That was all the youth I ever had.  We did not remain long in our province.  One day I found my wife in tears.  She was miserable; life was so dull; she wanted to get away.  Six months later I had saved a little money by taking in extra work after office hours, and through the influence of a friend of my father’s I obtained a petty appointment in Paris.  I started off to settle there with the dear little woman so that she might cry no more.  During the night, which we spent in the third-class railway carriage, the seats being very hard, I took her in my arms in order that she might sleep.

That was the past, and now I had just died on the narrow couch of a Paris lodginghouse, and my wife was crouching on the floor, crying bitterly.  The white light before my left eye was growing dim, but I remembered the room perfectly.  On the left there was a chest of drawers, on the right a mantelpiece surmounted by a damaged clock without a pendulum, the hands of which marked ten minutes past ten.  The window overlooked the Rue Dauphine, a long, dark street.  All Paris seemed to pass below, and the noise was so great that the window shook.

We knew nobody in the city; we had hurried our departure, but I was not expected at the office till the following Monday.  Since I had taken to my bed I had wondered at my imprisonment in this narrow room into which we had tumbled after a railway journey of fifteen hours, followed by a hurried, confusing transit through the noisy streets.  My wife had nursed me with smiling tenderness, but I knew that she was anxious.  She would walk to the window, glance out and return to the bedside, looking very pale and startled by the sight of the busy thoroughfare, the aspect of the vast city of which she did not know a single stone and which deafened her with its continuous roar.  What would happen to her if I never woke up again—­alone, friendless and unknowing as she was?

Marguerite had caught hold of one of my hands which lay passive on the coverlet, and, covering it with kisses, she repeated wildly:  “Olivier, answer me.  Oh, my God, he is dead, dead!”

So death was not complete annihilation.  I could hear and think.  I had been uselessly alarmed all those years.  I had not dropped into utter vacancy as I had anticipated.  I could not picture the disappearance of my being, the suppression of all that I had been, without the possibility of renewed existence.  I had been wont to shudder whenever in any book or newspaper I came across a date of a hundred years hence.  A date at which I should no longer be alive, a future which I should never see, filled me with unspeakable uneasiness.  Was I not the whole world, and would not the universe crumble away when I was no more?