No, no!  I have nothing that I can call my own.  In my days of poverty I dreamt of rest in the country, of travel in distant lands; and now that I might make those dreams reality, the work that has been begun keeps me shut up.  There is no chance of a walk in the morning’s sun, no chance of running round to a friend’s house, or of a mad bout of idleness!  My strength of will has gone with the rest; all this has become a habit; I have locked the door of the world behind me, and thrown the key out of the window.  There is no longer anything in my den but work and myself—­and work will devour me, and then there will be nothing left, nothing at all!’

He paused, and silence reigned once more in the deepening gloom.  Then he began again with an effort: 

’And if one were only satisfied, if one only got some enjoyment out of such a nigger’s life!  Ah!  I should like to know how those fellows manage who smoke cigarettes and complacently stroke their beards while they are at work.  Yes, it appears to me that there are some who find production an easy pleasure, to be set aside or taken up without the least excitement.  They are delighted, they admire themselves, they cannot write a couple of lines but they find those lines of a rare, distinguished, matchless quality.  Well, as for myself, I bring forth in anguish, and my offspring seems a horror to me.  How can a man be sufficiently wanting in self-doubt as to believe in himself?  It absolutely amazes me to see men, who furiously deny talent to everybody else, lose all critical acumen, all common-sense, when it becomes a question of their own bastard creations.  Why, a book is always very ugly.  To like it one mustn’t have had a hand in the cooking of it.  I say nothing of the jugsful of insults that are showered upon one.  Instead of annoying, they rather encourage me.  I see men who are upset by attacks, who feel a humiliating craving to win sympathy.  It is a simple question of temperament; some women would die if they failed to please.  But, to my thinking, insult is a very good medicine to take; unpopularity is a very manly school to be brought up in.  Nothing keeps one in such good health and strength as the hooting of a crowd of imbeciles.  It suffices that a man can say that he has given his life’s blood to his work; that he expects neither immediate justice nor serious attention; that he works without hope of any kind, and simply because the love of work beats beneath his skin like his heart, irrespective of any will of his own.  If he can do all this, he may die in the effort with the consoling illusion that he will be appreciated one day or other.  Ah! if the others only knew how jauntily I bear the weight of their anger.  Only there is my own choler, which overwhelms me; I fret that I cannot live for a moment happy.  What hours of misery I spend, great heavens! from the very day I begin a novel.  During the first chapters there isn’t so much trouble.  I have plenty of room before me in which