A Journey Around my Room by Xavier de Maistre

Author:Xavier de Maistre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2017-05-25T09:52:31+00:00

A Nocturnal Expedition

around My Room

1

To make the new room in which I made a nocturnal expedition more interesting, I must tell the curious reader how I had come to own it. Continually distracted from my occupations in the noisy house where I was living, I had for long been planning on finding for myself a more solitary retreat in the neighbourhood, when one day, as I was glancing through a biographical article on M. Buffon,* I read that this celebrated man had chosen in his gardens an isolated pavilion, which contained no other furniture than the armchair and the desk on which he wrote, nor any work other than the manuscript on which he was labouring.

The fancies that I busy myself with are so completely different from the immortal works of M. Buffon that the thought of imitating him, even in spirit, would doubtless never have sprung to my mind, were it not for a certain accident that finally persuaded me to do so. As a servant was wiping the dust off the furniture, he thought he could see a great deal of it on a pastel painting I had just finished, and wiped it so energetically with a cloth that he did indeed manage to rid it of all the dust that I had, with considerable care, arranged on it. Having flown into a rage against this man, who was no longer there, and having abstained from saying anything about it to him when he returned – as usual – I immediately put my plan into action, and came home with the key to a small room that I had rented on the fifth floor of a place in the Rue de la Providence. That same day, I had all the equipment I needed for my favourite occupations transported there, and subsequently spent the greater part of my time there, far from domestic hustle and bustle and all those who enjoy cleaning pictures. Hours sped by like minutes in this isolated little spot, and more than once my theories absorbed me so much I forgot to notice it was dinner time.

Oh sweet solitude! I have known the charms with which you intoxicate your lovers. Woe betide the man who cannot go a single day in his life without feeling the torments of boredom, and who prefers, if need be, to converse with idiots rather than with himself!

Still, I will confess that, while I like solitude in big cities, unless I am forced by some grave circumstance, such as a journey around my room, it is only in the morning that I have a desire to be a hermit; in the evening, I like to see human faces. The drawbacks of social life and those of solitude thus cancel each other out, and these two modes of existence embellish each other mutually.

However, the inconstancy and inevitability of the things of this world are such that the very intensity of the pleasures I enjoyed in my new abode should have forewarned me that they would not last long.

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