I remained for some time lost in the sort of insensibility belonging to
a first sleep; at last some vague and broken sensations came over me.
It seemed to me that the day grew darker, that the air became colder.
I half perceived bushes covered with the scarlet berries which foretell
the coming of winter. I walked on a dreary road, bordered here and there
with juniper-trees white with frost. Then the scene suddenly changed.
I was in the diligence; the cold wind shook the doors and windows; the
trees, loaded with snow, passed by like ghosts; in vain I thrust my
benumbed feet into the crushed straw. At last the carriage stopped, and,
by one of those stage effects so common in sleep, I found myself alone in
a barn, without a fireplace, and open to the winds on all sides. I saw
again my mother's gentle face, known only to me in my early childhood,
the noble and stern countenance of my father, the little fair head of my
sister, who was taken from us at ten years old; all my dead family lived
again around me; they were there, exposed to the bitings of the cold and
to the pangs of hunger. My mother prayed by the resigned old man, and my
sister, rolled up on some rags of which they had made her a bed, wept in
silence, and held her naked feet in her little blue hands.

It was a page from the book I had just read transferred into my own
existence.

My heart was oppressed with inexpressible anguish. Crouched in a corner,
with my eyes fixed upon this dismal picture, I felt the cold slowly
creeping upon me, and I said to myself with bitterness:

"Let us die, since poverty is a dungeon guarded by suspicion, apathy, and
contempt, and from which it is vain to try to escape; let us die, since
there is no place for us at the banquet of the living!"