OUT of a clear sky there comes one day a letter from Boris whom I have not seen for months and months.  It is a strange document and I don't pretend to understand it all clearly.  "What happened between us - at any rate, as far as I go - is that you touched me, touched my life, that is, at the one point where I am still alive: my death.  By the emotional flow I went through another immersion.  I lived again, alive.  No longer by reminiscence, as I do with others, but alive."

      That's how it began.  Not a word of greeting, no date, no address.  Written in a thin, pompous scrawl on ruled paper torn out of a blank book.  "That is why, whether you like me or not - deep down I rather think you hate me - you are very close to me.  By you I know how I died: I see myself dying again: I am dying.  That is something.  More than to be dead simply.  That may be the reason why I am so afraid to see you: you may have played the trick on me, and died.  Things happen so fast nowadays."

      I'm reading it over, line by line, standing by the stones.  It sounds nutty to me, all this palaver about life and death and things happening so fast.  Nothing is happening that I can see, except the usual calamities on the front page.  He's been living all by himself for the last six months, tucked away in a cheap little room - probably holding telepathic communication with Cronstadt.  He talks about the line falling back, the sector evacuated, and so on and so forth, as though he were dug into a trench and writing a report to headquarters.  He probably had his frock coat on when he sat down to pen this missive, and he probably rubbed his hands a few times as he used to do when a customer was calling to rent the apartment.  "The reason I wanted you to commit suicide ..." he begins again.  At that I burst out laughing.  He used to walk up and down with one hand stuck in the tail flap of his frock coat at the Villa Borghese, or at Cronstadt's - wherever there was deck space, as it were - and reel of this nonsense about living and dying to his heart's content.  I never understood a word of it, I must confess, but it was a good show and, being a Gentile, I was naturally interested in what went on in that menagerie of a brainpan.  Sometimes he would lie on his couch full length, exhausted by the surge of ideas that swept through his noodle.  His feet just grazed the bookrack where he kept his Plato and Spinoza - he couldn't understand why I had no use for them.  I must say he made them sound interesting, though what it was all about I hadn't the least idea.  Sometimes I would glance at a volume furtively, to check up on these wild ideas which he imputed to them - but the connection was frail, tenuous.  He had a language all his own, Boris, that is, when I had him alone; but when I listened to Cronstadt it seemed to me that Boris had plagiarized his wonderful ideas.  They talked a sort of higher mathematics, these two.  Nothing of flesh and blood ever crept in; it was weird, ghostly, ghoulishly abstract.  When they got on to the dying business it sounded a little more concrete: after all, a cleaver or a meat axe has to have a handle.  I enjoyed those sessions immensely.  It was the first time in my life that death had even seemed fascinating to me - all these abstract deaths which involved a bloodless sort of agony.  Now and then they would compliment me on being alive, but in such a way that I felt embarrassed.  They made me feel that I was alive in the nineteenth century, a sort of atavistic remnant, a romantic shred, a soulful Pithecanthropus erectus.  Boris especially seemed to get a great kick out of touching me; he wanted me to be alive so that he could die to his heart's content.  You would think that all those millions in the street were nothing but dead cows the way he looked at me and touched me.  But the letter ... I'm forgetting the letter....

      "The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that evening at the Cronstadts', when Moldorf became God, was that I was very close to you then.  Perhaps closer than I shall ever be.  And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that some day you'd go back on me, die on my hands.  And I would be left high and dry with my idea of you simply, and nothing to sustain it.  I should never forgive you for that."

      Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that!  Myself it's not clear what his idea of me was or, at any rate, it's clear that I was just pure idea, an idea that kept itself alive without food.  He never attached much importance, Boris, to the food problem.  He tried to nourish me with ideas.  Everything was an idea.  Just the same, when he had his heart set on renting the apartment, he wouldn't forget to put a new washer in the toilet.  Anyway, he didn't want me to die on his hands.  "You must be life for me to the very end," so he writes.  "That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you.  Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off.  Nor do I wish to.  I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead.  That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed.  It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately."

