Is all that happens to me really my fault? Perhaps. And yet it seems to me that a fatality of which I have never been the mistress has weighed upon my entire existence, and has prevented me from ever staying more than six months in the same place. When they did not discharge me, I left, disgusted beyond endurance. It is funny, and it is sad,--I have always been in a hurry to be "elsewhere," I have always entertained a mad hope of "those chimerical elsewheres," which I invest with the vain poesy, the illusory mirage of far-away distances, especially since my stay at Houlgate with poor M. Georges. That stay has left me with a certain anxiety, a certain torturing necessity of reaching fruitlessly after unattainable ideas and forms. I really believe that this too short and sudden glimpse of a world which I had better never have known at all, being unable to know it better, has been very harmful to me. Oh! how disappointing are these ways leading to the unknown! One goes on and on, and it is always the same thing. See that sparkling horizon yonder. It is blue, it is pink, it is fresh, it is as light and luminous as a dream. It must be fine to live there. You approach, you arrive. There is nothing. Sand, pebbles, hills as dismal as walls. There is nothing else. And above this sand, these pebbles, these hills, there is a gray, opaque, heavy sky,--a sky which kills the day, and whose light weeps dirty tears. There is nothing,--nothing of that which one is looking for. Moreover, I do not know what I am looking for; and neither do I know who I am.