I often have the idea that, if I had started an hour earlier, or if I had quickened my gait, I should have arrived in time; that, while I was passing through one street, the thing I was looking for passed through another, and that a block of carriages was enough to make me miss what I have been pursuing, regardless of everything else, for so long a time.--You cannot imagine the intense melancholy and profound despair into which I fall when I see that all this comes to nothing and that my youth is passing and no prospect opening before me; thereupon all my idle passions mutter in my heart and devour each other for lack of better food, like the wild beasts in a menagerie whom the keeper has forgotten to feed. Despite the stifled, unacknowledged disappointments of every day, there is something within me that resists and will not die. I have no hope, for, in order to hope, one must have a desire, a certain propensity to wish that things should turn out in one way rather than another. I desire nothing, for I desire everything. I do not hope, or rather I have ceased to hope;--this is too absurd--and it is absolutely one to me whether a thing is or is not.--I am waiting--for what? I don't know, but I am waiting. It is a shuddering sort of expectation, overflowing with impatience, broken with somersaults and nervous movements, like the suspense of a lover waiting for his mistress.--Nothing comes;--I fly into a passion or begin to weep.--I am waiting for heaven to open and an angel to descend and make some revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and the people to give me a throne, for one of Raphaël's virgins to step out of its canvas and come and embrace me, for relations that I don't possess to die and leave me the wherewithal to set my fancy afloat upon a sea of gold, for a hippogriff to snatch me up and bear me away into unknown regions.--But whatever I am waiting for, it certainly is nothing commonplace and ordinary. It has gone so far that, when I return home, I never fail to ask: "Has no one been here? is there no letter for me? nothing new?"--I know perfectly well that there is nothing, that there can be nothing. That makes no difference; I am always much surprised and much disappointed when I receive the regular reply:--"No, monsieur--nothing at all."