      You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see me, or that he would like to know what I was doing - but no, not a line about the concrete or the personal, except in this living- dying language, nothing but this little message from the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and sundry that the war was still on.  I sometimes ask myself how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics, psychopaths - and Jews especially.  There must be something in a healthy Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black bread.  There was Moldorf, for example, who had made himself God, according to Boris and Cronstadt.  He positively hated me, the little viper - yet he couldn't stay away from me.  He came round regularly for his little dose of insults - it was like a tonic to him.  In the beginning, it's true, I was lenient with him; after all, he was paying me to listen to him.  And though I never displayed much sympathy I knew how to be silent when it involved a meal and a little pin money.  After a while, however, seeing what a masochist he was, I permitted myself to laugh in his face now and then; that was like a whip for him, it made the grief and agony gush forth with renewed vigour.  And perhaps everything would have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it his duty to protect Tania.  But Tania being a Jewess, that brought up a moral question.  He wanted me to stick to Mlle. Claude for whom, I must admit, I had a genuine affection.  He even gave me money occasionally to sleep with her.  Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher.

      I mention Tania now because she's just got back from Russia - just a few days ago.  Sylvester remained behind to worm his way into a job.  He's given up literature entirely.  He's dedicated himself to the new Utopia.  Tania wants me to go back there with her, to the Crimea preferably, and start a new life.  We had a fine drinking bout up in Carl's room the other day discussing the possibilities - if I could be a proof-reader, for example.  She said I didn't need to worry about what I would do - they would find a job for me so long as I was earnest and sincere.  I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic.  They don't want to see sad faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic.  It sounded very much like America to me.  I wasn't born with this kind of enthusiasm.  I didn't let on to her, of course, but secretly I was praying to be left alone, to go back to my little niche, and to stay there until the war breaks.  All this hocus-pocus about Russia disturbed me a little.  She got so excited about it, Tania, that we finished almost a half dozen bottles of vin ordinaire.  Carl was jumping about like a cockroach.  He has just enough Jew in him to lose his head over an idea like Russia.  Nothing would do but to marry us off - immediately.  "Hitch up," he says, "you have nothing to lose!"  And then he pretends to run a little errand so that we can pull off a fast one.  And while she wanted it all right, Tania, still that Russia business had gotten so solidly planted in her skull that she pissed the interval away chewing my ear off, which made me somewhat grumpy and ill at ease.  Anyway, we had to think about eating and getting to the office, so we piled into a taxi on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, just a stone's throw away from the cemetery, and off we whizzed.  It was just a nice hour to spin through Paris in an open cab, and the wine rolling around in our tanks made it seem even more lovely than usual.  Carl was sitting opposite us, on the strapontin, his face as red as a beet.  He was happy, the poor bastard, thinking what a glorious new life he would lead on the other side of Europe.  And at the same time he felt a bit wistful, too - I could see that.  He didn't really want to leave Paris, any more than I did.  Paris hadn't been good to him, any more than it had to me, or to anybody, for that matter, but when you've suffered and endured things here it's then that Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls, you might say, like some lovesick bitch who'd rather die than let you get out of her hands.  That's how it looked to him, I could see that.  Rolling over the Seine he had a big foolish grin on his face and he looked around at the buildings and the statues as though he were seeing them in a dream.  To me it was like a dream too: I had my hand in Tania's bosom and I was squeezing her titties with all my might and I noticed the water under the bridges and the barges and Notre-Dame down below, just the postcards show it, and I was thinking drunkenly to myself that's how one gets fucked, but I was sly about it too and I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.  It was a fine afternoon, I was thinking to myself, and soon we'd be pushing a feed down our bellies and what could we order as a special treat, some good heavy wine that would drown out all this Russia business.  With a woman like Tania, full of sap and everything, they don't give a damn what happens to you once they get an idea in their heads.  Let them go far enough and they'll pull the pants off you, right in the taxi.  It was grand though, milling through the traffic, our faces all smudged with rouge and the wine gurgling like a sewer inside us, especially when we swung into the Rue Lafitte which is just wide enough to frame the little temple at the end of the street and above it the Sacré-Coeur, a kind of exotic jumble of architecture, a lucid French idea that gouges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn't jar your nerves.

