For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, as soon as my candle was out, my eyes would close so quickly that I didn't have time to say to myself, "I'm falling asleep. "And half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep woke me up; I wanted to put down the volume I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not stopped thinking in my sleep about what I had just read, but those thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V. This belief survived for a few seconds when I woke up; it did not shock my reason, but it weighed like scales on my eyes and prevented them from realizing that the candleholder was no longer lit. Then it began to become unintelligible to me, as after the metempsychosis the thoughts of a previous existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; at once I regained my sight and I was quite astonished to find around me a darkness, soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my spirit, to whom it appeared as a thing without cause, incomprehensible, as a really obscure thing. I wondered what time it might be; I could hear the whistle of the trains which, more or less distant, like the song of a bird in a forest, raising the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveller hurried to the next station ; and the little path he follows will be etched in his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unusual acts, to the recent talk and farewell under the foreign lamp which still follow him in the silence of the night, to the coming sweetness of the return.