Wednesday

There is a patch of sunlight on the paper tablecloth.  In the patch of sunlight, a fly is dragging itself along, dazed, warming itself and rubbing its front legs against one another.  I am going to do it the favour of squashing it.  It doesn't see this gigantic index-finger looming up with the gold hairs shining in the sun.

      "Don't kill it, Monsieur!" cried the Autodidact.

      It bursts, its little white guts come out of its belly; I have relieved it of existence.  I say dryly to the Autodidact:

      "I've done it a favour."

      Why am I here? - And why shouldn't I be here?  It is midday, I am waiting for it to be time to sleep.  (Fortunately sleep doesn't avoid me.)  In four days I shall see Anny again: for the moment, that is my only reason for living.  And afterwards?  When Anny has left me?  I know very well what I am secretly hoping: I am hoping that she will never leave me again.  Yet I ought to know that Anny will never agree to grow old in front of me.  I am weak and lonely, I need her.  I should have liked to see her again while I was strong: Anny has no pity for flotsam.

      "Is anything the matter, Monsieur?  Do you feel all right?"

      The Autodidact looks sideways at me with laughing eyes.  He is panting slightly, his mouth open, like a dog out of breath.  I have to admit it: this morning I was almost glad to see him again, I needed to talk.

      "How glad I am to have you at my table," he says.  "If you're cold, we could go and sit next to the stove.  Those gentlemen are going to go soon, they have asked for their bill."

      Somebody is worrying about me, wondering if I am cold; I am speaking to another man: that hasn't happened to me for years.

      "They're leaving, would you like to change places?"

      The two gentlemen have lighted cigarettes.  They go out, there they are in the pure air, in the sunshine.  They walk along past the big windows, holding their hats on with both hands.  They laugh; the wind puffs out their overcoats.  No, I don't want to change places.  What would be the use?

      And then, through the windows, between the white roofs of the bathing-huts, I see the sea, green and compact.

      The Autodidact has taken too rectangles of purple cardboard from his wallet.  He will hand them over at the cash-desk later on.  On the back of one I decipher the words:

                              Maison Bottanet, cuisine bourgeoise.

                                      Le déjeuner à prix fixe: 8 francs

                                      Hors-d'oeuvre au choix

                                      Viande garnie

                                      Fromage ou dessert

                                      140 francs les 20 cachets

      That fellow eating at the round table, near the door - I recognize him now: he often stays at the Hôtel Printania, he's a commercial traveller.  Now and then he turns his attentive and smiling gaze upon me; but he doesn't see me; he is too busy examining what he is eating.  On the other side of the cash-desk, two stocky, red-faced men are eating mussels and drinking white wine.  The smaller of the two, who has a thin yellow moustache, is telling a story which he himself is finding amusing.  He pauses and laughs, revealing dazzling teeth.  The other man doesn't laugh; his eyes are hard.  But he often nods his head affirmatively.  Near the window, a dark, thin man, with distinguished features and fine white hair brushed back from his forehead, is thoughtfully reading his paper.  On the bench beside him, he has put a leather briefcase.  He is drinking Vichy water.  In a moment all these people are going to leave; weighed down by food, caressed by the breeze, their overcoats wide open, their heads a little hot and muzzy, they will walk along by the balustrade, looking at the children on the beach and the boats on the sea; they will go to work.  I for my part will go nowhere, I have no work.

      The Autodidact laughs innocently and the sunshine plays in his sparse hair:

      "Would you like to order?"

      He hands me the menu: I am entitled to choose one hors-d'oeuvre: either five slices of sausage or radishes or shrimps or a dish of celery in sauce.  There is an extra charge for the Burgundy snails.

      "I'll have sausage," I tell the waitress.  He snatches the menu out of my hands.

      "Isn't there anything better?  Look, there are Burgundy snails."

      "The thing is that I'm not very fond of snails."

      "Oh!  Then what about oysters?"

      "They're four francs extra," says the waitress.

      "All right, oysters, Mademoiselle - and radishes for me."

      Blushing, he explains to me:

      "I'm very partial to radishes."

      So am I.

      "And afterwards?" he asks.

      I look through the list of meat dishes.  The braised beef would tempt me.  But I know in advance that I shall have chicken, the only meat dish with an extra charge.

      "This gentleman," he says, "will have chicken.  Braised beef for me, Mademoiselle."

      He turns the menu round: the wine list is on the back:

      "We shall have some wine," he says with a somewhat solemn expression.

      "Well I never," says the waitress, "we are letting ourselves go!  You've never had any before."

      "But I can easily stand a glass of wine now and then.  Mademoiselle, will you bring us a carafe of Anjou rosé."

      The Autodidact puts down the menu, breaks his bread into small pieces, and rubs his knife and fork with his napkin.  He glances at the white-haired man reading his paper, then he smiles at me:

      "Usually I come here with a book, even though a doctor once advised me not to: you eat too quickly and you don't chew.  But I've got a stomach like an ostrich, I can swallow anything.  During the winter of 1917, when I was a prisoner of war, the food was so bad that everybody fell ill.  Naturally, I went sick like everybody else: but there was nothing wrong with me."

      He has been a prisoner of war.... This is the first time he has ever spoken to me about it; I can't get over it: I can't imagine him as anything but an autodidact.

      "Where were you a prisoner?"

      He doesn't reply.  He has put down his fork and is looking at me terribly hard.  He is going to tell me his troubles: now I remember that there was something wrong at the library.  I am all ears: I ask for nothing better than to sympathize with other people's troubles, that will make a change for me.  I haven't any troubles, I have some money like a gentleman of leisure, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that's all.  And that particular trouble is so vague, so metaphysical, that I am ashamed of it.

      The Autodidact doesn't seem to want to talk.  What a curious look he is giving me: it isn't a look to see with, but rather one for a communion of souls.  The Autodidact's soul has risen to the surface of his magnificent blind man's eyes.  If mine does the same, if it comes and presses its nose against the windowpanes, the two of them can exchange greetings.

      I don't want a communion of souls, I haven't fallen so low.  I draw back.  But the Autodidact leans forward across the table, without taking his eyes off me.  Fortunately the waitress brings him his radishes.  He slumps back in his chair, his soul disappears from his eyes, he docilely starts eating.

      "Have you sorted out your troubles?"

      He gives a start:

      "What troubles, Monsieur?" he asks with a frightened look.

      "You know, the other day you spoke to me about them."

      He blushes scarlet.

      "Ha!" he says in a dry voice.  "Ha!  Yes, the other day.  Well, it's the Corsican, Monsieur, that Corsican in the library."

      He hesitates a second time, with the stubborn look of a sheep.

      "They're just trivialities, Monsieur, that I don't want to bother you about."

      I don't pursue the matter.  Without seeming to, he eats at an extraordinary speed.  He has already finished his radishes by the time the waitress brings me the oysters.  Nothing is left on his plate but a heap

of green stalks and a little damp salt.

      Outside, a young couple has stopped in front of the menu which a cardboard chef is holding out to them in his left hand (in his right he has a frying-pan).  They hesitate.  The woman is cold, she tucks her chin into her fur collar.  The young man makes up his mind first, he opens the door and stands to one side to let his companion pass.

      She comes in.  She looks around her amiably and gives a little shiver:

      "It's hot," she says in a deep voice.

      The young man closes the door.

      "Messieurs dames," he says.

      The Autodidact turns round and says pleasantly:

      "Messieurs dames."

      The other customers don't answer, but the distinguished-looking gentleman lowers his paper slightly and submits the new arrivals to a searching scrutiny.

      "Thank you, don't bother."

      Before the waitress, who had run up to help him, could make a move, the young man had slipped out of his raincoat.  In place of a jacket, he is wearing a leather windcheater with a zip fastener.  The waitress, a little disappointed, turns to the young woman.  But once again he is ahead of her and helps his companion out of her coat with gentle, precise movements.  They sit down near us, side by side.  They don't look as if they'd known each other for long.  The young woman has a tired pure face, with a somewhat sullen expression.  She suddenly takes off her hat, shakes her black hair and smiles.