      With Tania back on the scene, a steady job, the drunken talk about Russia, the walks home at night, and Paris in full summer, life seems to lift its head a little higher.  That's why, perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent me seems absolutely cockeyed.  Most every day I meet Tania around five o'clock, to have a Porto with her, as she calls it.  I let her take me to places I've never seen before, the swell bars around the Champs-Elysees where the sound of jazz and baby voices crooning seems to soak right through the mahogany woodwork.  Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy, sappy strains pursue you, come floating into the cabinet through the ventilators and make life all soap and iridescent bubbles.  And whether it's because Sylvester is away and she feels free now, or whatever it is, Tania certainly tries to behave like an angel.  "You treated me lousy just before I went away," she says to me one day.  "Why did you want to act that way?  I never did anything to hurt you, did it?"  We were getting sentimental, what with the soft lights and that creamy, mahogany music seeping through the place.  I was getting near time to go to work and we hadn't eaten yet.  The stubs were lying there in front of us - six francs, four-fifty, seven francs, two-fifty - I was counting them up mechanically and wondering too at the same time if I would like it better being a bartender.  Often like that, when she was talking to me, gushing about Russia, the future, love, and all that crap, I'd get to thinking about the most irrelevant things, about shining shoes or being a lavatory attendant, particularly I suppose because it was so cosy in these joints that she dragged me to and it never occurred to me that I'd be stone sober and perhaps old and bent ... no, I imagined always that the future, however modest, would be in just this sort of ambiance, with the same tunes playing through my head and the glasses clinking and behind every shapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take the stink out of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.

      The strange thing is it never spoiled me trotting around to the swell bars with her like that.  It was hard to leave her, certainly.  I used to lead her around to the porch of a church near the office and standing there in the dark we'd take a last embrace, she whispering to me "Jesus, what am I going to do now?"  She wanted me to quit the job so as I could make love night and day; she didn't even care about Russia anymore, just so long as we were together.  But the moment I left her my head cleared.  It was another kind of music, not so croony but good just the same, which greeted my ears when I pushed through the swinging door.  And another kind of perfume, not just a yard wide, but omnipresent, a sort of sweat and patchouli that seemed to come from the machines.  Coming in with a skinful, as I usually did, it was like dropping suddenly to a low altitude.  Generally I made a beeline for the toilet - that braced me up rather.  It was a little cooler there, or else the sound of water running made it seem so.  It was always a cold douche, the toilet.  It was real.  Before you got inside you had to pass a line of Frenchmen peeling off their clothes.  Ugh! but they stand, those devils!  And they were well paid for it, too.  But there they were, stripped down, some in long underwear, some with beards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in their veins.  Inside the toilet you could take an inventory of their idle thoughts.  The walls were crowded with sketches and epithets, all of them jocosely obscene, easy to understand, and on the whole rather jolly and sympathetic.  It must have required a ladder to reach certain spots, but I suppose it was worthwhile doing it even looking at it from just a psychological viewpoint.  Sometimes, as I stood there taking a leak, I wondered what an impression it would make on those swell dames whom I observed passing in and out of the beautiful lavatories on the Champs-Elysées.  I wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they could see what was though of an ass here.  In their world, no doubt, everything was gauze and velvet - or they made you think so with the fine scents they gave out, swishing past you.  Some of them hadn't always been such fine ladies either; some of them swished up and down like that just to advertise their trade.  And maybe, when they were left alone with themselves, when they talked out loud in the privacy of their boudoirs, maybe some strange things fell out of their mouths too; because in that world, just as in every world, the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth, sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be able to put covers over the can.

      As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad effect upon me.  Once in a while I'd get too much of a skinful and I'd have to stick my finger down my throat - because it's hard to read proof when you're not all there.  It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to epitomize Nietzsche's philosophy.  You can be brilliant sometimes, when you're drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department.  Dates, fractions, semicolons - these are the things that count.  And these are the things that are most difficult to track down when your mind is all ablaze.  Now and then I made some bad blunders, and if it weren't that I had learned how to kiss the boss's ass, I would have been fired, that's certain.  I even got a letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never even met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic phrases about my more than ordinary intelligence, he hinted pretty plainly that I'd better learn my place and toe the mark or there'd be what's what to pay.  Frankly, that scared the shit out of me.  After that I never used a polysyllabic word in conversation; in fact, I hardly even opened my trap all night.  I played the high-grade moron, which is what they wanted of us.  Now and then, to sort of flatter the boss, I'd go up to him and ask politely what such and such a word might mean.  He liked that.  He was a sort of dictionary and timetable, that guy.  No matter how much beer he guzzled during the break - and he made his own private breaks too, seeing as how he was running the show - you could never trip him up on a date or a definition.  He was born to the job.  My only regret was that I knew too much.  It leaked out now and then, despite all the precautions I took.  If I happened to come to work with a book under my arm this boss of ours would notice it, and if it were a good book it made him venomous.  But I never did anything intentionally to displease him; I liked the job too well to put a noose around my neck.  Just the same it's hard to talk to a man when you have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself, even if you use only monosyllabic words.  He knew goddamn well, the boss, that I didn't take the least bit of interest in his yarns; and yet, explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from my dreams and fill me full of dates and historical events.  It was his way of taking revenge, I suppose.

