surrounded by vague dangers, unknown and terrible things; and the partition that separates me from my neighbor, my neighbor whom I do not know, keeps me at as great a distance from him as the stars that I see through my window.  A sort of fever pervades me, a fever of impatience and of fear, and the silence of the walls terrifies me.  The silence of a room where one lives alone is so intense and so melancholy It is not only a silence of the mind; when a piece of furniture cracks a shudder goes through you for you expect no noise in this melancholy abode.

How many times, nervous and timid from this motionless silence, I have begun to talk, to repeat words without rhyme or reason, only to make some sound.  My voice at those times sounds so strange that I am afraid of that, too.  Is there anything more dreadful than talking to one’s self in an empty house?  One’s voice sounds like that of another, an unknown voice talking aimlessly, to no one, into the empty air, with no ear to listen to it, for one knows before they escape into the solitude of the room exactly what words will be uttered.  And when they resound lugubriously in the silence, they seem no more than an echo, the peculiar echo of words whispered by ones thought.

My sweetheart was a young girl like other young girls who live in Paris on wages that are insufficient to keep them.  She was gentle, good, simple.  Her parents lived at Poissy.  She went to spend several days with them from time to time.

For a year I lived quietly with her, fully decided to leave her when I should find some one whom I liked well enough to marry.  I would make a little provision for this one, for it is an understood thing in our social set that a woman’s love should be paid for, in money if she is poor, in presents if she is rich.

But one day she told me she was enceinte.  I was thunderstruck, and saw in a second that my life would be ruined.  I saw the fetter that I should wear until my death, everywhere, in my future family life, in my old age, forever; the fetter of a woman bound to my life through a child; the fetter of the child whom I must bring up, watch over, protect, while keeping myself unknown to him, and keeping him hidden from the world.

I was greatly disturbed at this news, and a confused longing, a criminal desire, surged through my mind; I did not formulate it, but I felt it in my heart, ready to come to the surface, as if some one hidden behind a portiere should await the signal to come out.  If some accident might only happen!  So many of these little beings die before they are born!

   Oh!  I did not wish my sweetheart to die!  The poor girl, I loved
   her very much!  But I wished, possibly, that the child might die
   before I saw it.