It is blue, it is pink, it is fresh, it is as light and luminous as a dream. It must be fine to live there. You approach, you arrive. There is nothing. Sand, pebbles, hills as dismal as walls. There is nothing else. And above this sand, these pebbles, these hills, there is a gray, opaque, heavy sky, - a sky which kills the day, and whose light weeps dirty tears. There is nothing, - nothing of that which one is looking for. Moreover, I do not know what I am looking for; and neither do I know who I am.
A domestic is not a normal being, a social being. He is an incongruous personage, made up of pieces and bits that cannot fit into one another, that can only lie next one another. He is some- thing worse, - a monstrous human hybrid. He is no longer of the people, whence he came; neither is he of the bourgeoisie, among whom he lives and toward whom he tends. He has lost the generous blood and the artless strength of the people that he has denied, and has gained the shameful vices of the bourgeoisie, without having succeeded in acquiring the means of satisfying them, - the vile sentiments, the cowardly fears, the criminal appetites, without the setting, and consequently without the excuse, of wealth. With a soiled soul, he traverses this respectable bourgeois world, and, simply from having breathed the mortal odor that rises from these putrid sinks, he loses forever the
