I have told you how I had found a room in a pretty miserable house. Good Lord, I had no aspirations for anything better. But what makes poverty so hard is not its deprivations but its promiscuity. Our situation at Pressburg had shielded me from the sordid contacts one experiences in cities. Despite the recommendations my family had furnished me with, for a long time it was difficult, at my age, to find a job giving lessons. I did not like to thrust myself forward, and therefore I did not know how to go about it. It pained me to serve as an accompanist in the theater, where the people around me thought they were putting me at ease by being excessively familiar. Nor did I form there the best opinion of women, whom one is supposed to be able to love. Unhappily, I was very sensitive to the external aspects of things; I suffered from living where I did; I suffered from the people I was sometimes obliged to encounter there. You can imagine how mediocre they were. But I have always been helped in my relations with people by the realization that they are not very happy. Objects are not very happy either; that is what makes us feel friendly toward them. At first, my room revolted me; it was sad, with a sort of false elegance that wrung the heart because it revealed that the owner of the house did not know any better. It was not very clean either: it was evident that other people had been there before me, and that disgusted me a good deal. Later I came to get interested in who they might have been and in imagining their life. They were like friends with whom I could not get involved because I did not know them. I told myself that they had sat at this table to labor over their daily accounts, that they had known on this bed their sleep or their insomnia. I thought how they had had their hopes, their virtues, their vices, and their miseries, as I had my own. I do not know, my dear, what the point of suffering is if it does not teach us pity.

I got accustomed to it all. One gets accustomed easily. There is a sort of enjoyment in knowing that one is poor, that one is alone, and that no one is thinking of you. It simplifies life. But it is also a great temptation. I came back late every night through quarters almost deserted at that hour, so tired that I no longer felt fatigue. The people you encounter in the streets during the day give the impression of going toward a definite goal, which one assumes is rational; but at night they seem to walk in their dreams. The people who passed me seemed, like me, to have the vague aspect of figures one sees in dreams, and I was not convinced that the whole of life was not a stupid, exhausting, endless nightmare. I do not need to tell you the dullness of those Viennese nights. Sometimes I saw lovers reclining on doorsteps, insouciantly extending their conversations or perhaps their embraces; the darkness around them made the reciprocal illusion of love more excusable; and I envied this calm contentment that I did not desire. My dear, we are indeed strange. I experienced for the first time the perverse pleasure of being different from others. It is hard not to consider oneself superior when one suffers more. And the vision of happy people makes one feel a nausea at that sort of bliss.