I am now able to work in a warm and dry place, for yesterday, as honorary minister without portfolio, I entered what is spoken of as “the French governing body” of the fort.
Do you think these vain honours? Not at all, for they provide me with a table. To have table and lamp of one’s own, with many hours all to oneself for observation and reflection! In my view, free time is preferable to money. “Time is money,” say the English. I would rather say “Money is time.” It seems to me that the only object of working is to secure leisure. The man within us is formed by leisure. Work produces money, money produces leisure, and leisure produces more work—but this last is noble, lofty, and disinterested work, the true work of humanity. With me it is an article of faith that the true work of humanity is the work of leisure. Thank goodness I have now a little leisure and solitude.
My solitude, a very precarious one, is a kitchen. You must not laugh.
Near the door of the huge room is the region of the cooking stoves, encumbered, filled with iron and smoke, under the care of Bouquet, the “chef,” a delicate and gentle lad from Quercy. But beyond this plutonic zone you enter a spacious quadrilateral, which the cooks usually speak of as the “salon.” Two large windows looking to the south flood the place with light. It is fairly clean. The cemented floor is flushed down with water after the vegetables have been prepared, after the serving of each of the three meals, and, speaking generally, whenever there has been much coming and going. At the further end of this kitchen, between the two windows, there stands a table, a little deal table, the table. M. Prudhomme would say: “This table, it is the heart of Fort Orff.” It is here, in fact, that is established, in almost continuous sitting (upon three deal stools), our ministerial council. Here we plan reforms. Here we elaborate details of organization. Here is regulated the entire internal life of the colony. It is here, finally, that by means of various stratagems we learn the news from outside.
This table, or to be precise, the left side of this table, is now mine. The deep mouth of the sink yawns just behind my stool on the floor level. As I work, my left arm touches the window-sill, on which I place my pipe, my mess-tin, my papers, and your photograph. Such is my kingdom. Here I read, write, and dream. Here thrice daily when meals are served I watch my brothers in captivity file by. Here I listen, and here I observe. Notwithstanding the buzz of talk, the trampling of those at work, and the smoke from the fire, I delight in this corner close to the cooking stoves. Upon our scanty regimen I have become as chilly as a cat. Besides, where else could I work?
Thus my life is divided between my “Fontainebleau of the slopes,” my stool in kitchen No. 22, and casemate 17. For I continue to sleep on my old heap of straw. It is nothing more than a derisory bed of dust, but I am more comfortable there than I was the first night. I am glad to say that my back is now covered with callus; my nose has become hardened; even my ears during the night are less sensitive than they were at first to the noises, now strident, now guttural, of the sleepers. At the outset, suffering from insomnia, I passed hour after hour, sickened by this frogs’ chorus. I longed to run away from it. I summoned sleep with all my might. Smile if you like, but I feel my faith in the human soul weaken when I contemplate a sleeping man whose mouth gapes and who snores like a great hog. The horrible stench which tainted the damp breeze at Moncourt, Lagarde, and Kerprich, rising from the putrefying corpses of men and beasts, was to my mind less strongly insistent of the animal relationships of man than is the slow, irregular rhythm, the dull and undignified noise, of snoring. But one gets used to everything. I have become accustomed to the snoring and to the yet more disagreeable incidents of our too intimate association. I hardly notice the foul smell of drains which permeates the passages of our ant-hill, and which made me feel positively faint on the evening of our arrival. Man is so greedy for happiness that he speedily becomes immunized against the toxin of his daily troubles. Day by day I am less keenly conscious of my miseries. At night, on my heap of dust, I often meditate upon this marvellous characteristic of our nature. Towards eleven, passing into a condition of gentle melancholy, I manage to get off to sleep between Sergeant Bertrand on one side, dreaming love dreams, and my terrible and dear Guido on the other—Guido, a prey to pessimism and insomnia, whose cigarette continues to glow in the darkness.