the narrow streets, the smell and the atmosphere of Paris affected my head and my heart as if they would suffocate me. I was overtaken by a burst of sobs which I could not stop. I wished to be stronger than my feelings, but they overcame me with their whole power. I only succeeded in checking my tears by throwing into my face handfuls of water that I took from a street fountain. There was a print-seller there, and I looked at his pictures while I crunched my last apple from home. The lithographs displeased me greatly; they were scenes with grisettes in low dresses, women bathing, women dressing. Paris seemed to me lugubrious and insipid. I went away to a lodging-house where I spent my first night in a sort of continual nightmare. My room was but an ill-smelling hole with no daylight. At dawn I got up and rushed out into the air; light had come and I regained calm and determination; sadness remained and I remembered the lamentations of Job: "Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night in which it was said, 'There is a man child conceived.' It was thus that I accosted Paris, not cursing it, but in terror
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