A Fool's Life

I want to leave it entirely to you to decide whether this manuscript should be published, and, if it is published, when and where.

You probably know most of the people who appear in it. Even so, if you do publish it, I would prefer that no index be attached.

At present I am living in the unhappiest kind of happiness. Strangely enough, however, I feel no regret. I only feel deeply sorry for those who have had a bad husband, a bad son, and a bad father like me.

Well then, goodbye. At least in this manuscript, I believe I have not consciously tried to defend myself.

Lastly, I entrust this manuscript to you in particular because I think you probably know me better than anyone else does. If only you would strip away the skin I wear as a man of the city, then please laugh at the extent of my foolishness revealed in these pages.

June 20, 1927

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

To Masao Kume

1. The Age

It was on the second floor of a certain bookstore. At twenty, he climbed a Western-style rolling ladder set against the shelves, searching for new books. Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy...

Before long dusk began to gather. But he went on eagerly reading the titles stamped on the spines. What stood in rows there were less books than the fin de siecle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert...

Fighting the dimness, he counted off their names. But the books gradually began to sink into a melancholy shadow of their own. At last his patience gave out, and he started down the Western-style ladder. Then, all at once, a bare lightbulb directly above his head flared on. Pausing there on the ladder, he looked down at the clerks and customers moving among the books. They seemed strangely small. More than that, they looked unspeakably shabby.

"Life is not worth even a single line of Baudelaire."

For a while he kept looking down at them from the ladder like that...

2. Mother

The madmen were all dressed alike in mouse-gray clothes. The large room seemed all the gloomier because of it. One of them sat before an organ, earnestly playing hymns without stopping. At the same time another stood in the middle of the room, not so much dancing as leaping about.

Together with a rosy-cheeked doctor, he watched the scene. Ten years earlier his mother too had been no different from them. No different at all. In fact, in their smell he sensed his mother's smell.

"Shall we go?"

The doctor, walking ahead of him, led him down the corridor to another room. In one corner of that room stood several brains preserved in a large glass jar filled with alcohol. On one brain he noticed a faint white patch. It looked rather like a drop of egg white spilled on it. As he stood talking with the doctor, he remembered his mother once more.

"The man who had this brain was an engineer at the XX Electric Company. He always thought he was a big, black-glossed dynamo."

To avoid the doctor's eyes, he looked out the glass window. There was nothing there beyond a brick wall topped with shards of empty bottles. Yet the wall, mottled with thin moss, shone whitely and dimly.

3. Home

He lived in an upstairs room in a suburb. Because the ground beneath it was unstable, the whole second floor tilted in a strange way.

His aunt quarreled with him there time and again. Sometimes his foster parents had to step in and mediate. Yet he felt more love for his aunt than for anyone else. She had remained unmarried all her life, and even when he was twenty she was already nearly sixty.

Many times in that suburban upstairs room he wondered why people who love each other must torment each other, all the while feeling the eerie tilt of the floor beneath him.

4. Tokyo

The Sumida River lay under a heavy, overcast sky. From the window of a little steam launch, he watched the cherry trees of Mukojima on the opposite bank. In full bloom, they looked to him melancholy, like a row of rags. Yet in those blossoms, in the cherry trees of Mukojima as they had been since Edo, he somehow found himself.

5. Self

Facing a table in a cafe with an older acquaintance, he smoked one hand-rolled cigarette after another. He himself said little, but listened intently to the other man's words.

"I spent half the day riding around in automobiles today."

"Did you have some errand to do?"

His senior, resting his cheek on one hand, replied with complete indifference.

"No. I just felt like riding around."

Those words released him into a world he had never known, into the world of the self, close to the gods. He felt a kind of pain. Yet at the same time he felt joy as well.

The cafe was extremely small. But beneath the brow of Pan there stood a rubber plant in a reddish pot, its thick leaves hanging limply down.

6. Illness

In the ceaseless sea wind he had opened a large English dictionary and was searching with his fingertip for words.

Talaria: winged shoes, or sandals.

Tale: story.

Talipot: a palm native to the East Indies. Its trunk reaches fifty to one hundred feet in height; its leaves are used for umbrellas, fans, hats, and so forth. It flowers once every seventy years...

His imagination clearly pictured that palm in bloom. Then he felt, at the back of his throat, an itch unlike any he had ever known, and before he knew it he had spat onto the dictionary. Spat? But it was not spit. He thought of his short life, and once more imagined the flower of that palm, towering high beyond the distant sea.

