The other day, while looking through a limbo of a drawer wherein have been cast from time to time a medley of maimed, half-soiled, abortive things, too unfitted for the paradise of publication, and too good (so my vanity will have it) for the damnation of the waste-paper basket, I came across, at the very bottom, the manuscript of the preceding autobiographical narrative, the last words of which I wrote at Mustapha Superieur three years ago.  At first I carried it about with me, not caring to destroy it and not knowing what in the world to do with it until, with the malice of inanimate things, the dirty dog’s-eared bundle took to haunting me, turning up continually in inconvenient places and ever insistently demanding a new depository.  At last I began to look on it with loathing; and one day in a fit of inspiration, creating the limbo aforesaid, I hurled the manuscript, as I thought, into everlasting oblivion.  I had no desire to carry on the record of my life any further, and there, in limbo, it has remained for three years.  But the other day I took it out for reference; and now as I am holiday-making in a certain little backwater of the world, where it is raining in a most unholiday fashion, it occurs to me that, as everything has happened to me which is likely to happen (Heaven knows I want no more excursions and alarums in my life’s drama), I may as well bring the narrative up to date.  I therefore take up the thread, so far as I can, from where I left off.

Lola, having nothing to do in Algiers, which had grown hateful to us both, accompanied me to London.  As, however, the weather was rough, and she was a very bad sailor, I saw little of her on the voyage.  For my own part, I enjoyed the stormy days, the howling winds and the infuriated waves dashing impotently over the steamer.  They filled me with a sense of conflict and of amusement.  It is always good to see man triumphing over the murderous forces of nature.  It puts one in conceit with one’s kind.

At Waterloo I handed Lola over to her maid, who had come to meet her, and, leaving Rogers in charge of my luggage, I drove homeward in a cab.

It was only as I was crossing Waterloo Bridge and saw the dark mass of the Houses of Parliament looming on the other side of the river, and the light in the tower which showed that the House was sitting, that I began to realise my situation.  As exiles in desert lands yearn for green fields, so yearned I for those green benches.  In vain I represented to myself how often I had yawned on them, how often I had cursed my folly in sitting on them and listening to empty babble when I might have been dining cosily, or talking to a pretty woman or listening to a comic opera, or performing some other useful and soul-satisfying action of the kind; in vain I told myself what a monument of futility was that building; I longed to be in it and of it once again.  And when I realised that I yearned for the impossible, my heart was like a stone.  For, indeed, I, Simon de Gex, with London once a toy to my hand, was coming into it now a penniless adventurer to seek my fortune.