M. Boscheron gives me his notes, gathers up his papers, bows and retires. Left alone in my office, I fall to examining the wallpaper with a sort of idiotic minuteness. It has the appearance of green felt with here and there a yellow stain; I begin to draw little men on my paper; I make an effort to write; for the fact is my Chief has asked for the circular three times and has promised the government deputies that it shall go to the prefects forthwith. I am bound to let him have it. I begin reading it through: _to diminish popular respect for government servants and to transform them_. I make a blot; then with my pen I adorn it with hair. I transform it into a comet. I dream of Marguerite’s tresses. The other day, in the Champs-Elysées, little filaments of gold, little delicate spirals stood out from the rest of her graceful tresses, with a singular brightness. You can see their like in fifteenth century miniatures, also in some of an earlier date. Dante says in his _Vita Nuova_: “One day when I was busy drawing angel’s heads . . .” And now here am I trying to draw angels’ heads on a government circular. Come now, we must get on with it: _government servants and to transform them--transform them_ . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single word after that? How is it I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever since I rediscovered my _ego_ on the Pont de la Concorde that evening of the lovely sunset? Transform, did I say? O God of mystery, nature, truth, if she whose name even now after four years I dare not utter, if she died in giving life to Marguerite, I should believe, I should know with the certainty of instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed into the daughter and that they are one and the same being. [Illustration: 040] [Illustration: 042] 1st November