      The Autodidact gazes at them for a long time, with a kindly eye; then he turns to me and gives me a meaning wink as if to say: 'What a good-looking pair they are!'

      They are not ugly.  They are silent, they are happy to be together.  Sometimes, when we went into a restaurant in Piccadilly, Anny and I, we felt ourselves the objects of admiring attention.  It annoyed Anny, but I must admit that I was rather proud of it.  Above all, astonished; I have never had the neat look which becomes that young man so well and nobody could even say that my ugliness was touching.  Only, we were young: now I am at the age to be touched by the youth of others.  I am not touched.  The woman has dark, gentle eyes; the young man a rather leathery, orange-tinted skin and a charming, stubborn little chin.  Yes, I do find them touching, but they also make me feel a little sick.  I feel them so far away from me: the warmth is making them languid, they are pursuing a single dream in their hearts, so sweet, so low.  They are at ease, they look confidently at the yellow walls, at the people, they consider that the world is fine as it is, just as it is, and for the moment each of them discovers the significance of his life in the life of the other.  Soon the two of them will form just a single life, a slow, tepid life which will have no significance left at all - but they won't notice that.

      They look as if they were intimidated by each other.  Finally, the young man, in an awkward and determined manner, takes the young woman's hand with the tips of his fingers.  She breathes heavily and they bend over the menu together.  Yes, they are happy.  But what of it?

      The Autodidact assumes an amused, somewhat mysterious expression:

      "I saw you the day before yesterday."

      "Where?"

      "Ha, ha!" he says teasingly but respectfully.

      He keeps me waiting for a moment, then:

      "You were coming out of the museum."

      "Oh, yes," I say, "but not the day before yesterday: Saturday."

      The day before yesterday I was certainly in no mood for traipsing round museums.

      "Have you seen that remarkable wood-carving of Orsini's attempted assassination?"

      "I don't remember it."

      "Really?  It's in a little room, on the right as you go in.  It's the work of an insurgent in the Commune who lived at Bouville until the amnesty, hiding in an attic.  He had intended to get on a boat for America, but the port here is very well-policed.  An admirable man.  He spent his enforced leisure carving a great oak panel.  The only tools he had were his penknife and a nail file.  He did the intricate parts with the file: the hands and eyes.  The panel is five feet long by three feet wide: the whole work is in one piece; there are seventy figures, each the size of my hand, not counting the two horses pulling the Emperor's carriage.  And the faces, Monsieur, those faces carved with a nail file, they all have features, they all look human.  Monsieur, if I may venture to say so, it is a work well worth seeing."

      I don't want to commit myself:

      "I simply wanted to see Bordurin's pictures again."

      The Autodidact suddenly grows sad:

      "Those portraits in the main hall?  Monsieur," he says, with a tremulous smile, "I don't know anything about painting.  Naturally, I realize that Bordurin is a great painter, I can see that he knows his stuff, as they say.  But pleasure, Monsieur, aesthetic pleasure is something I have never known."

      I tell him sympathetically:

      "It's the same for me with sculpture."

      "Ah, Monsieur, for me too, alas.  And with music, and with dancing.  Yet I do possess a certain amount of knowledge.  Well, believe it or not, I have seen some young people who didn't know half as much as I do, and who, standing in front of a painting, seemed to be experiencing pleasure."

      "They must have been pretending," I say encouragingly.

      "Perhaps...."

      The Autodidact reflects for a moment:

      "What upsets me is not so much being deprived of a certain type of pleasure, it's rather that a whole branch of human activity should be foreign to me ... yet I am a man and it is men who have made those pictures ..."

      Suddenly he goes on in a changed voice:

      "Monsieur, at one time I ventured to think that beauty was only a matter of taste.  Aren't there different rules for each period?  Will you excuse me, Monsieur?"

      To my surprise I see him take a black leather notebook out of his pocket.  He goes through it for a moment: a lot of blank pages and, now and then, a few lines written in red ink.  He has turned quite pale.  He has put the notebook flat on the table and he places his great hand on the open page.  He coughs with embarrassment.

      "Sometimes things occur to me - I daren't call them thoughts.  It's very strange: I am sitting there reading and all of a sudden, I don't know where it comes from, I get a sort of revelation.  At first I didn't take any notice of it, but then I made up my mind to buy a notebook."

      He stops and looks at me: he is waiting.

      "Ah," I say.

      "Monsieur, these maxims are naturally only provisional: my education isn't complete yet."

      He picks up the notebook in his trembling hands, he is deeply moved:

      "As it happens there is something here about painting.  I should be happy if you will allow me to read it to you."

      "With pleasure," I say.

      He reads:

      "Nobody believes any longer what the eighteenth century considered to be true.  Why should we be expected to go on taking pleasure in the works which it considered to be beautiful?"

      He looks at me beseechingly.

      "What am I to think of that, Monsieur?  Perhaps it's rather paradoxical?  That's because I thought I could express my ideas in the form of a witty remark."

      "Well, I ... I think it's very interesting."

      "Have you read it anywhere before?"

      "No, certainly not."

      "Really, you really haven't read it anywhere?  Then, Monsieur," he says, his face falling, "that

means it isn't true.  If it were true, somebody would have thought of it already."

      "Wait a minute," I tell him, "now that I come to think of it, I believe that I have read something like it."

      His eyes light up; he takes out his pencil.

      "In a book by which author?" he asks me in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

      "By ... by Renan."

      He is overjoyed.

      "Would you be kind enough to give me the exact passage?" he says, sucking the point of his pencil.

      "You know, it's a very long time since I read it."

      "Oh, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter."

      He writes Renan's name in his notebook, underneath his maxim.

      "I have had the same idea as Renan!  I've written his name in pencil," he explains delightedly, "but this evening I'll go over it in red ink."

      He looks ecstatically at his notebook for a moment, and I wait for him to read me some more maxims.  But he closes it carefully and stuffs it into his pocket.  He probably considers that this is enough happiness for one time.

      "How pleasant it is," he says with a confidential air, "to be able to talk freely at times, like this."

      This remark, as might be imagined, kills off our languishing conversation.  A long silence follows.

      Since the arrival of the young couple, the atmosphere of the restaurant has completely changed.  The two red-faced men have fallen silent; they are shamelessly examining the young woman's charms.  The distinguished-looking gentleman has put down his paper and is looking at the couple with a kindliness almost bordering on complicity.  He is thinking that old age is wise and youth is beautiful, he nods his head with a certain coquetry: he is well aware that he is still handsome and well-preserved, that with his dark complexion and slim figure he is still attractive.  He is playing at feeling paternal.  The waitress's feelings seem to be simpler: she has planted herself in front of the young people and is staring at them open-mouthed.

      They are talking quietly.  The waitress has brought them their hors-d'oeuvre, but they don't touch them.  Straining my ears, I can make out snatches of their conversation.  It is easier for me to distinguish what the woman is saying, in her rich, veiled voice:

      "No, Jean, no."

      "Why not?" the young man murmurs with passionate vivacity.

      "I've told you why."

      "That isn't a reason."

      There are a few words which escape me, then the young woman makes a charming, weary gesture:

      "I've tried too often.  I'm past the age when you can start your life again.  I'm an old woman, you know."

      The young man laughs sarcastically.  She goes on:

      "I couldn't stand a ... disappointment."

      "You must have more confidence," says the young man; "the way you are now, you aren't living."

      She sighs.

      "I know!"

      "Look at Jeannette."

      "Yes," she says, pulling a face.

      "Well, I think it was splendid what she did.  She showed courage."

      "You know," says the young woman, "the fact is, she really grabbed the chance.  I can tell you that if I'd wanted, I could have had hundreds of chances like that.  I preferred to wait."

      "You were right," he says tenderly, "you were right to wait for me."

      She laughs in her turn.

      "What a conceit!  I didn't say that."

      I stop listening to them: they annoy me.  They are going to sleep together.  They know it.  Each of them knows that the other knows it.  But as they are young, chaste, and decent, as each wants to keep his self-respect and that of the other, and as love is a great poetic thing which mustn't be shocked, they go several times a week to dances and restaurants, to present the spectacle of their ritualistic, mechanical dances....

