We awake, look at our watch, see “four o’clock”; it is only four o’clock in the morning, but we imagine that the whole day has gone by, so vividly does this nap of a few minutes, unsought by us, appear to have come down to us from the skies, by virtue of some divine right, full-bodied, vast, like an Emperor’s orb of gold. In the morning, while worrying over the thought that my grandfather was ready, and was waiting for me to start on our walk along the Méséglise way, I was awakened by the blare of a regimental band which passed every day beneath my windows. But on several occasions⁠—and I mention these because one cannot properly describe human life unless one shows it soaked in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after night, sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea⁠—the intervening layer of sleep was strong enough to bear the shock of the music and I heard nothing.