“I was brought up by simple-minded parents who were unquestioning believers.  And I believed as they did.

“My dream lasted a long time.  The last veil has just been torn from my eyes.

“During the last few years a strange change has been taking place within me.  All the events of Life, which formerly had to me the glow of a beautiful sunset, are now fading away.  The true meaning of things has appeared to me in its brutal reality; and the true reason for love has bred in me disgust even for this poetic sentiment:  ’We are the eternal toys of foolish and charming illusions, which are always being renewed.’

“On growing older, I had become partly reconciled to the awful mystery of life, to the uselessness of effort; when the emptiness of everything appeared to me in a new light, this evening, after dinner.

“Formerly, I was happy!  Everything pleased me:  the passing women, the appearance of the streets, the place where I lived; and I even took an interest in the cut of my clothes.  But the repetition of the same sights has had the result of filling my heart with weariness and disgust, just as one would feel were one to go every night to the same theatre.

“For the last thirty years I have been rising at the same hour; and, at the same restaurant, for thirty years, I have been eating at the same hours the same dishes brought me by different waiters.

“I have tried travel.  The loneliness which one feels in strange places terrified me.  I felt so alone, so small on the earth that I quickly started on my homeward journey.

“But here the unchanging expression of my furniture, which has stood for thirty years in the same place, the smell of my apartments (for, with time, each dwelling takes on a particular odor) each night, these and other things disgust me and make me sick of living thus.

“Everything repeats itself endlessly.  The way in which I put my key in the lock, the place where I always find my matches, the first object which meets my eye when I enter the room, make me feel like jumping out of the window and putting an end to those monotonous events from which we can never escape.

“Each day, when I shave, I feel an inordinate desire to cut my throat; and my face, which I see in the little mirror, always the same, with soap on my cheeks, has several times made me weak from sadness.

“Now I even hate to be with people whom I used to meet with pleasure; I know them so well, I can tell just what they are going to say and what I am going to answer.  Each brain is like a circus, where the same horse keeps circling around eternally.  We must circle round always, around the same ideas, the same joys, the same pleasures, the same habits, the same beliefs, the same sensations of disgust.

“The fog was terrible this evening.  It enfolded the boulevard, where the street lights were dimmed and looked like smoking candles.  A heavier weight than usual oppressed me.  Perhaps my digestion was bad.