Really, at that moment I loved Gabrielle, Jesselin, Celestine—I even thought I loved Malterre.
I no longer worked. Not that love of work deserted me, but I no longer had the creative faculty in me. I used to sit down at my desk every day, with blank sheets of paper before me, searching for ideas, and failing to find them, I would again relapse into anxieties of the present, which meant Juliette, into dread of the future, which again meant Juliette!... Just as a drunkard clutches and turns his empty bottle to get the last drop of liquor out of it, so I searched my brains in the hope of squeezing the least bit of an idea out of it.... Alas! My head was empty!
It was empty and weighed upon my shoulders like an enormous ball of lead!... My mentality was always slow in getting started: it required stimulation, it had to be lashed with a whip. Because of my ill-balanced sensibility, my passive nature, I easily yielded to intellectual or moral influences, whether good or bad. And again, Lirat's friendship was quite useful to me in the past. My own ideas melted in the warmth of his spirit; his conversation opened for me new horizons hitherto unsuspected; whatever confused ideas I had were cleared up, they assumed a more definite form which I endeavored to express; he taught me how to see, to understand things and made me delve with him into the mysteries of life.
Now, the clear horizons toward which I was led shrunk and were shut off before me daily, almost hourly, and night was coming, black night, which to me was not only visible but tangible, for I could actually touch this monstrous night, I felt its darkness stuck fast in my hair, glued to my fingers, coiled around my body in clammy rings....
My study room opened into a yard, or rather a little garden shaded by two large plane-trees and bounded by a wall that had lattice work and was covered with ivy. Behind this wall, in the midst of another garden, the grey and very high façade of a house rose, accosting me with five rows of windows. On the third floor an old man sat near the window opening which encased him like a picture frame. He wore a cap of black velvet, a checkered morning robe, and he never stirred. Shrunk into himself, his head drooping on his chest, he seemed asleep. Of his face I could see only wrinkles of yellowish, wrinkled flesh, dark cavities and locks which looked like tufts of a soiled beard, resembling some strange vegetation sprouting on the trunks of dead trees. Sometimes the profile of a woman would bend over him sinisterly, and this profile had the appearance of an owl perched upon the aged man's shoulder; I could discern its hooked bill and round eyes, cruel, avaricious and bloodthirsty. When the sun shone into the garden, the window opened and I heard a shrill, piercing, angry voice which never ceased screaming reproaches. Then the old man would shrink into himself still farther, his head would begin to oscillate slightly, then he would become motionless again, still more buried in the folds of his morning robe, still deeper sunk in his armchair.
I used to sit for hours and watch the unhappy man, and I fancied terrible tragedies, some fatal love affair, a noble life bungled, crushed and ruined by that woman with the owl face. I pictured to myself this living corpse as beautiful, young and strong.... Perhaps he had been an artist once upon a time, a scientist, or simply a happy and kind-hearted man. And tall and upright, with a gaze full of hope, he marched towards glory or happiness.... One day he met that woman at the house of a friend ... and that woman, too, wore a perfumed veil, a small muff, an otter skin cap, a heavenly smile, and an air of angelic sweetness.... And forthwith he fell in love with her.... I followed step by step the development of his love affair, I counted up his weaknesses, his moments of cowardice, his growing downfalls up to the time of his sinking into this armchair for cripples and paralytics.
And what I imagined his life was to him, my own life was to me, those were my own feelings, it was my own dread of the future, my own anguish.... Little by little my hallucination took on a singular physical form, and it was myself that I saw in this velvet cap, in this morning robe with this battered body, this murky beard, and Juliette who stood over my shoulder like an owl....
Juliette!... She walked about in the study, weary of body, her whole figure betraying boredom, yawning and sighing. She could not think of anything to distract her. Most often she would place the card table not far from me and lose herself in the card combinations of a complicated "patience," or she would stretch herself out on the sofa, spread a napkin over her dress, place upon it some tiny instruments of tortoise shell, microscopic containers of ointment, and begin polishing her nails, fiercely filing them and making them shine more lustrously than agate. She would examine them every five minutes, looking for the reflection of her image in the polished surfaces:
"Look my dear! Aren't they beautiful! And you, too, Spy, look at your mistress' pretty nails."
The light friction of the nail brush, the imperceptible creaking of the sofa, Juliette's remarks, her conversation with Spy—all this was sufficient to put to rout the few ideas which I strove to bring together. My thoughts would turn immediately to ordinary matters, and I meditated upon painful things and lived sorrowful things over again.... Juliette.... Did I love her? Many times this question arose in my mind, pregnant with horrible doubt.... Had I not been deceived by the stupefaction of my senses?... Was not this thing which I took for love, the ephemeral and fleeting manifestation of a pleasure as yet untasted?... Juliette!... Of course I loved her....