      After all, you have to kill time.  They are young and well built, they have another thirty years in front of them.  So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right.  Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.  All the same ... is it absolutely necessary to lie to each other?  I look round the room.  What a farce!  All these people sitting there looking serious, eating.  No, they aren't eating: they are reviving their strength in order to complete their respective tasks.  Each of them has his little personal obstinacy which prevents him from noticing that he exists; there isn't one of them who doesn't think he is indispensable to somebody or something.  Wasn't it the Autodidact who said to me the other day: "Nobody was better qualified than Nouçapié to undertake this vast synthesis"?    Every one of them does one little thing and nobody is better qualified than he to do it.  Nobody is better qualified than the commercial traveller over there to sell Swan toothpaste.  Nobody is better qualified than that interesting young man to fumble about under his neighbour's skirts.  And I am among them and if they look at me they must think that nobody is better qualified than I to do what I do.  But I know.  I don't look very important but I know that I exist and that they exist.  And if I knew the art of convincing people, I should go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and I should explain to him what existence is.  The thought of the look which would come on to his face if I did, makes me burst out laughing.  The Autodidact looks at me in surprise.  I should like to stop, but I can't: I laugh until I cry.

      "You are in a gay mood, Monsieur," the Autodidact says to me with a guarded air.

      "I was just thinking," I tell him, laughing, "that here we are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing."

      The Autodidact has become serious, he makes an effort to understand me.  I laughed too loud: I saw several heads turn towards me.  Then I regret having said so much.  After all, that's nobody's business.

      He repeats slowly:

      "No reason for existing ... I suppose, Monsieur, you mean that life has no object.  Isn't that what people call pessimism?"

      He goes on thinking for a moment, then he says gently:

      "A few years ago I read a book by an American author, called Is Life Worth Living?  Isn't that the question you are asking yourself?"

      No, that obviously isn't the question I'm asking myself.  But I don't want to explain anything.

      "He concluded," the Autodidact tells me in a consoling voice, "in favour of deliberate optimism.  Life has a meaning if you choose to give it one.  First of all you must act, you must throw yourself into some enterprise.  If you think about it later on, the die is already cast, you are already involved.  I don't know what you think about that, Monsieur?"

      "Nothing," I say.

      Or rather I think that that is precisely the sort of lie that the commercial traveller, the two young people, and the white-haired gentleman keep on telling themselves.

      The Autodidact smiles with a certain malice and much solemnity:

      "It isn't my opinion either.  I don't think we need look so far to find the meaning of our life."

      "Ah?"

      "There is a goal, Monsieur, there is a goal ... there are people."

      That's right: I was forgetting that he was a humanist.  He remains silent for a moment, long enough to put away, neatly and inexorably, half his braised beef and a whole slice of bread.  "There are people ...” He has just painted a complete portrait of himself, this tender-hearted fellow.  Yes, but he doesn't know how to say his piece properly.  His eyes are as soulful as could be, that can't be denied, but being soulful isn't enough.  I knocked around with some Parisian humanists in the old days, and scores of times I've heard them say: "There are people".  That was quite another matter!  Virgan was unbeatable in this respect.  He would take off his spectacles, as if to show himself naked, in his human flesh, and stare at me with his eloquent eyes, with a solemn, weary gaze which seemed to undress me in order to seize my human essence, and then he would murmur melodiously: "There are people, old fellow, there are people," giving the 'There are' a sort of awkward emphasis, as if his love of people, perpetually new and astonished, were getting caught up in its giant wings.

      The Autodidact's mimicry hasn't acquired this smoothness; his love of mankind is naïve and barbaric: he is very much the provincial humanist.

      "People," I say to him, "people ... in any case you don't seem to worry about them very much: you are always alone, always with your nose in a book."

      The Autodidact claps his hands, he starts laughing mischievously:

      "You're wrong.  Ah, Monsieur, allow me to say how very wrong you are!"

      He reflects for a moment and discreetly finishes swallowing.  His face is as radiant as dawn.  Behind him the young woman gives a gay laugh.  Her companion is bending over her and whispering in her ear.

      "Your mistake is perfectly natural," says the Autodidact, "I should have told you long ago ... but I am so shy, Monsieur: I was looking for an opportunity."

      "Here it is," I tell him politely.

      "I think so too.  I think so too!  Monsieur, what I am about to tell you ...” He stops, blushing: "But perhaps I am imposing on you?"

      I reassure him.  He heaves a sigh of happiness.

      "It isn't every day that one meets a man like you, Monsieur, in whom breadth of vision is linked with clear-sighted intelligence.  I have been wanting to talk to you for months, to explain what I have been, what I have become...."

      His plate is empty and clean as if it had just been brought to him.  I suddenly discover, next to mine, a little tin dish in which a drumstick of chicken is swimming in a brown sauce.  I have to eat that.

      "A little while ago I mentioned my captivity in Germany.  It was there that it all began.  Before the war I was alone and I didn't realize it; I lived with my parents, who were good people, but I didn't get on with them.  When I think of those years ... but how could I have lived like that?  I was dead, Monsieur, and I never realized it; I had a collection of postage stamps."

      He looks at me and breaks off to say:

      "Monsieur, you are pale, you look tired, I hope I'm not boring you?"

      "You interest me greatly."

      "The war came and I enlisted without knowing why.  I spent two years without understanding, because life at the front left little time for thought and, besides, the soldiers were too coarse.  At the end of 1917 I was taken prisoner.  Since then I have been told that a lot of soldiers recovered their childhood faith during their captivity.  Monsieur," the Autodidact says, lowering his eyelids over burning pupils, "I don't believe in God; his existence is disproved by Science.  But, in the internment camp, I learnt to believe in people."

      "They endured their fate bravely?"

      "Yes," he says vaguely, "there was that too.  Besides, we were treated well.  But I wanted to speak of something else; during the last few months of the war, they gave us scarcely any work to do.  When it rained, they made us go into a big wooden shed which held about two hundred of us at a pinch.  They closed the door and left us there, squeezed up against one another, in almost total darkness."

      He hesitates for a moment.

      "I don't know how to explain this to you, Monsieur.  All those men were there, you could scarcely see them but you could feel them against you, you could hear the sound of their breathing.... One of the first times they locked us in that shed the crush was so great that at first I thought I was going to suffocate, then suddenly a tremendous feeling of joy came over me, and I almost fainted: at that moment I felt I loved those men like brothers, I would have liked to kiss them all.  After that, every time I went back there, I felt the same joy."

      I have to eat my chicken, which must be cold by now.  The Autodidact has finished a long time ago and the waitress is waiting to change the plates.

      "That shed had taken on a sacred character in my eyes.  Sometimes I managed to escape the attention of our guards.  I slipped into it all alone, and there in the darkness, at the memory of the joys I had known there, I fell into a sort of ecstasy.  Hours went by, but I paid no attention.  Sometimes I burst out sobbing."

      I must be ill: there is no other way of explaining that terrible rage which has just overwhelmed me.  Yes, a sick man's rage: my hands were shaking, the blood rushed to my head, and finally my lips too started trembling.  All that simply because the chicken was cold.  I was cold too, for that matter, and that was the worst of it: I mean that the heart of me had remained as it had been for the last thirty-six hours, absolutely cold and icy.  Anger went through me like a whirlwind, it was something like a shudder, an effort by my conscience to react, to fight against this lowering of my temperature.  It was all in vain: on the slightest pretext I should probably have rained blows and curses on the Autodidact or the waitress.  But my heart wouldn't really have been in it.  My rage blustered on the surface, and for the moment I had the painful impression of being a block of ice enveloped in fire, an omlette-surprise.  This superficial agitation disappeared and I heard the Autodidact say:

      "Every Sunday I used to go to Mass.  Monsieur, I have never been a believer.  But couldn't one say that the real mystery of the Mass is the communion of souls?  A French chaplain, who had only one arm, used to celebrate the Mass.  We had a harmonium.  We listened, standing bareheaded, and as the sounds of the harmonium carried me away, I felt myself at one with all the men surrounding me.  Ah, Monsieur, how I loved those Masses!  Even now, in memory of them, I sometimes go to church on Sunday morning.  We have a remarkable organist at Sainte-Cécile."

