the asphalt, expresses the fatigue of the roasted city, slumbering and perspiring like a workman asleep on a bench in the sun.  Yes, she perspires, the beggar, and she smells frightfully through her sewer mouths, the vent-holes of sinks and kitchens, the streams through which the filth of her streets is running.  Then I think of those summer mornings in your orchard full of little wild-flowers that flavor the air with a suggestion of honey.  Then I enter, sickened already, the restaurant where bald, fat, tired-looking men are eating, with half-opened waistcoats and moist, shining foreheads.  The food shows the effect of heat—­the melon growing soft under the ice, the soft bread, the flabby filet, the warmed-over vegetables, the purulent cheese, the fruits ripened on the premises.  I go out, nauseated, and go home to try to sleep a little until the hour for dinner, which I take at the club.

“There I always find Adelmans, Maldant, Rocdiane, Landa, and many others, who bore and weary me as much as hand-organs.  Each one has his own little tune, or tunes, which I have heard for fifteen years, and they play them all together every evening in that club, which is apparently a place where one goes to be entertained.  Someone should change my own generation for my benefit, for my eyes, my ears, and my mind have had enough of it.  They still make conquests, however, they boast of them and congratulate one another on them!

“After yawning as many times as there are minutes between eight o’clock and midnight, I go home and go to bed, and while I undress I think that the same thing will begin over again the next day.

“Yes, my dear friend, I am at the age when a bachelor’s life becomes intolerable, because there is nothing new for me under the sun.  An unmarried man should be young, curious, eager.  When one is no longer all that, it becomes dangerous to remain free.  Heavens! how I loved my liberty, long ago, before I loved you more!  How burdensome it is to me to-day!  For an old bachelor like me, liberty is an empty thing, empty everywhere; it is the path to death, with nothing in himself to prevent him from seeing the end; it is the ceaseless query:  ’What shall I do?  Whom can I go to see, so that I shall not be alone?’ And I go from one friend to another, from one handshake to the next, begging for a little friendship.  I gather up my crumbs, but they do not make a loaf.  You, I have You, my friend, but you do not belong to me.  Perhaps it is because of you that I suffer this anguish, for it is the desire for contact with you, for your presence, for the same roof over our heads, for the same walls inclosing our lives, the same interests binding our hearts together, the need of that community of hopes, griefs, pleasures, joys, sadness, and also of material things, that fills me with so much yearning.  You do belong to me—­that is to say, I steal a little of you from time to time.  But I long to breathe forever the same air that you breathe, to share everything with you, to possess nothing that does not belong to both of us, to feel that all which makes up my own life belongs to you as much as to me—­the glass from which I drink, the chair on which I sit, the bread I eat and the fire that warms me.