Little Poems in Prose

Perhaps; but it was simpler to suppose that he himself did not know why. I have been more than once a victim of these cries and impulses, which give ground for the belief that malicious demons may pos- sibly be asleep within us and cause us to per- form, unknown to ourselves, their maddest whims. One morning I got up in a bad temper, sad, tired of idleness, and impelled, it seemed to me, to do something big, a brilliant action; and I opened the window. Alas! (Observe, I beg you, that the spirit of mys- tification which, with some people, is not the result of a preconceived plan but of a chance inspiration, participates very much, though it were but through the intensity of its desire, in this humour which doctors call hysteric, and which those who have a little more sense than doctors call Satanic, which compels us unre- sisting towards a crowd of dangerous or incon- venient actions.) The first person that I saw in the street was a glazier whose piercing and discordant cry came up to me through the heavy and con- taminated atmosphere of Paris. It would be ut- terly impossible for me ever to tell you why I was suddenly seized with a hatred, as sudden as it was despotic, against the poor man.