From my ancestors the Gauls I have pale blue eyes, a narrow brain, 
and awkwardness in competition. I think my clothes are as barbaric as
theirs. But I don't butter my hair.

The Gauls were the most stupid hide-flayers and hay-burners of their 
time.

From them I inherit: idolatry, and love of sacrelige-- oh, all sorts 
of vice; anger, lechery-- terrific stuff, lechery-- lying, above all, 
and laziness.

I have a horror of all trades and crafts. Bosses and workers, all of 
them peasants, and common. The hand that holds the pen is as good as 
the one that holds the plow. (What a century for hands!) I'll never 
learn to use my hands. And then, domesticity goes too far. The 
propriety of beggary shames me. Criminals are as disgusting as men 
without balls; I'm intact, and I don't care.

But who has made my tongue so treacherous, that until now it has 
counseled and kept me in idleness? I have not used even my body to 
get along. Out-idling the sleepy toad, I have lived everywhere. 
There's not one family in Europe that I don't know. Families, I mean,
like mine, who owe their existence to the Declaration of the Rights 
of Man. I have known each family's eldest son!

If only I had a link to some point in the history of France!

But instead, nothing.

I am well aware that I have always been of an inferior race. 
I cannot understand revolt. My race has never risen, except to 
plunder; to devour like wolves a beast they did not kill.

I remember the history of France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church. 
I would have gone, a village serf, crusading to the Holy Land; my 
head is full of roads in the Swabian plains, of the sight of
Byzantium, of the ramparts of Jerusalem; the cult of Mary, the pitiful 
thought of Christ crucified, turns in my head with a thousand profane 
enchantments-- I sit like a leper among broken pots and nettles,
at the foot of a wall eaten away by the sun. --And later, a wandering
mercenary, I would have bivouacked under German nighttimes.

Ah! one thing more: I dance the Sabbath in a scarlet clearing, with 
old women and children.

I don't remember much beyond this land, and Christianity. I will see 
myself forever in its past. But always alone, without a family; what 
language, in fact, did I used to speak? I never see myself in the
councils of Christ; nor in the councils of the Lords, Christ's 
representatives. What was I in the century past? I only find myself 
today. The vagabonds, the hazy wars are gone. The inferior race has
swept over all-- the People (as they put it), Reason; Nation and 
Science.

Ah, Science! Everything is taken from the past. For the body and the 
soul-- the last sacrament-- we have Medicine and Philosophy, 
household remedies and folk songs rearrainged. And royal 
entertainments, and games that kings forbid. Geography, Cosmography, 
Mechanics, Chemistry!...

Science, the new nobility! Progress! The world moves!... And why 
shouldn't it?

We have visions of numbers. We are moving toward the Spirit. What I 
say is oracular and absolutely right. I understand... and since I 
cannot express myself except in pagan terms, I would rather keep 
quiet.

Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is at hand... why does Christ not 
help me, and grant my soul nobility and freedom? Ah, but the Gospel 
belongs to the past! The Gospel. The Gospel...

I wait gluttinously for God. I have been of an inferior race for 
ever and ever.

And now I am on the beaches of Brittany.... Let cities light their 
lamps in the evening; my daytime is done, I am leaving Europe. The 
air of the sea will burn my lungs; lost climates will turn my skin to
leather. To swim, to pulverize grass, to hunt, above all to smoke; 
to drink strong drinks, as strong as molten ore, as did those dear 
ancestors around their fires.

I will come back with limbs of iron, with dark skin, and angry eyes; 
in this mask, they will think I belong to a strong race. I will have 
gold; I will be brutal and indolent. Women nurse these ferocious
invalids come back from the tropics. I will become involved in 
politics. Saved. 

Now I am accursed, I detest my native land. The best thing is a
drunken sleep, stretched out on some strip of shore.

But no one leaves. Let us set out once more on our native roads, 
burdened with my vice-- that vice that since the age of reason has 
driven roots of suffering into my side-- that towers to heaven, beats
me, hurls me down, drags me on.

Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All's said. Carry no more my 
loathing and treacheries before the world. 

Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger.

Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? 
What hearts shall I break?
What lie maintain? Through what blood wade?

Better to keep away from justice. A hard life, outright stupor-- 
with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and 
suffocate. No old age this way-- no danger: terror is very un-French.

--Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward 
perfection.

Oh, my self-denial, my marvelous Charity, my Selfless love! And still
here below!

De profundis, Dominie... what an ass I am!

When I was still a little child, I admired the hardened convict on 
whom the prison door will always close; I used to visit the bars and 
the rented rooms his presence had consecrated; I saw with his eyes 
the blue sky and the flower-filled work of the fields; I followed his 
fatal scent through city streets. He had more strength than the 
saints, more sense than any  explorer-- and he, he alone! was
witness to his glory and his rightness.

