puddles, pick up rocks covered with seaweed, in
search of loaches and crabs. . . . Pretty soon the
vessel is nothing but a greyish speck on the horizon
line which grows thinner, enveloped in a vacuous
fog. . . . One can see that the sea is getting calm.
It is already two months that I have been here! . . two months! . . . I have walked on the roads, in the fields, through the heaths; I know all the grass blades, all the rocks, all the crosses watching over the crossroads. . . . Like a tramp I have slept in the ditches, my limbs made numb by the cold, and I have crawled ito the foot of the rocks, upon beds of humid foliage; I have wandered over the beach and the cliffs, blinded by the sand, lashed by the spray, deafened by the wind; with bleeding hands and bruised knees I have climbed rocks inaccessible to men, haunted only by sea ravens; I have spent sorrowful nights on the sea and I have seen sailors crossing themselves in the terror of death; I have rolled from the tops of huge boulders, and with the water up to my neck, swept by dangerous currents, I have fished sea weeds; I have climbed trees and I have dug the earth with a mattock.
The people here thought that I was out of my mind. My arms are broken. My flesh is bruised. And yet not for a minute, not for a second has my passion deserted me, it has possessed me even more than in the past. I feel how it strangles me, how it squashes my brains, crunches my chest, gnaws my heart, dries up my veins. . . . I am like a small animal attacked by a polecat; no matter how much I roll on the ground desperately struggling with its teeth, the polecat holds me and won't let me go. Why did I go away? . . . Couldn't I hide myself away in a room at some furnished house? . . . Juliette would come to see me from time to time, nobody would know that I existed, and in my obscurity I could enjoy my heavenly as
