La Pérouse received me in a small class-room on the ground floor, which I recognized as the most uncomfortable one in the school. Its only furniture consisted of four benches attached to four desks, a blackboard and a straw chair, on which La Pérouse forced me to sit down, while he screwed himself up slantwise on to one of the benches, after vain endeavours to get his long legs under the desk. “No, no. I’m perfectly comfortable, I assure you,” he declared, while the tone of his voice and the expression of his face said: “I am horribly uncomfortable, and I hope it’s obvious; but I prefer to be so; and the more uncomfortable I am, the less you will hear me complain.” I tried to make a joke, but could not succeed in getting him to smile. His manner was ceremonious and stiff, as if he wished to keep me at a distance and imply: “I owe it to you that I am here.” At the same time he declared himself perfectly satisfied with everything, though all the while eluding my questions and seeming vexed at my insisting. I asked him, however, where his room was. “Rather too far from the kitchen,” he suddenly exclaimed; and as I expressed my astonishment: “Sometimes during the night, I want something to eat ... when I can’t sleep.” I was near him; I came nearer still and put my hand gently on his arm. He went on in a more natural tone: “I must tell you that I sleep very badly. When I do go to sleep, I never lose the feeling that I am asleep. That’s not proper sleep, is it? A person who is properly asleep, doesn’t feel that he is asleep. When he wakes up, he just knows that he has been asleep.” Then, leaning towards me, he went on with a kind of finicky insistence: “Sometimes I’m inclined to think that it’s an illusion and that, all the same, I _am_ properly asleep, when I think I’m not asleep. But the proof that I’m not properly asleep is that if I want to open my eyes, I open them. As a rule, I don’t want to. You understand, don’t you, that there’s no object in it? What’s the use of proving to myself that I’m not asleep? I always go on hoping that I shall go to sleep by persuading myself that I’m asleep already....” He bent still nearer and went on in a whisper: “And then there’s something that disturbs me. Don’t tell anyone.... I haven’t complained, because there’s nothing to do about it; and if a thing can’t be altered, there’s no good complaining, is there?... Well, just imagine, in the wall, right against my bed and exactly on a level with my head, there’s something that makes a noise.” He had grown excited as he spoke. I suggested that he should take me to his room. “Yes! Yes!” he said getting up suddenly. “You might be able to tell me what it is ... I can’t succeed in making out. Come along.” We went up two stories and then down a longish passage. I had never been into that part of the house before.