Saint-Avit as classmate. I might have studied law or medicine. Then I
should be today a respectable inhabitant of a town with a church and
running water, instead of this cotton-clad phantom, brooding with an
unspeakable anxiety over this desert which is about to swallow me.

A great insect has flown in through the window. It buzzes, strikes
against the rough cast, rebounds against the globe of the lamp, and
then, helpless, its wings singed by the still burning candle, drops on
the white paper.

It is an African May bug, big, black, with spots of livid gray.

I think of others, its brothers in France, the golden-brown May bugs,
which I have seen on stormy summer evenings projecting themselves like
little particles of the soil of my native countryside. It was there
that as a child I spent my vacations, and later on, my leaves. On my
last leave, through those same meadows, there wandered beside me a
slight form, wearing a thin scarf, because of the evening air, so cool
back there. But now this memory stirs me so slightly that I scarcely
raise my eyes to that dark corner of my room where the light is dimly
reflected by the glass of an indistinct portrait. I realize of how
little consequence has become what had seemed at one time capable of
filling all my life. This plaintive mystery is of no more interest to
me. If the strolling singers of Rolla came to murmur their famous
nostalgic airs under the window of this bordj I know that I should not
listen to them, and if they became insistent I should send them on
their way.

What has been capable of causing this metamorphosis in me? A story, a
legend, perhaps, told, at any rate by one on whom rests the direst of