and from time to time in the resonant depths, the dull blows of the ax and the almost human groans of the old oak trees. Nevertheless, curiosity often drove me out of my small room which I occupied on Rue Oudinot, and I sauntered along the streets, the boulevards, the river banks impelled by a feverish desire for walking, my fingers twitching from nervousness, my brains squashed, as it were, by the gigantic and intense activity of Paris, my senses in some way thrown out of balance by all these colors, odors, sounds, by the perversion and strangeness of the contact so new to me. The more I mingled with the crowds, the more intoxicated I became with this uproar, the more I saw multitudes of human lives pass by, brushing one another, indifferent to one another, without apparent attachment, and saw others surge forward, disappear and emerge again and so on forever—the more I felt the overwhelming sense of inexorable loneliness.
At Saint-Michel, although I was lonely, I at least knew some human beings and objects. Everywhere I had points of reference by which my spirit was guided; the back of a peasant bent over his glebe, the ruins of a building at the turn of the road, a ditch, a dog, a clay pit, a charming face—everything there was familiar to me, if not dear. At Paris everything was strange and unknown to me. In this frightful haste with which all seemed to be moving about, in the profound selfishness, in this giddy obliviousness to one another into which they were all precipitated, how could one retain even for a single moment the attention of these people, these phantoms; I don't speak of the attention of tenderness or pity, but of that of simple notice! . . . One day I saw a man who killed another: he was admired and his name was soon on everybody's lips; the next morning I saw a woman