7. Painting

Suddenly, and it really was sudden, he came to understand painting. He was standing in front of a bookstore, looking through an album of Gauguin's paintings, when it happened. Of course the reproductions in the book could only have been photographs. Yet even in those reproductions he felt nature rising vividly before him.

This passion for painting gave his vision new scope. Before long he found himself paying constant attention to the twists of tree branches and the swelling of a woman's cheek.

One autumn evening heavy with impending rain, he happened to pass under a railway overpass in the suburbs.

Beyond it, below the embankment, a wagon stood still. As he walked by, he became aware that someone else had once passed this way before him. Someone else? There was no need now to ask himself who. In the heart of the twenty-three-year-old stood a Dutchman with his ear cut off, a long pipe in his mouth, staring fixedly with sharp eyes at this melancholy landscape...

8. Sparks

Soaked by rain, he walked over the asphalt. The rain was fairly hard. Amid the spray-filled air he smelled the odor of a rubberized raincoat.

Then one of the overhead wires in front of him gave off a violet spark. It moved him strangely. In the pocket of his jacket lay the manuscript he meant to publish in the coterie magazine of their group. Walking on through the rain, he looked back up once more at the wire behind him.

It was still throwing off sharp sparks. Looking across life, there was nothing in particular he wanted. But that violet spark, that fierce spark in the air, he wanted to seize even at the cost of his life.

9. A Corpse

Every corpse had a tag attached by a wire to its thumb. On each tag were written a name, an age, and so forth. Stooping over, his friend deftly moved a scalpel and began to peel the skin from one corpse's face. Beneath the skin spread a beautiful yellow fat.

He watched the corpse. It must have been necessary for finishing a certain short story of his, one set in the imperial past. But the corpse's odor, like the smell of rotting apricots, was unpleasant. His friend, knitting his brows, kept moving the scalpel quietly.

"These days there's even a shortage of corpses."

His friend said this, and somehow he already had his answer prepared. "If I were short of corpses, I'd kill someone without the least malice." But of course the answer remained only in his mind.

10. The Master

He was reading one of the master's books beneath a large tree. Not a single leaf of the tree stirred in the autumn light. Somewhere in the distant sky, it seemed, a balance with glass pans hung perfectly level. Reading the master's book, he felt a scene like that...

11. Dawn

Night gradually gave way to day. Before long he found himself at a street corner overlooking a broad market. The people and carts crowding the market were all beginning to take on a rosy hue.

He lit a cigarette and quietly entered the market. At once a thin black dog barked sharply at him. But he was not startled. More than that, he even loved the dog.

In the middle of the market stood a plane tree, its branches spread in every direction. Standing at its base, he looked up through the branches into the high sky. There, directly above him, a single star was shining.

That was in his twenty-fifth year, the third month after he had met the master.

12. Naval Port

Inside the submarine it was dim. Crouching among the machinery hemming him in on every side, he peered through a small eyepiece. Reflected in it was the bright scene of a naval port. "You can see the Kongo over there too, can't you?"

A naval officer said this to him. Looking at the tiny warship on the square lens, he suddenly, for no particular reason, thought of parsley, the faint smell of parsley that clings even to a thirty-sen beefsteak.

13. The Master's Death

In the wind after rain he walked the platform of a new station. The sky was still dim. Beyond the platform, three or four railway workers were all raising and lowering their picks in unison, singing something in high voices.

The wind after rain tore away both the workers' song and his feelings. Without even lighting his cigarette, he felt a suffering close to joy, with the telegram reading "MASTER CRITICAL" thrust into the pocket of his coat...

Then from behind the pines on the opposite hill, the six o'clock inbound train began to approach in a wavering line, trailing thin smoke.

14. Marriage

The day after he married, he scolded his wife: "It won't do to waste money like this from now on." Yet the scolding was less his than his aunt's, who had told him to say it. His wife apologized not only to him, of course, but to his aunt as well, with the pot of yellow daffodils she had bought for him set before her...

15. They

They lived peacefully in the shade of broad banana leaves. Their house stood in a seaside town more than a full hour from Tokyo by train.

16. Pillow

Using skepticism scented with rose leaves as his pillow, he lay reading Anatole France. Yet he never noticed that within that pillow there was also a faun.

