“I stayed a long time with the pistol to my temple. My finger was on the trigger. I pressed it a little; but not hard enough. I said to myself: ‘In another moment I shall press harder and it will go off.’ I felt the cold of the metal and I said to myself: ‘In another moment I shall not feel anything. But before that I shall hear a terrible noise.’... Just think! So near to one’s ear!... That’s the chief thing that prevented me--the fear of the noise.... It’s absurd, for as soon as one’s dead.... Yes, but I hope for death as a sleep; and a detonation doesn’t send one to sleep--it wakes one up.... Yes; certainly that was what I was afraid of. I was afraid that instead of going to sleep I should suddenly wake up.” He seemed to be collecting himself, and for some moments his lips again moved without making a sound. “I only said all that to myself,” he went on, “afterwards. In reality, the reason I didn’t kill myself is that I wasn’t free. I say now that I was afraid; but no; it wasn’t that. Something completely foreign to my will held me back. As if God didn’t want to let me go. Imagine a marionette who should want to leave the stage before the end of the play.... Halt! You’re wanted for the _finale_. Ah! Ah! you thought you would be able to go off whenever you liked!... I understood that what we call our will is merely the threads which work the marionette, and which God pulls. Don’t you see? Well, I’ll explain. For instance, I say to myself: ‘Now I’m going to raise my right arm’; and I raise it.” (And he did raise it.) “But it’s because the string had already been pulled which made me think and say: ‘I’m going to raise my right arm.’... And the proof that I’m not free is that if it had been my left arm that I had had to raise, I should have said to you: ‘Now I’m going to raise my left arm.’... No; I see you don’t understand.... You are not free to understand.... Oh! I realize now that God is playing with us. It amuses him to let us think that what he makes us do is what we wanted to do. That’s his horrible game.... Do you think I’m going mad? A propos--Madame de La Pérouse ... you know she has gone into a home?... Well, what do you think? She is convinced that it’s a lunatic asylum and that I have had her shut up to get rid of her--that I am passing her off for mad.... You must grant that it’s rather a curious thing that the first passer-by in the street would understand one better than the woman one has given one’s life to.... At first I went to see her every day. But as soon as she caught sight of me, she used to call out: ‘Ah! there you are again! come to spy on me!...’ I had to give up my visits, as they only irritated her. How can you expect one to care about life, when one’s of no good to anyone?” His voice was stifled by sobs. He dropped his head and I thought he was going to relapse again into his dejection. But with a sudden start: