There are times when I think of cutting my hair, times when I think of cutting my throat, and other times when I think of screwing out my eyes. Forgive me, Doctor, it’s just a way to talk about myself, and about Armance.

A sense of perplexity comes over me, I no longer know what to say; that is, in general, when one suddenly falls silent, thought wanders as though in expectation and then there it is – a novelty or a reflection.

I start thinking about all this on the train – since I know the landscape by heart it’s not hard to do. I always travel first class, and always sit by the window. I could just about be permanently lost in thought, given the frequency of my displacements.

I also have a habit of sitting on a rock by the river to read Stendhal or look at the river and the stones.

I have absolutely no parents, no friends in particular, my life runs serenely, sweetly.

A young woman has been living in my house for some time and I often meet acquaintances of hers to whom I offer drinks in my beautiful glasses. Miss Armance is very good company, she was born twenty years before me and wears her hair back, always neat. We met on the Milan–Gotthard–Zurich direttissimo train of the Swiss Federal Railways.

She was sitting almost directly in front of me and one noticed her right away on account of that strict look she has at all times; now that I know it, I hardly notice it anymore, except on rare occasions; though there was a time when I couldn’t help going to her room at odd hours of the night, to see whether she might have let herself go a little (or not at all), to hear a story, or to be caressed.

And she was so strict, so frightfully fierce. In the train compartment she had looked at me in such a mean way, and kept doing so. And so I took up my newspaper trick, I pretended to read, to look out the window in which her face was reflected, I smoked, blew my nose, picked up a book, looked up, and she was no longer there.

Naturally I thought once again, with a sigh of relief, that I have too much imagination. I don’t think much of the very silly, even gullible, person that I am. But one starts to conjecture right away through the entire length of the Gotthard Tunnel – about ten minutes.