17. Butterfly

In a wind full of the smell of seaweed, a single butterfly fluttered. For one brief instant he felt its wings touch his dry lips. Yet the powder those wings had pressed onto them still glittered there years later.

18. Moon

Halfway up the stairs of a hotel, he happened to meet her. Her face looked as though it were bathed in moonlight even in broad day. Watching her go, though they were complete strangers, he felt a loneliness he had never known before...

19. Artificial Wings

From Anatole France he moved on to the philosophers of the eighteenth century. But he did not draw near to Rousseau. Perhaps that was because one side of himself, the side easily driven by passion, already resembled Rousseau too much. Instead he drew near to the philosopher of Candide, closer to another side of himself, the side rich in cool reason.

By the age of twenty-nine life had become no brighter for him at all. Yet Voltaire supplied him with artificial wings.

He spread these artificial wings and rose lightly into the sky. At the same time, the joys and sorrows of life, lit by the light of reason, sank beneath his eyes. Scattering irony and smiles over the shabby towns below, he climbed straight toward the sun through an unobstructed sky, as though forgetting the ancient Greek who had once flown with just such artificial wings, only to have them burned by the sun and fall at last into the sea...

20. Machine

He and his wife came to live under the same roof as his foster parents. This was because he was about to join a newspaper company. He trusted in a single contract written on yellow paper. But later, when he looked at it again, the contract bound only him, while the newspaper company assumed no obligation at all.

21. The Madman's Daughter

Two rickshaws sped along a deserted country road beneath a cloudy sky. That the road led toward the sea was obvious from the salt wind blowing in. Riding in the rear rickshaw, he wondered at his own total lack of interest in this rendezvous, while asking himself what it was that had brought him here. It was certainly not love. If it was not love, then to avoid answering, he could only think, "At any rate, we are equals."

In the front rickshaw rode the daughter of a madman. Moreover, her younger sister had killed herself out of jealousy.

"There's nothing to be done now."

By then he already felt a kind of hatred toward this madman's daughter, this woman in whom only animal instinct seemed strong.

In the meantime the two rickshaws passed outside a fish-smelling graveyard. Within a brushwood fence encrusted with oyster shells, a number of stone monuments stood darkening. Gazing at the sea glimmering faintly beyond them, he suddenly began to despise her husband, the husband who had failed to take hold of her heart...

22. A Certain Painter

It was an illustration in a magazine. But the ink painting of a rooster showed a striking individuality. He asked a friend about the artist.

About a week later, the painter came to visit him. It was one of the most remarkable events of his life. In this painter he discovered a poetry no one else knew. More than that, he discovered his own soul, one he himself had never known.

On a chilly autumn evening, the sight of a single stalk of millet suddenly made him think of this painter. The tall millet, trailing its rough leaves, exposed delicate roots like nerves from the mound of earth. It was, of course, also a self-portrait of his own vulnerable self. Yet discoveries like that only made him melancholy.

"Too late now. But when the moment comes..."

23. She

Twilight was falling in front of a certain square. Slightly feverish, he walked across it. Several large buildings glittered with lighted windows against the faintly silver-clear sky.

He stopped by the roadside and decided to wait for her. After about five minutes she came toward him, looking somehow worn. But when she saw his face, she smiled and said, "I'm tired." They walked side by side across the dim square. It was the first time they had done so. To be with her, he felt he could cast anything away.

After they got into the car, she gazed fixedly at his face and said, "You won't regret this?" He answered firmly, "I won't regret it." Pressing his hand, she said, "I won't regret it either, but..." Even at such a moment, her face looked as though it were in moonlight.

24. Childbirth

Standing beside the sliding door, he looked down as a midwife in a white gown washed the newborn baby. Every time the soap stung its eyes, the child made a pitiful little grimace. And it kept crying in a high voice. Smelling the infant's odor, something close to the smell of a baby mouse, he could not help thinking, with deep feeling: Why has this one too been born? Into this world overflowing with the suffering of samsara. And why is it burdened with the fate of having someone like me for a father?

Yet this was the first son his wife had given birth to.

25. Strindberg

Standing in the doorway of his room, he watched several grimy Chinese men playing mahjong in the moonlight, where pomegranate blossoms had opened. Then he went back inside and began reading Inferno beneath a low lamp. But before he had read even two pages, a bitter smile escaped him. Strindberg too, in the letters he sent to the countess who was also his lover, had written things not very different from his own...

