O God, the stings of this bitter, haunting, horrible poverty! The ghastly weight that has hung about my neck since ever I can remember! Oh, shall I ever be free from it? Shall I ever know what it is to have what I ought to have, to think of my work without the intrusion of these degrading pettinesses?
They are so infinite, so endless, so hideous! The thing gets to be a habit of my thoughts; my whole nature is steeped and soaked in it—in filthy sordidness! I plot and I plan all the day—I can not buy a newspaper without hesitating and debating—I am like a ragpicker going about the streets!
Sometimes the thing goads me so that I think I must go mad—when I think of the time that I lose, of the power, of the courage! I walk miles when I am exhausted, to save a car-fare! I wear ragged collars and chafe my neck! I stand waiting in foul-smelling grocery shops with crowds of nasty people! I cook what I eat in a half-dirty frying-pan because I can not afford to pay the servant to wash it! So it is that I drag myself about—chafing and goaded—crouching and cringing like a whipped cur!
My God, when will I be free? My God! My God!
—The boarding-houses that I have been in! The choice collection of memories that I have stored away in my mind, memories of boarding-houses! The landladies' faces—the assorted stenches—the dark hallways—the gabbling, quarreling, filthy, beer-carrying tenants! Oh, I wring my hands and something clutches me in my heart! Let me go! Let me go!
Six times in the course of my life, when I have been starved sick on my own feeding, I have become a “table-boarder”; and out of those six experiences I could make myself another Zola. The infinite variety of animality in those six vile stables—the champing jaws and the slobbering mouths and the rank odor of food! The men who shoveled with their knives or plastered things on their forks as hod-carriers do mortar! The women who sucked in their soup, and the children who smeared their faces and licked their lips and slopped upon the table-cloth! The fat Dutchman who grunted when he ate, and then leaned back and panted! The yellow woman with the false teeth who gathered everything about her on the table! The flashy gentleman with the diamond scarf-pin and the dirty cuffs, who made a tower out of his dirty dishes and then sucked his teeth! O God!
And the loathsome food!—For seven years I have had my nose stamped into this mud, and all in vain; I can still starve, but I can not eat what is not clean.
—Some day I shall put into a book all the rage and all the hate and all the infamy of these things, and it will be a book that will make your flesh sizzle. And you will wonder why I did it!
It will be better than Troilus and Cressida, better than the end of Gulliver's Travels—better than Swellfoot the Tyrant!