      "You must have often missed that life?"

      "Yes, Monsieur, in 1919.  That was the year I was released.  I spent some utterably miserable months.  I didn't know what to do, I wasted away.  Whenever I saw some men gathered together, I would insinuate myself into their group.  There were times," he adds with a smile, "when I joined the funeral procession of a complete stranger.  One day, in despair, I threw my stamp collection into the fire ... but I found my vocation."

      "Really?"

      "Somebody advised me ... Monsieur, I know that I can count on your discretion.  I am - perhaps these are not your ideas, but you are so broadminded - I am a Socialist."

      He has lowered his eyes and his long lashes are trembling:

      "Since September 1921 I have been a member of the S.F.I.O. Socialist Party.  That is what I wanted to tell you."

      He is radiant with pride.  He looks at me, his head thrown back, his eyes half-closed, his mouth slightly open, looking like a martyr.

      "That's excellent," I say, "that's very fine."

      "Monsieur, I knew that you would approve.  And how could you disapprove of somebody who comes and tells you: I have arranged my life in such and such a way, and now I am perfectly happy?"

      He has spread his arms out with his palms towards me and his fingers pointing to the ground, as if he were about to receive the stigmata.  His eyes are glazed, I can see a dark pink mass rolling about in his mouth.

      "Ah," I say, "as long as you're happy...."

      "Happy?"  His gaze is disconcerting, he has raised his eyelids and is staring at me.  "You are going to be able to judge, Monsieur.  Before taking that decision, I felt such utter loneliness that I thought of committing suicide.  What held me back was the idea that nobody, absolutely nobody would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life."

      He straightens up, his cheeks puff out.

      "I am no longer alone, Monsieur.  And I shall never be alone again."

      "Ah, so you know a lot of people?" I say.

      He smiles and I promptly realize my mistake.

      "I mean that I no longer feel alone.  But naturally, Monsieur, I don't have to be with anybody."

      "All the same," I say, "at the local branch of the party ..."

      "Ah, I know everybody there.  But most of them only by name.  Monsieur," he says mischievously, "is one obliged to choose one's companions in such a narrow way?  All men are my friends.  When I go to the office in the morning, there are other men in front of me, behind me, going to their work.  I see them, if I dared I would smile at them, I think that I am a Socialist, that they all form the purpose of my life, the object of my efforts, and that they don't know it yet.  That's a positive holiday for me, Monsieur."

      He looks inquiringly at me: I nod my approval, but I can feel that he is a little disappointed, that he would like rather more enthusiasm.  What can I do?  Is it my fault if, in everything he tells me, I recognize borrowings, quotations?  Is it my fault if, while he speaks, I see all the humanists I have known reappear?  Alas, I've known so many of them!  The radical humanist is a special friends of civil servants.  The so-called 'Left-wing' humanist's chief concern is to preserve human values; he belongs to no party because he doesn't want to betray humanity as a whole, but his sympathies go towards the humble; it is to the humble that he devotes his fine classical culture.  He is generally a widower with beautiful eyes always clouded with tears; he weeps at anniversaries.  He also loves cats, dogs, all the higher animals.  The Communist writer has been loving men ever since the second Five-Year Plan; he punishes because he loves.  Modest as all strong men are, he knows how to hide his feelings, but he also knows how, with a look on an inflection of his voice, to reveal, behind his stern justicial words, a glimpse of his bitter-sweet passion for his brethren.  The Catholic humanist, the late-comer, the Benjamin, speaks of men with a wonderstruck air.  What a beautiful fairy tale, he says, is the humblest life, that of a London docker, of a girl in a shoe factory!  He has chosen the humanism of the angels; he writes for the edification of the angels, long, sad, beautiful novels, which frequently win the Prix Femina.

      Those are the principal types.  But there are others, a swarm of others: the humanist philosopher who bends over his brothers like an elder brother who is conscious of his responsibilities; the humanist who loves men are they are, the one who loves them as they ought to be, the one who wants to save them with their consent, and the one who will save them in spite of themselves, the one who wants to create myths, and the one who is satisfied with the old myths, the one who loves man for his death, the one who loves man for his life, the happy humanist who always knows what to say to make people laugh, the gloomy humanist whom you usually meet at wakes.  They all hate one another: as individuals, of course, not as men.  But the Autodidact doesn't know it: he has locked them up inside himself like cats in a leather bag and they are tearing one another to pieces without his noticing it.

      He is already looking at me with less confidence.

      "Don't you feel as I do, Monsieur?"

      "Good heavens ..."

      Faced with his anxious, rather spiteful look, I feel a moment's regret at having disappointed him.  But he goes on amiably:

      "I know: you have your research, your books, you serve the same cause in your own way."

      My books, my research: the idiot.  He couldn't have made a worse blunder.

      "That isn't why I write."

      The Autodidact's face is immediately transformed: it is as if he had scented the enemy.  I had never seen that expression on his face before.  Something has died between us.

      Feigning surprise, he asks:

      "But ... if I am not being indiscreet, why do you write, then, Monsieur?"

      "Well, I don't know: just to write."

      He gives a satisfied smile, he thinks he has caught me out:

      "Would you write on a desert island?  Doesn't one always write in order to be read?"

      It was out of habit that he put that sentence in an interrogative form.  In fact, he is making a statement.  His veneer of gentleness and shyness has peeled off; I don't recognize him anymore.  His

features reveal a massive obstinacy; he is a wall of complacency.  I still haven't got over my astonishment when I hear him say:

      "If somebody tells me: I write for a certain social class, for a group of friends, that's all right.  Perhaps you write for posterity ... but, Monsieur, in spite of yourself you write for somebody."

      He waits for an answer.  As it doesn't come, he smiles feebly.

      "Perhaps you are a misanthrope?"

      I know what this fallacious effort at conciliation hides.  He is asking very little from me in fact: simply to accept a label.  But this is a trap: if I consent, the Autodidact triumphs, I am promptly outflanked, recaptured, overtaken, for humanism takes all human attitudes and fuses them together.  If you stand up to it, you play its game; it lives on its opponents.  There is a race of stubborn, stupid villains who lose to it every time: it digests all their violences and worst excesses, it turns them into a white, frothy lymph.  It has digested anti-intellectualism, manicheism, mysticism, pessimism, anarchy, and egotism: they are nothing more than stages, incomplete thoughts which find their justification only in humanism.  Misanthropy also has its place in this concert; it is simply a discord necessary to the harmony of the whole.  The misanthrope is a man: it is therefore inevitable that the humanist should be misanthropic to a degree.  But he is a scientific misanthrope who has succeeded in determining the extent of his hatred, who hates men at first only to love them better later.

      I don't want to be integrated, I don't want my good red blood to go and fatten that lymphatic animal: I am not going to be fool enough to say that I am an 'anti-humanist'.  I am not a humanist, that's all.

      "I believe," I say to the Autodidact, "that one cannot hate men any more than one can love them."

      The Autodidact looks at me with a distant, patronizing air.  He murmurs, as if he were paying no particular attention to his words:

      "We must love them, we must love them...."

      "Whom must we love?  The people here?"

      "Them too.  One and all."

      He turns round to look at the radiant young couple: that's what we must love.  For a moment he contemplates the white-haired gentleman.  Then his gaze returns to me; on his face I read a mute question.  I shake my head.  He looks as if he felt sorry for me.

      "You don't love them either," I tell him in irritation.

      "Really, Monsieur?  Will you allow me to disagree with you?"

      He has become respectful again, respectful to his fingertips, but he has the ironic look in his eyes of somebody who is tremendously amused.  He hates me.  I would have been a fool to worry about this maniac.  I question him in my turn:

      "So, those two you people behind you - you love them, do you?"