26. Antiquity

The Buddhas, heavenly beings, horses, and lotus flowers with their colors peeling away almost overwhelmed him. Looking up at them, he forgot everything, even his good fortune in having escaped the madman's daughter...

27. Spartan Training

He was walking with a friend through a back street. Then a hooded rickshaw came straight toward them. And, unexpectedly, the woman riding in it was the very woman from the night before. Her face looked as though it were bathed in moonlight even in daytime. In front of his friend, of course, they did not so much as exchange greetings.

"She's beautiful."

His friend said this. Still gazing at the spring mountain at the end of the street, he answered without the slightest hesitation:

"Yes, very beautiful."

28. Murder

The country road was thick with the smell of cow dung in the sunlight. Wiping sweat away, he climbed the uphill road on tiptoe. On either side, ripened wheat gave off a fragrant scent.

"Kill him, kill him..."

At some point he found himself repeating these words under his breath. Whom? That was perfectly clear to him. He was thinking of a crew-cut man who seemed utterly servile.

Then beyond the yellowing wheat, a Roman Catholic church suddenly showed its dome...

29. Form

It was an iron kettle. Somehow this kettle with its ribbed lines had taught him the beauty of form.

30. Rain

He was talking with her about one thing and another on a large bed. Outside the bedroom window it was raining. The sea hibiscus flowers seemed somehow to be rotting away in the rain. Her face still looked as though it were in moonlight. Yet talking with her was not without its tedium for him. Lying on his stomach, he quietly lit a cigarette and remembered that it had been seven years now that he had spent his days with her.

"Do I love this woman?"

He asked himself that question. The answer was unexpected even to the self that had kept watch over him.

"I still love her."

31. The Great Earthquake

It was something close to the smell of overripe apricots. Walking through the burned ruins, he caught this faint smell and found himself thinking that the odor of corpses rotting under the blazing sun was not as bad as one might expect. But when he stood before a pond heaped with bodies, he discovered that the word ghastly was in no sensory sense an exaggeration. What moved him most was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. Gazing at it, he felt something close to envy. "Those whom the gods love die young": he even remembered such words as these. Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their homes in the fire. Yet his sister's husband was at that time under suspended sentence for perjury...

"It would be better if everyone just died."

Standing amid the ruins, he could not help thinking this from the depths of his heart.

32. Quarrel

He got into a grappling fight with his half-brother. His brother was surely vulnerable to pressure because of him. At the same time, he too had surely lost his freedom because of his brother. His relatives kept telling his brother, "Get used to him." But to him that was no different from having his hands and feet tied. Wrestling together, they finally tumbled onto the veranda. In the garden beyond stood a crape myrtle. He still remembers it, loaded with red-glinting blossoms beneath a sky heavy with rain.

33. Hero

From a window in Voltaire's house he found himself gazing up at a high mountain. Not even the shadow of a vulture could be seen above the mountain hung with glaciers. But a short Russian kept doggedly climbing the mountain path.

That night, in Voltaire's house as well, he wrote this kind of tendentious poem beneath a bright lamp, remembering the figure of the Russian climbing that mountain path...

You, who kept the Ten Commandments more than anyone,

are the one who broke them more than anyone.

You, who loved the people more than anyone,

are the one who despised the people more than anyone.

You, who blazed with ideals more than anyone,

are the one who knew reality more than anyone.

You are the greatest hero born of our East.

It was an electric locomotive that smelled of grass and flowers. ---

34. Color

By the time he was thirty, he had somehow come to love a vacant lot. There was nothing there but moss, with bits of brick and tile scattered over it. Yet to his eyes it was no different from a landscape by Cezanne.

All at once he remembered the passion he had felt seven or eight years before. At the same time, he realized that seven or eight years before he had not yet known color.

35. A Clown Doll

He meant to live intensely, so that whenever death came he would have no regrets. Yet, just as before, he went on living with excessive deference toward his foster parents and his aunt. That produced both light and shadow in his life. Seeing a clown doll standing in the window of a Western-style clothing shop, he found himself thinking how very close he too was to being a clown doll. But his self outside consciousness, so to speak his second self, had long since already worked that feeling into a certain short story.

36. Weariness

He was walking through a field of pampas grass with a university student.

"You young people still have a strong appetite for life, I suppose?"

"Yes, though surely even you..."