      The result was that I developed a bit of a neurosis.  As soon as I hit the air I became extravagant.  It wouldn't matter what the subject of conversation happened to be, as we started back to Montparnasse in the early morning, I'd soon turn the fire hose on it, squelch it, in order to trot out my perverted dreams.  I liked best talking about those things which none of us knew anything about.  I had cultivated a mild sort of insanity, echolalia, I think it's called.  All the tag ends of a night's proofing danced on the tip of my tongue.  Dalmatia - I had held copy on an ad for that beautiful jewelled resort.  All right, Dalmatia.  You take a train and in the morning your pores are perspiring and the grapes are bursting their skins.  I could reel it off about Dalmatia from the grand boulevard to Cardinal Mazarin's palace, further, if I chose to.  I don't even know where it is on the map, and I don't want to know ever, but at three in the morning with all that lead in your veins and your clothes saturated with sweat and patchouli and the clink of bracelets passing through the wringer and those beer yarns that I was braced for, little things like geography, costume, speech, architecture don't mean a goddamn thing.  Dalmatia belongs to a certain hour of the night when those high gongs are snuffed out and the court of the Louvre seems so wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like weeping for no reason at all, just because it's so beautifully silent, so empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs rolling the dice.  With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on my throbbing nerves like a cold knifeblade I could experience the most wonderful sensations of voyage.  And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt nothing at all.  Now and then, it's true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into a great cloudlike form that blotted out the past.  I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge.  It's strange.  I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I though about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

      For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind - her.  Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christs today.  Day and night I thought of her, even when I was deceiving her.  And now sometimes, in the very midst of things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all, suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a few trees and a bench, a deserted spot where we stood and had it out, where we drove each other crazy with bitter, jealous scenes.  Always some deserted spot, like the Place de l'Estrapade, for example, or those dingy, mournful streets off the Mosque or along that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil which at ten o'clock in the evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes one think of murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of human drama.  When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space.  And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged.  There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.

      How many thousand times, in walking through the streets at night, have I wondered if the day would ever come again when she would be at my side: all those yearning looks I bestowed on the buildings and statues, I had looked at them so hungrily, so desperately, that by now my thoughts must have become a part of the very buildings and statues, they must be saturated with my anguish.  I could not help but reflect also that when we had walked side by side through these mournful, dingy streets now so saturated with my dream and longing, she had observed nothing, felt nothing: they were like any other streets to her, a little more sordid perhaps, and that is all.  She wouldn't remember that at a certain corner I had stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces, I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.

      Walking down the Rue Lhomond one night it a fit of unusual anguish and desolation, certain things were revealed to me with poignant clarity.  Whether it was that I had so often walked this street in bitterness and despair or whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had dropped one night as we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do not know.  "Why don't you show me that Paris," she said, "that you have written about?"  One thing I know, that at the recollection of these words I suddenly realized the impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had gotten to know, the Paris whose arrondissements are undefined, a Paris that has never existed except by virtue of my loneliness, my hunger for her.  Such a huge Paris!  It would take a lifetime to explore it again.  This Paris, to which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it.

      Stumbling down the Rue Mouffetard, with these reflections stirring in my brain, I recalled another strange item out of the past, out of that guidebook whose leaves she had asked me to turn but which, because the covers were so heavy, I then found impossible to pry open.  For no reason at all - because at the moment my thoughts were occupied with Salavin, in whose sacred precincts I was now meandering - for no reason at all, I say, there came to mind the recollection of a day when, inspired by the plaque which I passed day in and day out, I impulsively entered the Pension Orfila and asked to see the room Strindberg had occupied.  Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger and in fear of the police.  Up to then I had not found a single friend in Paris, a circumstance which was not so much depressing as bewildering, for wherever I have roamed in this world the easiest thing for me to discover has been a friend.  But in reality, nothing very terrible had happened to me yet.  One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non.  One can live in Paris - I discovered that! - on just grief and anguish.  A bitter nourishment - perhaps the best there is for certain people.  At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope.  I was only flirting with disaster.  I had time and sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people's lives, to dally with the dead stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous.  As I was leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering over my lips, as though I were saying to myself "Not yet, the Pension Orfila!"

