In another letter he frankly admits that he has no faith, no principles of morality, no political ideals, and in this admission, wrung from the depths of his heart, the note of despair is already struck: "In the present day there seems to be as little possibility of establishing any new belief as of obtaining respect for the old faith. And so I seek and fail to find that one idea upon which all the rest should depend." These few words throw a clearer light on the attitude of Flaubert during the latter years of his life than anything else. Formerly he had found this idea in his art, while now he assumes that there is another and higher basis, upon which art itself must rest; but to find this principle is beyond his power. He seeks forgetfulness in work, but work only brings exhaustion, and he is still more dissatisfied. He realises his singularity, and it draws him out of his objective attitude into that incomprehensible existence, the very conception of which he himself denies. The real tragedy of his position lies in the fact that he is alone in the midst of a strange and unknown world. And little by little his despair reaches its utmost limits: "Whenever I am without a book in my hand, or whenever I am not writing, such anguish seizes on me that I simply find myself on the verge of tears." So he writes in a letter to Georges Sand. "It seems to me that I have literally turned into a fossil, and that I am deprived of all connection with the universe around me." "A feeling of universal destruction and agony possesses me, and I am deathly sad." "When I am tired out from my work, I grow anxious about myself. No one remembers me, I belong to another sphere. My professional friends are so little friendly to me." "I pass whole weeks without exchanging a word with a single human creature, and at the end of the week I find it hard to recall any special day or any particular event during the course of that time. On Sundays I see my mother and niece, and that is all. A gathering of rats in the attic, that is my whole society. They make an infernal noise over my head, when the rain is not roaring, and the wind is not howling. The nights are blacker than coal, and a silence is all around me, infinite as in the desert. One's senses are terribly sharpened in such surroundings, and my heart starts beating at the slightest sound." "I am losing myself in the reminiscences of my youth, like an old man. Of life I ask nothing more, save a few sheets of paper that I may scratch ink upon. I feel as though I were wandering through an endless desert, wandering, not knowing whither; and that at one and the same time, I am the wanderer, and the camel, and the desert." "One hope alone sustains me, that soon I shall be parted from life, and that I shall surely find no other existence that might be still more painful.... No, no! Enough of misery!"