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160 toward Heaven. I have always lived alone by reason of a sort of incommodity that the presence of others affects me with. How shall I explain that? I cannot. I do not shut myself entirely from the world, I do not refuse to converse and dine with my friends, but when I have had them by me for any length of time, even the nearest and dearest of them, they tire me, they weary and depress me, and I experience a constantly increasing, tormenting desire to see them go away, or to go away myself and be alone.

This desire is something more than a mere fancy; it is an irresistible necessity. And should the people with whom I chance to be continue to remain with me, should I be compelled, not to listen and attend to, but to hear their conversation for a long time, some accident would doubtless happen me. Of what nature? Ah! who can tell? Perhaps a simple fainting-fit? Yes, probably.

I love so to be alone that I cannot even endure the propinquity of other beings sleeping beneath my roof; I cannot live in Paris because it is infinite torture to me. I die a moral death, and am racked, too, in body and nerves, by that immense throng that swarms and lives about me, even while it sleeps. Ah! the slumber of others is even more afflictive to me than their speech, and I can never rest when I know, when I feel that, parted from me by a wall, there are lives whose thread is broken by these regular eclipses of the reason.

Why am I thus? Who can tell? The reason, perhaps, is very simple: I weary very quickly of everything that occurs outside my own individuality. And there are many people constituted as I am.