"The thing is, I don't have it anymore. I still have the desire to create, but not the desire to live."

It was the truth. Without noticing when it had happened, he had in fact lost interest in life.

"But the desire to create is still a kind of desire to live, isn't it?"

He gave no answer. Before long, above the reddish plumes of the grass, a volcano came clearly into view. Toward this volcano he felt something close to envy. But he himself did not know why. ...

37. The Passing Traveler

He encountered a woman who could contend with him even in talent and intellect. But by writing lyric poems such as "The Passing Traveler," he barely escaped the crisis. It felt painfully like shaking down glittering snow frozen onto a tree trunk.

A sedge hat, whirled upon the wind,

must have fallen somewhere on the road.

How could my own name be worth regret?

The only name I would regret is yours.

38. Revenge

It was the terrace of a hotel among budding trees. Sitting there painting, he let a boy play nearby, the only son of the madwoman's daughter, from whom he had broken off relations seven years before.

The madwoman's daughter lit a cigarette and watched them play. With a heavy heart, he went on drawing trains and airplanes. Fortunately, the boy was not his child. But hearing him call him "uncle" was more painful than anything.

After the boy had gone off somewhere, the madwoman's daughter, smoking her cigarette, spoke to him in a wheedling tone.

"Doesn't he look like you?"

"He does not. To begin with..."

"But there's such a thing as prenatal influence, isn't there?"

In silence he turned his eyes away. Yet at the bottom of his heart, it was not as though he felt no savage urge to strangle her as she was. ...

39. Mirror

He was talking with a friend in a corner of a cafe. His friend ate a baked apple and chatted about the cold weather lately. In the midst of such talk, he suddenly began to feel a contradiction.

"You're still unmarried, aren't you?"

"No, I'm getting married next month."

Without thinking, he fell silent. The mirror set into the cafe wall reflected countless images of himself, cold and somehow threatening. ...

40. Dialogue

Why do you attack the social system of the modern age?

Because I see the evils produced by capitalism.

Evils? I thought you did not recognize any distinction between good and evil. Then what about your own life?

Thus he held a dialogue with an angel. An angel, moreover, wearing a silk hat no one could possibly be ashamed of. ...

41. Illness

He began to suffer from insomnia. More than that, his physical strength also started to fail. Several doctors each gave two or three diagnoses for his condition: hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue...

But he himself knew the source of his illness. It was the feeling of being ashamed of himself, together with fear of them. Of them, that is, of the society he despised.

One snow-clouded afternoon, he sat in a corner of a cafe with a lit cigar between his teeth, listening to music drifting from the gramophone across from him. It was music that penetrated him strangely deeply. He waited for it to finish, then got up and went over to inspect the record label.

Magic Flute -- Mozart

In an instant he understood. Mozart too, who had broken the Ten Commandments, must surely have suffered. Yet surely not like him... Keeping his head bowed, he quietly returned to his table.

42. The Laughter of the Gods

At thirty-five, he was walking through a pine grove filled with spring sunlight, remembering words he himself had written two or three years before: "The gods, unfortunately, cannot commit suicide as we can." ...

43. Night

Night pressed in once more. Beneath the dim light, the stormy sea kept flinging up spray. Under such a sky he married his wife for the second time. For them it was a joy. But at the same time it was also suffering. Their three children stood with them, watching the lightning far out at sea. His wife held one child in her arms and seemed to be holding back tears.

"You can see a ship over there, can't you?"

"Yes."

"A ship with its mast broken in two."

44. Death

Finding himself alone in bed, he tried to hang himself by looping his sash over the window bars. But when he put his neck into the sash, he was suddenly overcome by fear of death. It was not that he feared the pain of the final moment itself. The second time, he took out his pocket watch and decided to try hanging himself experimentally. After a brief spell of suffering, everything began to grow dim. If he had only gotten past that point, he would no doubt have entered death. Looking at the watch, he found that he had felt pain for a minute and twenty-odd seconds. Outside the window bars it was pitch dark. Yet from within that darkness came the harsh crowing of a rooster.

45. Divan

The Divan once again tried to give his heart new strength. It was the "Oriental Goethe" of whom he had been unaware. Seeing Goethe standing calmly beyond all good and evil, he felt an envy bordering on despair. To his eyes, the poet Goethe was greater even than the poet Christ. In that poet's heart, besides the Acropolis and Golgotha, there also bloomed the roses of Arabia. If only he had possessed enough strength to follow in this poet's footsteps even a little -- when he finished reading the Divan, and after the terrible emotion had subsided, he could not help looking down with contempt on himself, born as a life-bound eunuch.

