'And confess, now,' he added, with a sudden sideway glance at me; 'I must strike you as a queer fellow, an original, as they say, or possibly as something worse: perhaps you think I affect to be original!'
'I must repeat again that I don't know you....'
He looked down an instant.
'Why have I begun talking so unexpectedly to you, a man utterly a stranger?--the Lord, the Lord only knows!' (He sighed.) 'Not through the natural affinity of our souls! Both you and I are respectable people, that's to say, egoists: neither of us has the least concern with the other; isn't it so? But we are neither of us sleepy... so why not chat? I'm in the mood, and that's rare with me. I'm shy, do you see? and not shy because I'm a provincial, of no rank and poor, but because I'm a fearfully vain person. But at times, under favourable circumstances, occasions which I could not, however, particularise nor foresee, my shyness vanishes completely, as at this moment, for instance. At this moment you might set me face to face with the Grand Lama, and I'd ask him for a pinch of snuff. But perhaps you want to go to sleep?'
'Quite the contrary,' I hastened to respond; 'it is a pleasure for me to talk to you.'
'That is, I amuse you, you mean to say.... All the better.... And so, I tell you, they call me here an original; that's what they call me when my name is casually mentioned, among other gossip. No one is much concerned about my fate.... They think it wounds me.... Oh, good Lord! if they only knew... it's just what's my ruin, that there is absolutely nothing original in me--nothing, except such freaks as, for instance, my conversation at this moment with you; but such freaks are not worth a brass farthing. That's the cheapest and lowest sort of originality.'
He turned facing me, and waved his hands.
'Honoured sir!' he cried, 'I am of the opinion that life on earth's only worth living, as a rule, for original people; it's only they who have a right to live. Man verre n'est pas grand, maisje bois dans mon verre, said someone. Do you see,' he added in an undertone, 'how well I pronounce French? What is it to one if one's a capacious brain, and understands everything, and knows a lot, and keeps pace with the age, if one's nothing of one's own, of oneself! One more storehouse for hackneyed commonplaces in the world; and what good does that do to anyone? No, better be stupid even, but in one's own way! One should have a flavour of one's own, one's individual flavour; that's the thing! And don't suppose that I am very exacting as to that flavour.... God forbid! There are no end of original people of the sort I mean: look where you will--there's an original: every live man is an original; but I am not to be reckoned among them!'
'And yet,' he went on, after a brief silence, 'in my youth what expectations I aroused! What a high opinion I cherished of my own individuality before I went abroad, and even, at first, after my return! Well, abroad I kept my ears open, held aloof from everyone, as befits a man like me, who is always seeing through things by himself, and at the end has not understood the A B C!'
'An original, an original!' he hurried on, shaking his head reproachfully....' They call me an original.... In reality, it turns out that there's not a man in the world less original than your humble servant. I must have been born even in imitation of someone else.... Oh, dear! It seems I am living, too, in imitation of the various authors studied by me; in the sweat of my brow I live: and I've studied, and fallen in love, and married, in fact, as it were, not through my own will--as it were, fulfilling some sort of duty, or sort of fate--who's to make it out?'