stay long enough to embrace me and to open the drawers to see whether my things were in order.
"Well I am going. Don't be sad. I see you have been crying. That is not nice at all! Why cause me aggravation?'
"Juliette! Will I see you tonight? Oh! please, tonight!"
"Tonight?"
She reflected for a minute.
"Tonight, yes, my dear! But still do not wait for me too long. Go to bed. Sleep well. Above all, don't cry. You drive me to despair! Really, I don't know what to do with you!"
And so I lived here, stretched out on the sofa, never going out, counting the minutes which slowly, slowly, drop by drop, vanished into the eternity of waiting.
The frenzied excitement of my senses was succeeded by a period of great depression. I spent whole afternoons apathetically, without stirring, my body lifeless, my limbs hanging, my brains in a state of torpor, like the morrow of a day of drunkenness. My life resembled a heavy slumber disturbed by painful dreams, interrupted by sudden awakenings even more painful than the dreams; and in the annihilation of my will power, in the blotting out of my intellect, I again felt, but more keenly than ever, the horror of my moral decay. In addition, Juliette's life caused me perpetual anguish. As in the past, on the dune of Ploch, I could not dismiss from my mind the loathsome vision which grew, intensified and assumed even more cruel forms. . . . To lose a person whom you love, a person who has been the source of all your joys, the memory of whom is associated with happiness only, is a heartrending sorrow. But where there is sorrow there is also consolation, and suffering is eventually put to sleep, lulled in some way by its own tenderness. But here I