Along the open road on winter nights, homeless, cold, and hungry, 
one voice gripped my frozen heart: "Weakness or strength: you exist, 
that is strength.... You don't know where you are going or why you 
are going; go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you,
any more than if you were a corpse." In the morning my eyes were so 
vacant and my face so dead that the people I met may not even have 
seen me.

In cities, mud went suddenly red and black, like a mirror when a lamp
in the next room moves, like treasure in the forest! Good luck, I 
cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke rise to heaven, and
left and right all wealth exploded like a billion thunderbolts.

But orgies and the companionship of women were impossible for me. 
Not even a friend. I saw myself before an angry mob, facing a firing 
squad, weeping out sorrows they could not understand, and pardoning-- 
like Joan of Arc!-- "Priests, professors and doctors, you are mistaken
in delivering me into the hands of the law. I have never been one of 
you; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race that sang on 
the scaffold; I do not understand your laws; I have no moral sense; I
am a brute; you are making a mistake...."

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But 
I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all 
of you. Businessman, you're a nigger; judge, you're a nigger;
general, you're a nigger; emperor, old scratch-head, you're a nigger:
you've drunk a liquor no one taxes, from Satan's still. This nation 
is inspired by fever and cancer. Invalids and old men are so
respectable that they ask to be boiled. The best thing is to quit 
this continent where madness prowls, out to supply hostages for these 
wretches. I will enter the true kingdom of the sons of Ham.

Do I understand nature? Do I understand myself? No more words! I 
shroud dead men in my stomach.... Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance! 
I can't even imagine the hour when the white men land, and I will 
fall into nothingness.

Thirst and hunger, shouts, dance, dance, dance!

The white men are landing! Cannons! Now we must be baptized, get 
dressed, and go to work.

My heart has been stabbed by grace. Ah! I hadn't thought this would 
happen.

But I haven't done anything wrong. My days will be easy, and I will 
be spared repentance. I will not have had the torments of the soul 
half-dead to the Good, where austure light rises again like funeral
candles. The fate of a first-born son, a premature coffin covered 
with shining tears. No doubt, perversion is stupid, vice is stupid; 
rottenness must always be cast away. But the clock must learn to
strike more than hours of pure pain! Am I to be carried away like a 
child, to play in paradise, forgetting all this misery?

Quick! Are there any other lives? Sleep for the rich is impossible. 
Wealth has always lived openly. Divine love alone confers the keys of 
knowledge. I see that nature is only a show of kindness. Farewell 
chimeras, ideals and errors.

The reasonable song of angels rises from the rescue ship: it is 
divine love. Two loves! I may die of earthly love, die of devotion. 
I have left behind creatures whose grief will grow at my going. You
choose me from among the castaways; aren't those who remain my 
friends?

Save them!

I am reborn in reason. The world is good. I will bless life. 
I will love my brothers. There are no longer childhood promises. Nor 
the hope of escaping old age and death. God is my strength, and I
praise God.

Boredom is no longer my love. Rage, perversion, madness, whose every 
impulse and disaster I know-- my burden is set down entire. Let us 
appraise with clear heads the extent of my innocence. I am no longer 
able to ask for the consolation of a beating. I don't imagine I'm off 
on a honeymoon with Jesus Christ as my father-in-law.

I am no prisoner of my own reason. I have said: God. I want freedom, 
within salvation: how shall I go about it? A taste for frivolity has 
left me. No further need for divine love or for devotion to duty. I
do not regret the age of emotion and feeling. To each his own reason, 
contempt, Charity: I keep my place at the top of the angelic ladder 
of good sense.

As for settled happiness, domestic or not... no, I can't. I am too 
dissipated, too weak. Work makes life blossom, an old idea, not mine; 
my life doesn't weigh enough, it drifts off and floats far beyond
action, that third pole of the world.

What an old maid I'm turning into, to lack the courage to love death!

If only God would grant me that celestial calm, etherial calm, and 
prayer-- like the saints of old. --The Saints! They were strong! 
Anchorites, artists of a kind we no longer need....

Does this farce have no end? My innocence is enough to make me cry. 
Life is the farce we all must play.

Stop it! This is your punishment.... Forward march!

Ah! my lungs burn, my temples roar! Night rolls in my eyes, beneath 
this sun! My heart... my arms and legs....

Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! the others go on ahead... 
tools, weapons... give me time!

Fire! Fire at me! Here! or I'll give myself up! --Cowards! --I'll 
kill myself! I'll throw myself beneath the horses' hooves!

Ah!...

--I'll get used to it.

That would be the French way, the path of honor!