A domestic is not a normal being, a social being. He is an incongruous personage, made up of pieces and bits that cannot fit into one another, that can only lie next one another. He is something worse,--a monstrous human hybrid. He is no longer of the people, whence he came; neither is he of the _bourgeoisie_, among whom he lives and toward whom he tends. He has lost the generous blood and the artless strength of the people that he has denied, and has gained the shameful vices of the _bourgeoisie_, without having succeeded in acquiring the means of satisfying them,--the vile sentiments, the cowardly fears, the criminal appetites, without the setting, and consequently without the excuse, of wealth. With a soiled soul, he traverses this respectable _bourgeois_ world, and, simply from having breathed the mortal odor that rises from these putrid sinks, he loses forever the security of his mind, and even the very form of his personality. At the bottom of all these recollections, amid this host of figures among whom he wanders, a phantom of himself, he finds nothing to work upon but filth,--that is, suffering. He laughs often, but his laugh is forced. This laugh does not come from joy found or from hope realized, and it shows the bitter grimace of rebellion, the hard and contracted curve of sarcasm. Nothing is more sorrowful and ugly than this laugh; it burns and withers. It would have been better, perhaps, if I had wept. And then, I do not know. And then, _zut!_ Come what will. But nothing comes at all,--never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay. Madame is always the same; distrustful, methodical, severe, rapacious, without an impulse, without a caprice, without a particle of spontaneity, without a ray of joy upon her marble face. Monsieur has resumed his habits, and I imagine, from certain sullen airs, that he has a spite against me because of my severity; but his spites are not dangerous. After breakfast, armed and gaitered, he starts off on a hunting expedition, returns at night, asks me only to help him in taking off his boots, and goes to bed at nine o'clock. He is still awkward, comical, and irresolute. He is growing fat. How can people as rich as they are be resigned to so dismal an existence? Sometimes I question myself regarding Monsieur. What should I have done with him? He has no money, and would have given me no pleasure. And especially as Madame is not jealous! The terrible thing about this house is its silence. I cannot get used to it. Yet, in spite of myself, I am beginning to glide, to "walk in the air," as Joseph says. Often in these dark passage-ways, alongside these cold walls, I seem to myself like a spectre, like a ghost. And I am stifling in it all. And I stay.