I + 

My God! My God! So at last I am going to write down what has happened to me. But shall I be able to? Shall I dare?⁠—so fantastic, so inexplicable, so incomprehensible, so crazy is it. + 

If I were not certain of what I had seen, certain that there has been in my reasoning no faulty link, no error in my investigations, no lacuna in the relentless sequence of my observations, I would have believed myself to be merely the victim of an hallucination, the sport of a strange vision. After all, who knows? + 

I am today in a private asylum; but I entered it voluntarily, urged thereto by prudence, and fear. Only one living creature knows my story. The doctor here. I am going to write it. I hardly know why. To rid myself of it, for it fills my thoughts like an unendurable nightmare. + 

Here it is: + 

I have always been a recluse, a dreamer, a sort of detached philosopher, full of kindly feeling, content with little, with no bitterness against men or resentment against heaven. I lived alone, all my life, because of a sort of uneasiness that the presence of other people induces in me! How can I explain it? I could not explain it. I don’t refuse to see people, to talk to them, to dine with friends, but when I have endured their nearness for some time, even those with whom I am most intimate, they weary me, exhaust me, get on my nerves, and I suffer an increasing exasperating longing to see them go or to go myself, to be alone. + 

This longing is more than a desire, it is an irresistible necessity. And if I had to endure the continued presence of the people in whose company I was, if I were compelled, not to listen but to go on for any length of time hearing their conversation, some accident would certainly befall me. What? Ah, who knows? Perhaps merely a fainting fit? Yes, probably that! + 

I have such a passion for solitude that I cannot even endure the nearness of other people sleeping under my roof: I cannot live in Paris because of the indefinable distress I feel there. I die spiritually, and I am as tortured in my body and my nerves by the vast crowd that swarms and lives round me, even when it sleeps. Oh, the slumber of other people is more unendurable than their speech! And I can never rest when at the other side of the wall I am aware of lives held in suspense by these regular eclipses of consciousness. + 

Why am I so made? Who knows? The cause is perhaps quite simple. I am quickly wearied of all that exists outside myself. And there are many people similarly constituted. + 

There are two races dwelling on earth. Those who need other people, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by other people, and who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by other people, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace. + 

In effect, this is a usual psychical phenomenon. Some people are made to live an outward life, others to live within themselves. I myself have a short and quickly exhausted power of attention to the outside world, and as soon as it has reached its limit, I suffer in my whole body and my whole mind an intolerable distress. + 

The result is that I attach myself, that I attached myself strongly to inanimate things that assume for me the importance of living creatures, and that my house has become, had become a world where I lived a solitary and active life, surrounded by things, furniture, intimate trifles, as sympathetic to my eyes as faces. I had filled it with them little by little. I had decorated it so, and I felt myself housed, content, satisfied, as happy as in the arms of a loving woman whose familiar caress was become a calm and pleasant need. + 

I had had this house built in a beautiful garden which shut it off from the roads, and at the gate of a town where I could, when occasion arose, find the social resources to which, at odd moments, I felt impelled. All my servants slept in a distant building at the end of the kitchen garden, which was surrounded by a great wall. The sombre folding down of the nights, in the silence of my habitation, lost, hidden, drowned under the leaves of great trees, was so tranquillising, so pleasant to me, that every evening I delayed going to bed for several hours, to enjoy it the longer. + 

That particular day, Sigurd had been played at the local theatre. It was the first time I had heard this beautiful fairy-like musical drama, and it had given me the greatest pleasure. + 

