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without success-but also that my self-expression was taking a perfect and complete form. In other words, I had the precise sensation, founded, it seemed to me, on my experience as a man of letters, that I was writing a masterpiece.
     
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    A FTER working all the morning, I spent the afternoon in the usual way, being careful only to avoid sudden emotions and shocks and distractions; though in appearance far removed from literature, I was in reality, in the dark depths of my mind, gloating with affectionate delight over what I had written during the morning and what I intended to write next day. Later, at bed-time, I said good night to my wife on the landing between the doors of our two rooms, and went straight to bed. I slept with a feeling of confidence I had never known, conscious, as it were, that I was accumulating the fresh energies that I would expend upon my work next morning. On awaking I felt ready and well-disposed, light and vigorous, my head filled with ideas which had sprung up there during sleep like grass in a meadow during a night of rain. I sat down at my desk, hesitated only one minute, and then my pen, as if moved by an independent will, would start running over the sheets of paper, from one word to another, from one line to the next, as though between my mind and the ceaselessly unfolding arabesque of ink upon paper, there were neither interruptions of continuity nor any difference in material. I had inside my head a large and inexhaustible reel of thread and, by my act of writing, all I did was to pull and unwind this thread, arranging it on the sheets of paper in the elegant black patterns of handwriting; and in this reel of thread there were no knots or gaps; and it went round and round in my head as I unwound it; and I had the feeling that, the more I unwound it, the more there was to unwind. As I have already said, I would write from ten to twelve pages, urging myself to the point of physical exhaustion, fearful above all that this flood of activity might, for some mysterious reason, suddenly decrease or even dry up altogether. At last, when I could do no more, I would rise from my desk with tottering legs and a feeling of giddiness in my head, walk over to a mirror and look at myself. There in the mirror I could see, not one but two, or even three, images of myself slowly doubling and redoubling as they mingled and criss-crossed each other. A long and careful toilet would put me right again, although, as I have said, I remained dazed and stunned all the rest of the day.
    Later, at table, I ate with a hearty, automatic appetite, feeling, almost, that I was not a human being at all but an empty machine that required to be filled up again with fuel after several hours of fierce efficiency. As I ate I laughed and joked and even made puns - quite a new thing for me, who am usually serious and thoughtful. As always happens with me when, for some reason or other, I yield to enthusiasm, there was a sort of indiscreet quality, almost an immodesty, in this exuberance of mine: I was aware of it, but whereas once I should have been ashamed of myself for giving way to it, I was now almost pleased with myself for displaying it. There I was, sitting at table, facing my wife, in the act of eating; but really I was not there at all. The best part of me had remained in my study upstairs, at the writing table, pen in hand. The rest of the day passed in the same atmosphere of gaiety - the rather disconnected, extravagant gaiety of a drunkard.
    Had I been less enthusiastic, less intoxicated with good fortune, I might perhaps have recognized in the productiveness of those days the presence of that same quality of goodwill that I sometimes thought I could detect in my wife's attitude towards me. To express it differently, and without inferring that the story I was in process of writing was not the masterpiece I believed it to be, the thought might have entered my head that all this was too good to be true. Perfection is not