      He looks at them again, he ponders:

      "You want to make me say," he says suspiciously, "that I love them without knowing them.  Well, Monsieur, I admit that I don't know them ... unless, of course, love is true knowledge," he adds with a silly laugh.

      "But what do you love?"

      "I see that they are young and it is youth that I love in them.  Among other things, Monsieur."

      He breaks off and listens:

      "Can you understand what they're saying?"

      Can I understand it?  The young man, emboldened by the sympathetic atmosphere around him, is describing in a loud voice a football match which his team won last year against a club from Le Havre.

      "He's telling her a story," I say to the Autodidact.

      "Ah!  I can't hear them properly.  But I can hear their voices, a soft voice, a deep voice, they alternate.  It's ... it's so attractive."

      "Only, I can also hear what their saying, unfortunately."

      "Well?"

      "Well, they're play-acting."

      "Really?  Playing at being young, perhaps? he asks sarcastically.  "Allow me, Monsieur, to say that I consider that a very profitable exercise.  Is it enough to play at being young to return to their age?"

      I remain dead to his sarcasm; I continue:

      "You've got your back to them, you can't hear what they're saying.... What colour is the young woman's hair?"

      He gets flustered:

      "Well, I ..." He shoots a glance at the young couple and recovers his composure.  "Black!"

      "You see!"

      "See what?"

      "You see that you don't love them.  You probably wouldn't be able to recognize them in the street.  They are only symbols in your eyes.  You aren't the least bit touched by them: you're touched by the Youth of Man, by the Love of Man and Woman, by the Human Voice."

      "Well, doesn't all that exist?"

      "Of course it doesn't exist!  Neither Youth nor Maturity nor Old Age nor Death...."

      The Autodidact's face, as hard and yellow as a quince, has frozen in lockjawed disapproval.  Nevertheless I go on:

      "It's like that old gentleman drinking Vichy water behind you.  It's the Mature Man, I suppose, that you love in him; the Mature Man bravely heading towards his decline, and taking care of his appearance because he doesn't want to let himself go?"

      "Exactly," he says defiantly.

      "And you can't see that he's a bastard?"

      He laughs, he thinks I'm joking, he darts a quick glance at the handsome face framed in white hair:

      "But, Monsieur, even supposing he looks what you say, how can you judge that man by his face?  A face, Monsieur, tells nothing when it is in repose."

      Blind humanists!  That face is so eloquent, so clear - but their tender, abstract souls have never allowed themselves to be affected by the meaning of a face.

      "How can you," says the Autodidact, "limit a man like that, how can you say that he is this or that?  Who can drain a man dry?  Who can know a man's resources?"

      Drain a man dry!  I salute in passing the Catholic humanism from which the Autodidact has unknowingly borrowed this formula.

      "I know," I tell him, "I know that all men are admirable.  You are admirable.  I am admirable.  In so far as we are God's creatures, of course."

      He looks at me uncomprehendingly, then says with a thin smile:

      "I suppose you are joking, Monsieur, but it is true that all men are entitled to our admiration.  It is difficult, Monsieur, very difficult to be a man."

      Without noticing, he has abandoned the love of men in Christ; he nods his head, and by a curious phenomenon of mimicry, he resembles that poor Guehenno.

      "Excuse me," I say, "but in that case I'm not quite sure of being a man: I had never found that very difficult.  It always seemed to me that you only had to let yourself go."

      The Autodidact laughs openly, but his eyes remain spiteful:

      "You are too modest, Monsieur.  In order to endure your condition, the human condition, you, like everybody else, need a great deal of courage.  Monsieur, the next moment may be the moment of your death, you know it and yet you can smile: come now, isn't that admirable?  In the most insignificant of your actions," he adds sourly, "there is an immensity of heroism."

      "And what will you gentlemen have for desert?" asks the waitress.

      The Autodidact is quite white, his eyelids are half-lowered over eyes of stone.  He makes a feeble gesture with his hand, as if inviting me to choose.

      "Cheese," I say heroically.

      "And you, Monsieur?"

      He gives a start.

      "Eh?  Oh, yes: Well, I won't have anything, I've finished."

      "Louise!"

      The two fat men pay and go off.   One of them limps.  The patron shows them to the door: they are important customers, they were served with a bottle of wine in an ice-bucket.

      I look at the Autodidact with a little remorse: he has been looking forward all week to this luncheon, at which he would be able to tell another man about his love of man.  He so rarely has the opportunity of talking.  And now I have spoilt his pleasure.  In point of fact, he is as lonely as I am: nobody cares about him.  Only, he doesn't realize his solitude.  Well, yes: but it wasn't up to me to open his eyes.  I feel very ill at ease: I'm furious, it's true, but not with him, with Virgan and the others, all those who have poisoned that poor brain of his.  If I could have them here in front of me, I'd have something to say to them, and no mistake.  I shall say nothing to the Autodidact, I have nothing but sympathy for him: he is somebody like Monsieur Achille, somebody of my sort, who has deserted out of ignorance and good-will.

      A burst of laughter from the Autodidact rouses me from my morose reflections:

      "Forgive me, but when I think of the depth of my love for people, of the strength of the impulses which carry me towards them, and when I see us here, arguing and discussing ... it makes me want to laugh."

      I say nothing, I give a forced smile.  The waitress puts a plate in front of me with a piece of chalky Camembert on it.  I glance round the room and a feeling of violent disgust comes over me.  What am I doing here?  Why did I get mixed up in a discussion about humanism?  What are these people here?  Why are they eating?  It's true that they don't know that they exist.  I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in ... but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

      The Autodidact calms down.  He had been afraid that I would put up rather more resistance.  He is willing to forget about all that I have said.  He leans towards me in a confidential manner:

      "At heart, you love them, Monsieur, you love them as I do: we are separated by words."

      I can't speak anymore, I bow my head.  The Autodidact's face is right up against mine.  He smiles foolishly, right up against my face, just as people do in nightmares.  I laboriously chew a piece of bread which I can't make up my mind to swallow.  People.  You must love people.  People are admirable.  I feel like vomiting - and all of a sudden, there it is: the Nausea.

      A really bad attack: it shakes me from top to bottom.  I had seen it coming for the last hour, only I didn't want to admit it.  This taste of cheese in my mouth.... The Autodidact babbles on and his voice buzzes gently in my ears.  But I don't know what he's talking about anymore.  I nod my head mechanically.  My hand is clutching the handle of the dessert knife.  I can feel this black wooden handle.  It is my hand which is holding it.  My hand.  Personally, I would rather leave this knife alone: what is the use of always touching something?  Objects are not made to be touched.  It is much better to slip between them, avoiding them as much as possible.  Sometimes you take one of them in your hand and you are obliged to drop it as quickly as you can.  The knife falls on the plate.  The white-haired gentleman jumps at the noise and looks at me.  I pick up the knife again, I press the blade against the table and I bend it.

      So this is the Nausea: this blinding revelation?  To think how I have racked my brains over it!  To think how much I've written about it!  Now I know: I exist - the world exists - and I know that the world exists.  That's all.  But I don't care.  It's strange that I should care so little about everything: it frightens me.  It's since that day when I wanted to play ducks and drakes.  I was going to throw that pebble, I looked at it and that was when it all began: I felt that it existed.  And then, after that, there were other Nauseas; every now and then objects start existing in your hand.  There was the Nausea of the Rendez-vous des Cheminots and then another one before that, one night when I was looking out of the window; and then another one in the municipal park, one Sunday, and then others.  But it had never been as strong as today.

      "... of ancient Rome, Monsieur?"

      The Autodidact is asking me a question, I think.  I turn towards him and smile at him.  Well?  What's the matter with him?  Why is he shrinking back into his chair?  Do I frighten people now?  It was bound to end up like that.  I don't care anyway.  They aren't completely wrong to be frightened.  I feel that I could do anything.  For example, plunge this cheese-knife into the Autodidact's eye.  After that, all these people would trample on me and kick my teeth in.  But that isn't what stops me: the taste of blood in my mouth instead of the taste of cheese would make no difference.  Only, it would be necessary to make a gesture, to give birth to a superfluous event: the cry the Autodidact would give would be superfluous - and so would the blood flowing down his cheek and the jumping-up of all these people.  There are quite enough things existing already.