I walked home, at a brisk pace, my head full of sounding rhythms, my eyes filled with visions of loveliness. It was dark, dark, so unfathomably dark that I could hardly make out the high road and several times almost went headlong into the ditch. From the toll gate to my house is about two-thirds of a mile, perhaps a little more, maybe about twenty minutes’ slow walking. It was one o’clock in the morning, one or half past; the sky was growing faintly light in front of me, and a slip of a moon rose, the wan slip of the moon’s last quarter. The crescent moon of the first quarter, that rises at four or five o’clock in the evening, is brilliant, gay, gleaming like silver, but the moon that rises after midnight is tawny, sad and sinister: it is a real Witches’ Sabbath of a moon. Every walker by night must have made this observation. The moon of the first quarter, be it thin as a thread, sends out a small joyous light that fills the heart with gladness and flings clear shadows over the earth; the moon of the last quarter scarcely spreads a dying light, so wan that it hardly casts any shadow at all. + 

I saw from some way off the sombre mass of my garden, and, sprung from I know not where, there came to me a certain uneasiness at the idea of entering it. I slackened my step. It was very mild. The heavy weight of trees wore the aspect of a tomb where my house was buried. + 

I opened my gateway and made my way down the long avenue of sycamore-trees, which led to the house, arched and vaulted overhead like a high tunnel, crossing shadowy groves and winding round lawns where under the paling shadows clumps of flowers jewelled the ground with oval stains of indeterminate hues. + 

As I approached the house, a strange uneasiness took possession of me. I halted. There was no sound. There was not a breath of air in the leaves. “What’s the matter with me?” I thought. For ten years I had entered in like manner without feeling the faintest shadow of disquietude. I was not afraid. I have never been afraid at night. The sight of a man, a marauder, a thief, would have filled me with fury, and I would have leaped on him without a moment’s hesitation. I was armed, moreover. I had my revolver. But I did not touch it, for I wished to master this sense of terror that was stirring in me. + 

What was it? A presentiment? The mysterious presentiment that takes possession of one’s senses when they are on the verge of seeing the inexplicable? Perhaps? Who knows? + 

With every step I advanced, I felt my skin creep, and when I was standing under the wall of my vast house, with its closed shutters, I felt the need of waiting a few moments before opening the door and going inside. So I sat down on a bench under the windows of my drawing room. I remained there, a little shaken, my head leaning against the wall, my eyes open on the shadows of the trees. During these first instants, I noticed nothing unusual round me. I felt a sort of droning sound in my ears, but that often happened to me. It sometimes seems to me that I hear trains passing, that I hear clocks striking, that I hear the footsteps of a crowd. + 

Then shortly, these droning sounds became more distinct, more differentiated, more recognisable. I had been mistaken. It was not the usual throbbing sound of my pulse that filled my ears with these clamourings, but a very peculiar, though very confused noise that came, no doubt about it, from the interior of my house. + 

I made it out through the wall, this continuous noise, which was rather a disturbance than a noise, a confused movement of a crowd of things, as if all my furniture was being pushed, moved out of its place and gently dragged about. + 

Oh, for an appreciable time longer I doubted the evidence of my ears. But when I had pressed myself against a shutter the better to make out this strange disturbance of my house, I became convinced, certain, that something abnormal and incomprehensible was taking place in my house. I was not afraid but I was⁠—how shall I say it?⁠—stunned with astonishment. I did not draw my revolver⁠—having a strong suspicion that I should not need it. I waited. I waited a long time, unable to come to any decision, my mind quite lucid, but wildly anxious. I waited, standing there, listening the whole time to the noise that went on increasing: at times it rose to a violent pitch, and seemed to become a muttering of impatience, of anger, of a mysterious tumult. + 

Then suddenly ashamed of my cowardice, I seized my bunch of keys, I chose the one I wanted, I thrust it in the lock, I turned it twice, and pushing the door with all my force, I sent the door clattering against the inner wall. + 

The crash rang out like a pistol shot, and, amazingly, from top to bottom of my house, a formidable uproar broke out in answer to this explosive sound. It was so sudden, so terrible, so deafening, that I recoiled some steps and although I still felt it to be useless, I drew my revolver from its holster. + 

