longing for a sort of lost paradise.

But of what avail to pray or rebel? I felt I had nothing more to
expect from life. Thenceforth, I should be neither happy nor unhappy.
I could not rise from the dead. I would grow old quietly, as quiet as
I was that day in the room where so many people had left their traces,
and yet no one had left his own traces.

This room--anywhere you turn, you find this room. It is the universal
room. You think it is closed. No, it is open to the four winds of
heaven. It is lost amid a host of similar rooms, like the light in the
sky, like one day amid the host of all other days, like my "I" amid a
host of other I's.

I, I! I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep
orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence
which gently but surely stifles and destroys.

I raised myself on my elbow as on a clipped wing. I wished that
something partaking of the infinite would happen to me.

I had no genius, no mission to fulfil, no great heart to bestow. I had
nothing and I deserved nothing. But all the same I desired some sort
of reward.

Love. I dreamed of a unique, an unheard-of idyll with a woman far from
the one with whom I had hitherto lost all my time, a woman whose
features I did not see, but whose shadow I imagined beside my own as we
walked along the road together.