Through the depths of this reverie I became aware of a slight, muffled blow against my right shoulder. This did not rouse me from my own absorption. A second time the blow came, followed by a soft, continuous contact. It gave me a disagreeable sensation. By my side there was a young boy of sixteen or seventeen, dressed like an apprentice. The uncertain glimmer of the street-lamps lighted up his pale, weary face. His eyes were closed and he seemed overwhelmed with sleep. I noticed that every few moments his head, swaying with the jolts of the vehicle, would strike against my shoulder. He would raise it up with an instinctive movement, only to let it fall back the more heavily the next moment. Once he let it lie there. At the time I was so lost in my dreams that the animal in me alone rose to its defense: I pushed the young lad gently back into his place. It was trouble lost; the next second he abandoned himself anew against my shoulder with a sort of desperate ingenuousness. I pushed him back two or three times, then I gave it up and tried, in spite of this slight burden, to continue my glorious excursion in the interior of my own self. But I did not succeed. An extraordinary, unforeseen, unknown sensation was sweeping over me. It was a penetrating animal warmth. It came from that head propped against my shoulder, and also from a certain frail, bent arm which I felt slowly digging into my side. The little apprentice was sound asleep. I bent down my face and felt his breath like that of a child passing in little puffs over my cheek and my chin. From that moment on, I ceased completely to think of my important personal affairs and I had only one anxiety: to see to it that the boy did not awaken. I do not know how long this sleep lasted: I was warm with a strange, delicate warmth; I had a sense of well-being, I was absorbed, I was penetrating into an unknown universe, as vast, as starry as my own. I could not understand how this contact could have offended me at first, even disgusted me. I had torn off the prickly shell and was tasting, like a nourishing kernel, that human presence and companionship. I was happy and interested. We reached a place where there were shouts and lights. The little fellow sat up with a start, rubbed his eyes and ran stumbling towards the stairway and disappeared; he had not even seen me. He did not know what I owed him and that he would never be forgotten. IX One must not, at first sight, say that a man is uninteresting and that his face is expressionless. One might as well say that the water of a river is empty when it swarms with vegetable and animal life. In one’s manner of listening to a man there may be prejudice and suspicion, there must not be indifference or indolence. The soul has, in its arsenal, lenses, microscopes, and powerful sources of light for exploring objects to their depths, through their transparencies, into the innermost recesses of their organs.