I am obliged to renounce even the convent in which I expected to find the protection of religion and of harmony with one's fellows. The life of the eremite was imposed upon me, and I have received it as a chastisement and an education, regardless of the fact that at the age of forty-eight it is difficult to change one's rooted habits for new ones. I live, as mentioned above, in a small room, narrow as a convent cell, with a barred window high up under the ceiling, which looks out on a courtyard and a stone wall overgrown with an immense quantity of ivy. In the evening I go out for my meal, and go straight to the restaurant, without first taking a liqueur to provoke an appetite,--a thing I dislike doing now. Why I choose the little restaurant on the Boulevard St. Germain it would be difficult for me to explain. Perhaps it is the recollection of the two terrible evenings I spent there last year with my occultist friend, the German-American, which fascinates and draws me thither, to such a degree that every attempt to go to another restaurant results in a degree of discomfort which might be called unfair, and which drives me back to this one, which I hate. The reason is that my former friend has left unpaid debts here, and that I have been recognised as his companion. For this reason, and because we have been heard speaking German, I am treated as a Prussian, that is to say, I am served very badly. It is no use for me to make silent protests by leaving my visiting cards behind, or purposely forgetting letters bearing the Swedish postmark. I sec myself compelled to suffer and to pay for the guilty. No one but I sees the logic in this position, nor that it is an atonement for a crime. It is simply a piece of justice which cannot be objected to, and for two months I chew the horribly bad food which reeks of the dissector's knife. The manageress, who, pale as a corpse, sits installed at the cashier's desk, greets me with a triumphant air, and I am accustomed to say to myself, "Poor old woman, she has certainly had to eat rats during the siege of Paris in 1871!" But it seems as though she begins to feel sympathy with me when she sees my dull submission and endurance. There are moments when she seems to me to look paler,--when she sees me come alone, always alone, and always thinner. It is the bare truth that after passing two months in this way, when I buy new collars I must buy them nearly two inches smaller. My cheeks have become hollow and my clothes hang in folds.