And now my toilet was finished, my occupation was gone.  An immense distress descended upon me.  It has been observed that the routine of daily life, that arbitrary system of trifles, is a great moral support.  But my toilet was finished, I had nothing more to do of those things consecrated by usage and which leave you no option.  The exercise of any kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is reduced to the sensation that he is being killed by “that sort of thing” cannot be anything but mere trifling with death, an insincere pose before himself.  I wasn’t capable of it.  It was then that I discovered that being killed by “that sort of thing,” I mean the absolute conviction of it, was, so to speak, nothing in itself.  The horrible part was the waiting.  That was the cruelty, the tragedy, the bitterness of it.  “Why the devil don’t I drop dead now?” I asked myself peevishly, taking a clean handkerchief out of the drawer and stuffing it in my pocket.

This was absolutely the last thing, the last ceremony of an imperative rite.  I was abandoned to myself now and it was terrible.  Generally I used to go out, walk down to the port, take a look at the craft I loved with a sentiment that was extremely complex, being mixed up with the image of a woman; perhaps go on board, not because there was anything for me to do there but just for nothing, for happiness, simply as a man will sit contented in the companionship of the beloved object.  For lunch I had the choice of two places, one Bohemian, the other select, even aristocratic, where I had still my reserved table in the petit salon, up the white staircase.  In both places I had friends who treated my erratic appearances with discretion, in one case tinged with respect, in the other with a certain amused tolerance.  I owed this tolerance to the most careless, the most confirmed of those Bohemians (his beard had streaks of grey amongst its many other tints) who, once bringing his heavy hand down on my shoulder, took my defence against the charge of being disloyal and even foreign to that milieu of earnest visions taking beautiful and revolutionary shapes in the smoke of pipes, in the jingle of glasses.

“That fellow (ce garcon) is a primitive nature, but he may be an artist in a sense.  He has broken away from his conventions.  He is trying to put a special vibration and his own notion of colour into his life; and perhaps even to give it a modelling according to his own ideas.  And for all you know he may be on the track of a masterpiece; but observe:  if it happens to be one nobody will see it.  It can be only for himself.  And even he won’t be able to see it in its completeness except on his death-bed.  There is something fine in that.”