      Everybody is looking at me; the two representatives of youth have interrupted their sweet conversation.  The woman has her mouth open in a pout.  Yet they ought to see that I am quite harmless.

      I get up, everything spins about me.  The Autodidact stares at me with his big eyes which I shan't put out.

      "You're leaving already?" he murmurs.

      "I'm a little tired.  It was very nice of you to invite me.  Goodbye."

      As I am leaving, I notice that I have kept the dessert-knife in my left hand.  I throw it on my plate which makes a clinking noise.  I cross the room in the midst of total silence.  They have stopped eating: they are looking at me, they have lost their appetite.  If I were to walk towards the young woman and say "Boo!" she would start screaming, that's certain.  It isn't worth it.

      All the same, before going out, I turn round and I show them my face, so that they can engrave it in their memory.

      "Messieurs dames." 

      They don't reply.  I go off.  Now the colour will come back into their cheeks, they will start chattering.

      I don't know where to go, I remain planted beside the cardboard chef.  I don't need to turn round to know that they are watching me through the windows; they are looking at my back with surprise and disgust: they thought that I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them.  All of a sudden, I lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab escaping backwards from that all too human room.  Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on.  It annoys me to feel that swarm of eyes and frightened thoughts behind my back.  I cross the street.  The other pavement runs alongside the beach and the bathing huts.

      There are a lot of people walking along the shore, turning poetic, springtime faces towards the sea; they're in holiday mood because of the sun.  There are women in light-coloured dresses, who have put on their outfits from last spring; they pass by, as long and white as kidgloves; there are also big boys from the lycée and the commercial school, and old men wearing decorations.  They don't know one another, but they look at one another with a conspiratorial air, because it's such a fine day and they are people.  People embrace one another without knowing one another on days when war is declared; they smile at one another every springtime.  A priest walks slowly along, reading his breviary.  Now and then he raises his head and looks at the sea approvingly: the sea too is a breviary, it speaks of God.  Delicate colours, delicate perfumes, springtime souls.  "What lovely weather, the sea is green, I like this dry cold better than the damp."  Poets!  If I grabbed one of them by the lapels of his coat, if I said to him: "Come to my help," he would think: 'What the devil is this crab?' and would run off, leaving his coat in my hands.

      I turn my back on them, I lean both hands on the balustrade.  The real sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls underneath this thin green film which is designed to deceive people.  The sylphs all around me have been taken in: they see nothing but the thin film, that is what proves the existence of God.  I see underneath!  The varnishes melt, the shining little velvety skins, God's little peach-skins, explode everywhere under my gaze, they split and yawn open.  Here comes the Saint-Elémir tram, I turn round and the things turn with me, as pale and green as oysters.  Useless, it was useless to jump in since I don't want to go anywhere.

      Bluish objects move jerkily past the windows, all stiff and brittle.  People, walls; through its open windows a house offers me its black heart; and the windowpanes give a pale-blue tinge to everything that is black, give a blue colour to this big yellow brick building which advances hesitatingly, tremblingly, and which stops all of a sudden, taking a nose-dive forward.  A gentleman gets on and sits down opposite me.  The yellow building sets off again, it leaps up against the windows, it is so close that you can see only part of it, it has turned dark.  The windows rattle.  It rises, overwhelming, much higher than you can see, with hundreds of windows open on black hearts; it glides alongside the box, brushing past it; darkness has fallen between the rattling windows.  It glides along endlessly, as yellow as mud, and the windows are sky-blue.  And all of a sudden it is no longer there, it has stayed behind, a bright grey light invades the box and spreads everywhere with inexorable justice: it is the sky; through the windows you can still see layer on layer of sky, because we are going up Eliphar Hill and we have a clear view on both sides, on the right as far as the sea, on the left as far as the airfield.  No smoking, not even a Gitane.

      I lean my hand on the seat, but I pull it away hurriedly: the thing exists.  This thing on which I'm sitting, on which I leaned my hand just now, is called a seat.  They made it on purpose for people to sit on, they took some leather, some springs, some cloth, they set to work with the idea of making a seat, and when they had finished, this was what they had made.  They carried it here, into this box, and the box is now rolling and jolting along, with its rattling windows, and it's carrying this red thing inside it.  I murmur: "It's a seat," rather like an exorcism.  But the word remains on my lips, it refuses to settle on the thing.  It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all stiff, little dead paws.  This huge belly turns upwards, bleeding, puffed up - bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this box, in this grey sky, is not a seat.  It could just as well be a dead donkey, for example, swollen by the water and drifting along, belly up on a great grey river, a flood river; and I would be sitting on the donkey's belly and my feet would be dangling in the clear water.  Things have broken free from their names.  They are there, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of Things, which cannot be given names.  Alone, wordless, defenceless, they surround me, under me, behind me, above me.  They demand nothing, they don't impose themselves, they are there.  Under the cushion of the seat, next to the wood, there is a thin line of shadow, a thin black line which runs along the seat with a mysterious, mischievous air, almost a smile.  I know perfectly well that it isn't a smile and yet it exists, it runs under the whitish windows, under the rattle of the windows, it persists, under the blue pictures which pass behind the windows and stop and set off again, it persists, like the vague memory of a smile, like a half-forgotten word of which you can remember only the first syllable and the best thing you can do is turn your eyes away and think about something else, about that man half-lying on the seat opposite me, there.  His terracotta face with its blue eyes.  The whole of the right side of his body has collapsed, the right arm is stuck to the body, the right side is scarcely alive, it lives laboriously, avariciously, as if it were paralysed.  But on the whole of the left side, there is a little parasitic existence which proliferates, a chancre: the arm started trembling and then it rose and the hand at the end was stiff.  And then the hand, too, started trembling and, when it reached the height of the skull, a finger stretched out and started scratching the scalp with the nail.  A sort of voluptuous grimace came and inhabited the right side of the mouth and the left side remained dead.  The windows rattle, the arm trembles, the nail scratches, the mouth smiles under the staring eyes, and the man endures without noticing it this little existence which is swelling his right side, which has borrowed his right arm and his right cheek to fulfil itself.  The conductor blocks my way.

      "Wait until the tram stops."

      But I push him aside and I jump off the tram.  I couldn't stand it anymore.  I couldn't stand things being so close anymore.  I push open a gate, I go through, airy existences leap about and perch on the treetops.  Now I recognize myself, I know where I am: I am in the municipal park.  I flop onto a bench between the great black trunks, between the black, knotty hands reaching out to the sky.  A tree is scratching the earth under my feet with a black nail.  I should so like to let myself go, to forget, to sleep.  But I can't, I'm suffocating: existence is penetrating me all over, through the eyes, through the nose, through the mouth....

      And suddenly, all at once, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.

Six o'clock in the evening

I can't say that I feel relieved or happy: on the contrary, I feel crushed.  Only, I have achieved my air: I know what I wanted to know; I have understood everything that has happened to me since January.  The Nausea hasn't left me and I don't believe it will leave me for quite a while; but I am no longer putting up with it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is me.

      I was in the municipal park just now.  The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench.  I no longer remembered that it was a root.  Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.  I was sitting, slightly bent, my head bowed, alone in front of that black, knotty mass, which was utterly crude and frightened me.  And then I had this revelation.

      It took my breath away.  Never, until these last few days, had I suspected what it meant to 'exist'.  I was like the others, like those who walk along the seashore in their spring clothes.  I used to say like them: "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull", but I didn't feel that it existed, that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself.  It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say a couple of words without speaking of it, but finally you can't touch it.  When I believed I was thinking about it, I suppose that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be'.  Or else I was thinking ... how can I put it?  I was thinking appurtenances, I was saying to myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green formed part of the sea's qualities.  Even when I looked at things, I was miles from thinking that they existed: they looked like stage scenery to me.  I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance.  But all that happened on the surface.  If anybody had asked me what existence was, I should have replied in good faith that it was nothing, just an empty form which added itself to external things, without changing anything in their nature.  And then, all of a sudden, there it was, as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself.  It had lost its harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things, that root was steeped in existence.  Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass on the lawn, all that had vanished; the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer.  The veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder - naked, with a frightening, obscene nakedness.

