At such moments of self-abandonment and sombre isolation in distant cities one thinks broadly, clearly and profoundly. And then, suddenly, you are aware that you are really alone in the world, always and everywhere, and that in places which we know, the familiar jostlings give us the illusion only of human fraternity. Then you feel so abominably lonely sitting in front of the glass of flat bock beer that a kind of madness seizes you, the longing to go somewhere or other, no matter where, as long as you need not remain in front of that marble table amid those dazzling lights. You have a terrible feeling, almost as if you were lost, and you continue to walk on so as not to be obliged to return to the hotel, where you would feel more lost still because you are at home, in a home which belongs to anyone who can pay for it and at last you sink into a chair of some well-lighted cafe, whose gilding and lights oppress you a thousand times more than the shadows in the streets. Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know anything more wretched than the approach of dusk on such an occasion? One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces that one never has seen before and never will see again listening to people talking about matters which are quite indifferent to you in a language that perhaps you do not understand. And then the hotel dinners-those dreary table d'hote dinners in the midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted by a wretched composite candle under a shade. And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am about to sleep! The mere idea of it makes me feel ill as I get into it. I think of those who are deformed and unhealthy, of the perspiration emanating from the sick, of everything that is ugly and filthy in man. I begin, then, to think of all the horrible people with whom one rubs shoulders every day, people with suspicious-looking skin which makes one think of the feet and all the rest! I call to mind those who carry about with them the sickening smell of garlic or of humanity. Who has occupied it the night before? Perhaps dirty, revolting people have slept in it. I cannot lift up the sheets of a hotel bed without a shudder of disgust. The bed is sacred, and should be respected, venerated and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly possessions. There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of love and of sleep. We entrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it so that they may be reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and feathers. After this introduction, we have the miseries of the hotel of some great hotel full of people, and yet so empty the strange room and the doubtful bed! I am most particular about my bed it is the sanctuary of life. Nights spent in a train, the disturbed slumbers of the railway carriage, with the attendant headache, and stiffness in every limb, the sudden waking in that rolling box, the unwashed feeling, with your eyes and hair full of dust, the smell of the coal on which one's lungs feed, those bad dinners in the draughty refreshment rooms are, according to my ideas, a horrible way of beginning a pleasure trip. I am, as you know, not a great traveller it appears to me a useless and fatiguing business. You don't understand me, so I will explain: In the spring of 1874 I was seized with an irresistible desire to see Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. I will make another attempt to penetrate into the interior, which I have not yet succeeded in doing. Some time, however, I must visit its cities, as well as the museums and works of art with which it abounds. And yet my two attempts gave me a charming idea of the manners of that beautiful country. So I do not know Italy, said my friend, Charles Jouvent. AS MOSCAS DE DEUS: I set out to see Italy thoroughly on two occasions, and each time I was stopped at the frontier and could not get any further.
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