I went on waiting, oh, some little time. I could distinguish, now, an extraordinary tap-tapping on the steps of my staircase, on the floors, on the carpets, a tap-tapping, not of shoes, of slippers worn by human beings, but of crutches, wooden crutches, and iron crutches that rang out like cymbals. And then all at once I saw, on the threshold of my door, an armchair, my big reading-chair, come swaggering out. It set off through the garden. Others followed it, the chairs out of my drawing room, then the low couches dragging themselves along like crocodiles on their short legs, then all my chairs, leaping like goats, and the little stools trotting along like hares. + 

Imagine the tumult of my mind! I slipped into a grove of trees, where I stayed, crouched, watching the whole time this march past of my furniture, for they were all taking their departure, one after the other, quickly or slowly, according to their shapes and weight. My piano, my large grand, passed galloping like a runaway horse, with a murmur of music in its depths; the smallest objects gliding over the gravel like ants, brushes, glass dishes, goblets, where the moonlight hung glowworm lamps. The hangings slithered past in whorls, like octopuses. I saw my writing-table appear, a rare piece of the last century, which contained all the letters I have received, the whole story of my heart, an old story which caused me so much suffering. And it held photographs too. + 

Suddenly, I was no longer afraid, I flung myself on it and seized it as one seizes a thief, as one seizes a flying woman; but it pursued its irresistible course, and in spite of my efforts, in spite of my anger, I could not even retard its progress. As I was making a desperate resistance to this terrible force I fell on the ground, struggling with it. Thereupon it tumbled me over, and dragged me over the gravel, and the pieces of furniture that were following it were already beginning to walk over me, trampling over my legs and bruising them; then, when I had loosed my hold of it, the others passed over my body like a cavalry charge over a dismounted soldier. + 

Mad with fear at last, I managed to drag myself out of the main avenue and to hide myself again among the trees, to watch the disappearance of the meanest, smallest, most overlooked by me, most insignificant objects that had belonged to me. + 

Then far away, in my house, now as full of echoing sounds as empty houses are, I heard the dreadful sound of shutting doors. They clashed shut from top to bottom of the building, until the hall door that I myself, in my mad folly, had opened for their flight, had finally shut itself, last of all. + 

I fled too, running towards the town, and I did not recover my self-control until I was in the streets, and meeting belated wayfarers. I went and rang at the door of a hotel where I was known. I had beaten my clothes with my hands to remove the dust, and I explained that I had lost my bunch of keys which contained also the key of the kitchen garden, where my servants were sleeping in a house isolated behind the enclosing wall that preserved my fruit and my vegetables from marauding visitors. + 

I buried myself up to my eyes in the bed they gave me. But I could not sleep, and I waited for daybreak, listening to the beating of my heart. I had given orders that my people were to be warned at dawn, and my man knocked on my door at seven o’clock in the morning. + 

His face seemed convulsed with emotion. + 

“A terrible thing happened last night, sir,” he said. + 

“What’s that?” + 

“The whole furniture of the house has been stolen, sir, everything, everything, down to the very smallest articles.” + 

This news pleased me. Why? Who knows? I had myself absolutely in hand, absolutely determined to dissimulate, to say nothing to anyone about what I had seen, to hide it: bury it in my conscience like a frightful secret. I answered: + 

“They must be the same people who stole my keys. We must warn the police at once. I will get up and be with you in a few moments.” + 

The investigations lasted five months. They discovered nothing, they did not find the smallest of my possessions, not the faintest trace of the thieves. Lord! if I had told what I knew. If I had told⁠ ⁠… they would have shut me up, me, not the robbers, but the man who had been able to see such a thing. + 

Oh, I know enough to hold my tongue. But I did not refurnish my house. It was quite useless. The thing would have happened again and gone on happening. I did not want to enter the house again. I did not enter it. I never saw it again. + 

I went to Paris, to a hotel, and I consulted doctors on my nervous state, which had been giving me much uneasiness since that deplorable night. + 

They ordered me to travel. I followed their advice. + 