I have run away from home. Here I am cast out on the street in the night. There is a fine blinding sleet; I do not know as yet where I am going to spend the night, but that doesn't hurt any more than the slap on my cheek hurt. Am I unfeeling? I push on straight ahead, the houses follow one another, the streets meet and cross, the separate shadows are only one and the same shadow. I stop now and then arrested by the consciousness of having forgotten to suffer.
How penetrating the night is. An hour of utter aloneness, an hour empty and bare. Ah, that it may be so until the end. Let misery come, the unknown, humiliations, but let the truth come also. You perish trying to do without the truth....
That scene.... Can the memory of it be annihilated, so that nothing remains, not even the grotesque memory of a memory?
He blazed with fury, he lashed the air first with one arm then the other; his features swelled with rage and suddenly looked youthful.... Now that I come to think of it, he looked exactly the same as on the day of the blue vase, only this time he did not dare to slap me. That's why he gesticulated so wildly. I listened to him at first with an indifferent air; I was accustomed to his storms--well, the thing would soon blow over. And before my eyes the familiar scene, which the lighting up of the chandelier always placidly ushered in, was being set according to the daily ritual--the smoking tureen, which Leontine, who had entered with her padded tread, was placing on the table (she removed her red hands, finger by finger, and stole her sidewise glance at me), and the transparent play of the glasses, with iridescent stems giving back the glitter of the silver and the white sheen of the tablecloth.
Although my eyes were occupied in following intently the details of the dinner-table, a heavy travail was going on within me. A legion of slumbering desires, halting impulses, dead aspirations were rousing themselves noiselessly, almost without my consciousness. Thoughts that come in the morning when one's eyes open, "To-day! to-day," hopes dashed to the ground, deceptions, sighs--their tune rose to the surface and changed to a peal which drew me on. Yet I remained on the spot, like a beast with lowered head led by a rope.