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ephemerally touches the dirty white wisps of fog, which float in the air above the construction-yards, it flows into my room, all gold, all pale, it spreads four dull, false reflections on my table.
    My pipe is daubed with a golden varnish which first catches the eye by its bright appearance; you look at it and the varnish melts, nothing is left but a great dull streak on a piece of wood. Everything is like that, everything, even my hands. When the sun begins shining like that the best thing to do is go to bed. Only I slept like a log last night, and I am not sleepy.
    I liked yesterday's sky so much, a narrow sky, black with rain, pushing against the windows like a ridiculous, touching face. This sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word. The four cafes on the Boulevard Victor-Noir, shining in the night, side by side, and which are much more than cafesùaquariums, ships, stars or great white eyes-have lost their ambiguous charm.
    A perfect day to turn back to one's self: these cold clarities which the sun projects like a judgment shorn of pity, over all creaturesùenter through my eyes; I am illuminated within by a diminishing light. I am sure that fifteen minutes would be enough to reach supreme self-contempt. No thank you, I want none of that. Neither shall I re-read what I wrote yesterday on Rollebon's stay in St. Petersburg. I stay seated, my arms hanging, or write a few words, without courage: I yawn, I wait for night to come. When it is dark, the objects and I will come out of limbo.
    14
    Did KolJebon, or did he not, participate in the assassination of Paul I? That is the question for today: I am that far and can't go on without deciding.
    According to Tcherkoff, he was paid by Count Pahlen. Most of the other conspirators, Tcherkoff says, were content with deposing and imprisoning the Czar. In fact, Alexander seems to have been a partisan of that solution. But Pahlen, it was alleged, wanted to do away with Paul completely, and M. de Rollebon was charged with persuading the individual conspirators to the assassination.
    "He visited each one of them and, with an incomparable power, mimed the scene which was to take place. Thus he caused to be born or developed in them a madness for murder."
    But I suspect Tcherkoff. He is not a reasonable witness, he is a half-mad, sadistic magician: he turns everything into the demoniacal. I cannot see M. de Rollebon in this melodramatic role or as mimic of the assassination scene! Never on your life! He is cold, not carried away: he exposes nothing, he insinuates, and his method, pale and colourless, can succeed only with men of his own level, intriguers accessible to reason, politicians.
    "Adhemar de Rollebon," writes Mme de Charrieres, "painted nothing with words, made no gestures, never altered the tone of his voice. He kept his eyes half-closed and one could barely make out, between his lashes, the lowest rim of his grey iris. It has only been within the past few years that I dare confess he bored me beyond all possible limits. He spoke a little in the way Abbú Mably used to write."
    And this is the man who, by his talent for mimicry? . . . But then how was he able to charm women? Then there is this curious story Segur reports and which seems true to me.
    "In 1787, at an inn near Moulins, an old man was dying, a friend of Diderot, trained by the philosophers. The priests of the neighbourhood were nonplussed: they had tried everything in vain; the good man would have no last rites, he was a pantheist. M. de Rollebon, who was passing by and who believed in nothing, bet the Cure of Moulins that he would need less than two hours to bring the sick man back to Christian sentiments. The Cure took