      I took care not to make the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamppost of the bandstand, and the Valleda in the middle of a clump of laurel bushes.  All those objects ... how can I explain?  They embarrassed me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, in a drier, more abstract way, with more reserve.  The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes.  Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and blistered, looked like boiled leather. The soft sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain flowed into my ears and made a nest there, filling them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid smell.  All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves drift into existence like those weary women who abandon themselves to laughter and say: "It does you good to laugh", in tearful voices; they were parading themselves in front of one another, they were abjectly admitting to one another the fact of their existence.  I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this rapturous abundance.  If you existed, you had to exist to that extent, to the point of mildew, blisters, obscenity.  In another world, circles and melodies kept their pure and rigid lines.  But existence is a curve.  Trees, midnight-blue pillars, the happy bubbling of a fountain, living smells, wisps of heat haze floating in the cold air, a red-haired man digesting on a bench: all these somnolences, all these digestions taken together had a vaguely comic side.  Comic.... No: it didn't go as far as that, nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a vague, almost imperceptible analogy with certain vaudeville situations.  We were a heap of existents inconvenienced, embarrassed by ourselves, we hadn't the slightest reason for being there, any of us, each existent, embarrassed, vaguely ill at ease, felt superfluous in relation to the others.  Superfluous: that was the only connexion I could establish between those trees, those gates, those pebbles.  It was in vain that I tried to count the chestnut trees, to situate them in relation to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped from the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, overflowed.  I was aware of the arbitrary nature of these relationships, which I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the collapse of the human world of measures, of quantities, of bearings; they no longer had any grip on things.  Superfluous, the chestnut tree, over there, opposite me, a little to the left.  Superfluous, the Velleda....

      And I - weak, languid, obscene, digesting, tossing about dismal thoughts - I too was superfluous.  Fortunately I didn't feel this, above all I didn't understand it, but I was uneasy because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I'm afraid of that - I'm afraid that it might take me by the back of my head and lift me up like a ground-swell).  I dreamed vaguely of killing myself, to destroy at least one of these superfluous existences.  But my death itself would have been superfluous.  Superfluous, my corpse, my blood on these pebbles, between these plants, in the depths of this charming park.  And the decomposed flesh would have been superfluous in the earth which would have received it, and my bones, finally, cleaned, stripped, neat and clean as teeth, would also have been superfluous; I was superfluous for all time.

      The word Absurdity is now born beneath my pen; a little while ago, in the park, I didn't find it, but then I wasn't looking for it either, I didn't need it: I was thinking without words, about things, with things.  Absurdity was not an idea in my head, or the sound of a voice, but that long dead snake at my feet, that wooden snake.  Snake or claw or root or vulture's talon, it doesn't matter.  And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life.  In fact, all that I was able to grasp afterwards comes down to this fundamental absurdity.  Absurdity: another word; I am struggling against words; over there, I touched the thing.  But here I should like to establish the absolute character of this absurdity.  A gesture, an event in the little coloured world of men is never absurd except relatively speaking: in relation to the accompanying circumstances.  A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.  But I, a little while ago, experienced the absolute: the absolute or the absurd.  That root - there was nothing in relation to which it was not absurd.  Oh, how can I put that in words?  Absurd: irreducible; nothing - not even a profound, secret aberration of Nature - could explain that.  Obviously, I didn't know everything, I hadn't seen the seed sprout or the tree grow.  But faced with that big rugged paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge had any importance; the world of explanations and reasons is not that of existence.  A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explicable by the rotation of a segment of a straight line around one of its extremities.  But a circle doesn't exist either.  That root, on the other hand, existed in so far that I could not explain it.  Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, repeated brought me back to its own existence.  It was no use my repeating: "It is a root" - that didn't work anymore.  I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction-pump, to that, to that hard, compact sealion skin, to that oily, horny, stubborn look.  The function explained nothing; it enabled you to understand in general what a root was, but not that one at all.  That root, with its colour, its shape, its frozen movement, was ... beneath all explanation.  Each of its qualities escaped from it a little, flowed out of it,  half-solidified, almost became a thing; each one was superfluous in the root, and the whole stump now gave me the impression of rolling a little outside itself, denying itself, losing itself in a strange excess.  I scraped my heel against that black claw: I should have liked to peel off a little of the bark.  For no particular reason, out of defiance, to make the absurd pink of an abrasion appear on the tanned leather: to play with the absurdity of the world.  But when I took my foot away, I saw that the bark was still black.

      Black?  I felt the word subside, empty itself of its meaning with an extraordinary speed.  Black?  The root was not black, it was not the black there was on that piece of wood - it was ... something else: black, like the circle, did not exist.  I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black?  But soon I stopped questioning myself because I had the feeling that I was on familiar ground.  Yes, I had already scrutinized, with that same anxiety, unnameable objects, I had already tried - in vain - to think something about them: and I had already felt their cold, inert qualities escape, slip between my fingers.  Adolphe's braces, the other evening, at the Rendez-vous des Cheminots.  They were not purple.  I recalled the two indefinable patches on the shirt.  And the pebble, that wretched pebble, the origin of this whole business: it was not ... I couldn't remember exactly what it refused to be.  But I hadn't forgotten its passive resistance.  And the Autodidact's hand; I had taken it and shaken it one day at the library, and then I had had the feeling that it wasn't quite a hand.  I had thought of a fat maggot, but it wasn't that either.  And the suspicious transparency of a glass of beer in the Café Mably.  Suspicious: that's what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes.  When they shot past under your eyes, like startled hares, and you didn't pay too much attention to them, you could believe them to be simple and reassuring, you could believe that there was real blue in the world, real red, a real smell of almonds or violets.  But as soon as you held on to them for a moment, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, smells were never real, never simply themselves and nothing but themselves.  The simplest, most irreducible quality had a superfluity in itself, in relation to itself, in its heart.  That black, there, against my foot, didn't look like black, but rather the confused effort to imagine black by somebody who had never seen black and who wouldn't have known how to stop, who would have imagined an ambiguous creature beyond the colours.  It resembled a colour but also ... a bruise or again a secretion, a yolk - and something else, a smell for example, it melted into a smell of wet earth, of warm, moist wood, into a black smell spread like varnish over that sinewy wood, into a taste of sweet, pulped fibre.  I didn't see that black in a simple way: sight is an abstract invention, a cleaned-up, simplified idea, a human idea.  That black, a weak, amorphous presence, far surpassed sight, smell, and taste.  But that richness became confusion and finally ceased to be anything at all because it was too much.

      That moment was extraordinary.  I was there, motionless and frozen, plunged into a horrible ecstasy.  But, in the very heart of that ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the Nausea, I possessed it.  To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself.  But I think that now it would be easy for me to put them into words.  The essential thing is contingency.  I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity.  To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it.  There are people, I believe, who have understood that.  Only, they have tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being.  But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness.  Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself.  When you realize that, it turns your stomach over and everything starts floating about, as it did the other evening at the Rendez-vous des Cheminots; that is the Nausea; that is what the Bastards - those who live on the Coteau Vert and the others - try to hide from themselves with their idea of rights.  But what a poor lie: nobody has any rights; they are entirely gratuitous, like other men, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous.  And in themselves, secretly, they are superfluous, that is to say amorphous and vague, sad.

