Monsieur Saval, popularly known in Mantes1 as Old Saval, has just got up. It is raining on a sad autumn day. Leaves are falling. They fall slowly like a different, denser and more leisurely kind of rain. Monsieur Saval is not in the best of spirits. He paces from his fireplace to his window and back to his fireplace again. It is one of life’s darker days. And for him now, dark days are all there will be for he is sixty-two! He is a lonely old bachelor with no one in his life close to him. How sad it will be to die like this, all alone, with no one to love and with no one in turn devoted to him.

He thinks how bare, how empty his life is. He remembers the dim, distant past, his childhood, the house with his parents in it, school, outings, his days as a law student in Paris. Then he remembers his father’s illness and subsequent death. Saval had returned to live with his mother. The two of them had shared a perfectly happy, peaceful life together. Then she too had died. Oh, how sad life is!

He was left all alone. And now soon he too would die. He would just disappear and that would be that. No more Monsieur Paul Saval on the face of the earth. What a terrible thing! Other people carrying on living, loving and laughing. Yes, other people having fun and he would be no more! Isn’t it strange how people can laugh and have fun while the certainty of death remains constant? If it were merely probable, you could still live in hope, but no, it is inevitable, as inevitable as night follows day.

If only his life had at least been a full one. If he had done something, tasted pleasure or success or experienced some satisfaction or other. But no, he had had nothing like that either. He had never done anything at all except get up in the morning, eat at the same time every day and then go to bed. And that is how he had reached the age of sixty-two. He had not even married, as other men had done. Why was that? Yes, why had he never married? He could have done, he had enough capital. Was it lack of opportunity? Maybe that was it! But people make opportunities, don’t they? He was obviously just too casual about things, that’s all. Being casual about things had been his greatest fault, the biggest flaw in his character, his weakness, you might say. How many people fail in life through being too casual about things? But, on the other hand, it’s just so difficult for certain personalities to get up and do things, take some initiative, say things, think things through, and so forth.