46.

The suicide of his sister's husband suddenly crushed him. Now he had to look after his sister's family as well. At least to him, his future was as dim as the close of day. Feeling something close to a sneer at his own spiritual bankruptcy, for he knew every one of his vices and weaknesses, he went on reading all sorts of books as before. Yet even Rousseau's Confessions overflowed with heroic spirit. As for The New Life in particular, he had never encountered a more cunning hypocrite than its hero. But Francois Villon alone penetrated his heart. In several of his poems he discovered a "beautiful male."

The figure of Villon awaiting execution by hanging appeared even in his dreams. Again and again he tried to sink to the very bottom of life as Villon had done. But his circumstances and his bodily energy would not allow such a thing. He gradually declined, just like the standing tree Swift had once seen, withering first from the topmost branches. ...

47. Playing with Fire

She had a radiant face. It was like the morning sun shining on thin ice. He felt affection for her. But he was not in love. More than that, he had not laid a single finger on her body.

"I hear you want to die."

"Yes. No, rather than wanting to die, I'm tired of living."

From this exchange they ended by promising to die together.

"A platonic suicide, then."

"A double platonic suicide."

He could not help finding it strange how calm he himself remained.

48. Death

He did not die with her. Yet the fact that he had still not laid a single finger on her body gave him a certain satisfaction. She went on talking with him from time to time as if nothing had happened. More than that, she handed him a bottle of the potassium cyanide she possessed and said, "As long as we have this, we'll both feel stronger, won't we?"

In fact, it surely did strengthen his heart. Sitting alone in a wicker chair, gazing at the young leaves of the chinquapin tree, he found himself again and again unable to stop thinking of the peace death would bring him.

49. The Stuffed Swan

With the last of his strength, he tried to write his autobiography. But it proved unexpectedly difficult for him. That was because his pride, his skepticism, and his calculating regard for advantage still remained. He could not help despising himself for that. Yet at the same time he also could not help thinking, "Strip off one layer and everyone is the same." The title Poetry and Truth often seemed to him the proper title for every autobiography. And he clearly understood that literary works do not necessarily move anyone. What his own works appealed to could not exist outside people like himself, people who had lived lives close to his own. Such a feeling was also at work in him. For that reason he decided to write his own "Poetry and Truth" in brief.

After finishing A Fool's Life, he happened to notice a stuffed swan in an antique shop. It stood there with its neck raised, but even its yellowing feathers had been eaten by moths. Thinking of his own life, he felt tears and a sneer welling up together. Before him there remained only madness or suicide. Walking all alone through the streets at dusk, he resolved to wait quietly for the fate that would come to destroy him.

50. Prisoner

One of his friends went mad. He had always felt a certain closeness to this friend. That was because, for him, the friend's loneliness, the loneliness beneath his light, easy mask, was something he understood with exceptional intimacy. After the friend lost his mind, he visited him several times.

"You and I are possessed by evil spirits, aren't we? By the evil spirits of the fin de siecle."

Lowering his voice, the friend said things like this to him. But two or three days later, on his way to a hot-spring inn, he was even eating roses, so they said. After the friend was hospitalized, he remembered the terracotta bust he had once given him. It was a bust of the author of The Inspector General, whom the friend had loved. Remembering that Gogol too had died mad, he could not help feeling there was some force governing them all.

Utterly worn out, he happened to read Radiguet's dying words and once again felt the laughter of the gods. The words were: "God's soldiers are coming to seize me." He tried to fight against his superstition and his sentimentalism. But any such struggle was physically impossible for him. The "evil spirits of the fin de siecle" really were tormenting him. He envied the people of the Middle Ages who had God's power to rely on. But to believe in God, to believe in God's love, was altogether impossible for him. Even the God that Cocteau believed in.

51. Defeat

Even the hand with which he held his pen began to tremble. More than that, saliva began to drip from his mouth. His head was never clear except after waking from a dose of 0.8 grams of Veronal. And even then it remained clear for only half an hour or an hour at most. He lived from day to day in nothing but dimness, leaning, as it were, on a thin sword with its blade chipped away.

(June 1927, posthumous manuscript)