      Since then, of course, I have learned what every madman in Paris discovers sooner or later; that there are no readymade infernos for the tormented.

      It seems to me I understand a little better now why she took such huge delight in reading Strindberg.  I can see her looking up from her book after reading a delicious passage, and, with tears of laughter in her eyes, saying to me: "You're just as mad as he was ... you want to be punished!"  What a delight that must be to the sadist when she discovers her own proper masochist!  When she bites herself, as it were, to test the sharpness of her teeth.  In those days, when I first knew her, she was saturated with Strindberg.  That wild carnival of maggots which he revelled in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which had endeared him to the sodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had brought us together.  We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could not recognize the world.  When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean....

      After leaving the Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to the library and there, after bathing in the Ganges and pondering over the signs of the zodiac, I began to reflect on the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg had so mercilessly depicted.  And, as I ruminated, it began to grow clear to me, the mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth, the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun god cast up on an alien shore.  It was no mystery to me any longer why he and others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to Paris.  I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love.  I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair.  One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers.  Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is.  The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing.  The air is chill and stagnant, the language apocalyptic.  Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue save death.  A blind alley at the end of which is a scaffold.

      An eternal city, Paris!  More eternal than Rome, more splendorous than Nineveh.  The very navel of the world to which, like a blind and faltering idiot, one crawls back on hands and knees.  And like a cork that has drifted to the dead centre of the ocean, one floats here in a scum and wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even of a passing Columbus.  The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world, the charnel house to which the stinking wombs confide their bloody packages of flesh and bone.

      The streets were my refuge.  And no man can understand the glamour of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has become a straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr that blows.  One passes along a street on a wintry day and, seeing a dog for sale, one is moved to tears.  While across the way, cheerful as a cemetery, stands a miserable hut that calls itself "Hotel du Tombeau des Lapins".  That makes one laugh, laugh fit to die.  Until one notices that there are hotels everywhere, for rabbits, dogs, lice, emperors, cabinet ministers, pawnbrokers, horse knackers, and so on.  And almost every other one is an "Hotel de l'Avenir".  Which makes one more hysterical still.  So many hotels of the future!  No hotels in the past participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis.  Everything is hoary, grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen with the future, like a gumboil.  Drunk with this lecherous eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place Violet, the colours all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only dwarfs and goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat by the roadside.

      Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyles?  Because that day a woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse, and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of a midwife was saying.  How that depressed me!  More even than the sight of those whimpering curs that were being sold on the Rue Brancion, because it was not the dogs which filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing, those rusty spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful life.  In the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard (Abattoir Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des Perichaux, I had noticed here and there signs of blood.  Just as Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings.  I saw my own blood being spilled, the muddy road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from the very beginning doubtless.  One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so.  Each one is travelling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.

      My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort.  Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill and starving, I suddenly recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave her, never, no matter what happened.  And, only a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was bearing her away: she was leaning out of the window, just as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile.  Only a few days before, she had clung to me desperately and then something happened, something which is not even clear to me now, and of her own volition she boarded the train and she was looking at me again with that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural, which I distrust with all my soul.  And now it is I, standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reaches out for her, who clings to her desperately and there is that same inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped down over my grief.  I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is an ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and Here I shall walk from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.

      It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets; it is that which stares out form the walls and terrifies us when suddenly we respond to a nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a sickening panic.  It is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists, which makes them beckon to us and lure us to their strangling grip; it is 'that' which makes certain houses appear like the guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty sockets of eyes that have seen too much.  It is that sort of thing, written into the human physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead I suddenly see inscribed "Impasse Satan".  That which makes me shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis."  In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with "Defendez-vous contre la syphilis!"  Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer.  No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis.  It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent.  It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.