      How long did that spell last?  I was the root of the chestnut tree.  Or, rather, I was all consciousness of its existence.  Still detached from it - since I was conscious of it - and yet lost in it, nothing but it.  An uneasy consciousness and yet one which let itself hang with all its weight over that piece of inert wood.  Time had stopped: a small black pool at my feet; it was impossible for anything to come after that particular moment.  I should have liked to tear myself away from that atrocious pleasure, but I didn't even imagine that that was possible; I was inside; the black stump did not pass, it stayed there, in my eyes, just as a lump of food sticks in a windpipe.  I could neither accept nor reject it.  At the cost of what effort did I raise my eyes?  And indeed did I actually raise them?  Didn't I rather obliterate myself for a moment, to come to life again the next moment with my head thrown back and my eyes turned upwards?  In fact, I was not aware of a transition.  But, all of a sudden, it became impossible for me to think of the existence of the root.  It had been wiped out.  It was no use my repeating to myself: "It exists, it is still there, under the bench, against my right foot", it didn't mean anything anymore.  Existence is not something which allows itself to be thought of from a distance; it has to invade you suddenly, pounce upon you, weigh heavily on your heart like a huge motionless animal - or else there is nothing left at all.

      There was nothing left at all, my eyes were empty, and I felt delighted with my deliverance.  And then, all of a sudden, something started moving before my eyes, slight, uncertain movements: the wind was shaking the top of the tree.

      I wasn't sorry to see something move, it was a change from all those motionless existences which watched me like staring eyes.  I said to myself, as I followed the swaying of the branches: "Movements never quite exist, they are transitions, intermediaries between two existences, unaccented beats."  I got ready to see them come out of nothingness, gradually ripen, blossom: at last I was going to surprise existences in the process of being born.

      It took only three seconds to dash all my hopes to the ground.  In those hesitant branches which were groping about like blind men, I failed to distinguish any 'transition' to existence.  That idea of transition was another invention of man.  An idea which was too clear.  All those tiny agitations cut themselves off, set themselves up on their own.  They overflowed the branches and boughs everywhere.  They whirled about those dry hands, enveloping them in tiny cyclones.  Admittedly, a movement was something different from a tree.  But it was still an absolute.  A thing.  My eyes never met anything but repletion.  There were swarms of existences at the ends of the branches, existences which constantly renewed themselves and were never born.  The existing wind came and settled on the tree like a big fly; and the tree shivered.  But the shiver was not a nascent quality, a transition from the potential to the act; it was a thing; a thing-shiver flowed into the tree, took possession of it, shook it, and suddenly abandoned it, going further on to spin around by itself.  Everything was full, everything was active, there was no unaccented beat, everything, even in the most imperceptible movement, was made of existence.  All of those existents which were bustling about the tree came from nowhere and were going nowhere.  All of a sudden they existed and then, all of a sudden, they no longer existed: existence has no memory; it retains nothing of what has disappeared; not even a recollection.  Existence everywhere, to infinity, superfluous, always and everywhere; existence - which is never limited by anything but existence.  I slumped on the bench, dazed, stunned by that profusion of beings without origin: bloomings, blossomings everywhere, my ears were buzzing with existence, my very flesh was throbbing and opening, abandoning itself to the universal burgeoning, it was repulsive.  'But why,' I thought, 'why so many existences, since they all resemble one another?'  What was the use of so many trees which were all identical?  So many existences failed and stubbornly begun again and once more failed - like the clumsy efforts of an insect which had fallen on its back?  (I was one of those efforts).  That abundance did not give the impression of generosity, far from it.  It was dismal, sickly, encumbered by itself.  Those trees, those big clumsy bodies ... I started laughing because I suddenly thought of the wonderful springtimes described in books, full of crackings, burstings, gigantic blossomings.  There were fools who talked to you about willpower and the struggle for life.  Hadn't they ever looked at an animal or a tree?  That plane tree with its scaling bark, that half-rotten oak - they would have wanted me to take them for vigorous youthful forces thrusting towards the sky.  And that root?  I would probably have had to see it as a greedy claw, tearing the earth, snatching its food from it.

      Impossible to see things that way.  Weaknesses, frailties, yes.  The trees were floating.  Thrusting towards the sky?  Collapsing rather: at any moment I expected to see the trunks shrivel like weary pricks, curl up and fall to the ground in a soft, black, crumpled heap.  They did not want to exist, only they could not help it; that was the point.  So they performed all their little functions, quietly, unenthusiastically, the sap rose slowly and reluctantly in the canals, and the roots penetrated slowly into the earth.  But at every moment they seemed on the verge of dropping everything and obliterating themselves.  Tired and old, they went on existing, unwillingly and ungraciously, simply because they were too weak to die, because death could come to them only from the outside: melodies alone can proudly carry their own death within them like an internal necessity; only they don't exist.  Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.  I leaned back and I closed my eyes.  But pictures, promptly informed, sprang forward and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a repletion which man can never abandon.

      Strange pictures.  They represented a host of things.  Not real things, other things which looked like them.  Wooden objects which looked like chairs, like clogs, like objects which looked like plants.  And then two faces: the couple who were lunching near me, the other Sunday, at the Brasserie Vézelize.  Fat, hot, sensual, absurd, with their ears all red.  I could see the woman's shoulders and bosom.  Existence in the nude.  Those two - the idea suddenly horrified me - those two were still existing somewhere in Bouville: somewhere - in the midst of what smells? - that soft bosom was still rubbing up against cool material, nestling in lace, and the woman was still feeling her bosom existing in her blouse, thinking: 'My tits, my lovely fruits', smiling mysteriously, attentive to the blossoming of her breasts which were tickling her, and then I cried out and I found myself with my eyes wide open.

      Did I dream it up, that huge presence?  It was there, installed on the park, tumbled into the trees, all soft, gumming everything up, all thick, a jelly.  And I was inside with the whole of the park?  I was frightened, but above all I was furious, I thought it was so stupid, so out of place, I hated that ignoble jelly.  And there was so much of it, so much!  It went up as high as the sky, it flowed away everywhere, it filled everything with gelatinous subsidence and I could see it going deeper and deeper, far beyond the limits of the park and the houses and Bouville, I was no longer at Bouville or anywhere, I was floating.  I was not surprised, I knew perfectly well that it was the World, the World in all its nakedness which was suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with fury at that huge absurd being.  You couldn't even wonder where it all came from, or how it was that a world should exist rather than nothing.  It didn't make sense, the world was present everywhere, in front, behind.  There had been nothing before it.  Nothing.  There had been no moment at which it might not have existed.  It was that which irritated me: naturally there was no reason for it to exist, that flowing larva.  But it was not possible for it not to exist.  That was unthinkable: in order to imagine nothingness, you had to be there already, right in the world, with your eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was just an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in that immensity: this nothingness hadn't come before existence, it was an existence like any other and one which had appeared after a great many others.  I shouted: "What filth!  What filth!" and I shook myself to get rid of that sticky dirt, but it held fast and there was so much of it, tons and tons of existence, indefinitely: I was suffocating at the bottom of that huge boredom.  Then, all of a sudden, the park emptied as if though a big hole, the world disappeared in the same way it had come, or else I woke up - in any case I could not see it anymore; there remained some yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches stuck up into the air.

      I got up, I went out.  When I got to the gate, I turned round.  Then the park smiled at me.  I leaned against the gate and I looked at the park for a long time.  The smile of the trees, of the clump of laurel bushes, meant something; that was the real secret of existence.  I remembered that one Sunday, not more than three weeks ago, I had already noticed in things a sort of conspiratorial air.  Was it to me that it was addressed?  I regretfully felt that I had no means of understanding.  No means.  Yet it was there, expectant, it resembled a gaze.  It was there, on the trunk of the chestnut tree ... it was the chestnut tree.  You could have sworn that things were thoughts which stopped half-way, which forgot themselves, which forgot what they had wanted to think and which stayed like that, swaying too and fro, with a funny little meaning which went beyond them.  That little meaning annoyed me: I could not understand it, even if I stayed leaning against the gate for a hundred and seven years; I had leaned everything I could know about existence.  I left, I came back to the hotel, and there you are, I wrote.

In the night

I have made up my mind: I no longer have any reason for staying at Bouville since I have stopped writing my book; I am going to live in Paris.  On Friday I shall take the five o'clock train, on Saturday I shall see Anny; I think we shall spend a few days together.  Then I shall come back here to settle a few things and pack my bags.  By 1st March at the latest, I shall be permanently installed in Paris.