When this happens to other people it seems to be a limited, bounded event, easy to ring around and to overcome. And then you find yourself absolutely alone, in a hallucinating experience that your imagination had not even begun to approach.

I am afraid of not sleeping and I am afraid of sleeping, on the nights that Maurice spends with Noëllie. That empty bed next to mine, these flat, cold sheets.… I take sleeping pills, but in vain; for I dream. Often in my dreams I faint with distress. I lie there under Maurice’s gaze, paralyzed, with the whole world’s anguish on my face. I expect him to rush toward me. He glances indifferently in my direction and walks off. I woke up and it was still night—I could feel the weight of the darkness; I was in a corridor; I hurried down it, and it grew narrower and narrower; I could scarcely breathe. Presently I should have to crawl and I should stay wedged there until I died. I screamed. And I began calling him more quietly, weeping as I did so. Every night I call him: not him—the other one, the one who loved me. And I wonder whether I should not prefer it if he were dead. I used to tell myself that death was the only irremediable misfortune and that if he were to leave me I should get over it. Death was dreadful because it was possible; a break was bearable because I could not imagine it. But now in fact I tell myself that if he were dead I should at least know whom I had lost and who I was myself. I no longer know anything. The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself—is swallowed up behind you as you flee. There is no going back. The house has vanished, and the village and the whole of the valley. Even if you survive there is nothing left, not even what had been your living space on earth.