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My God! What remains to me now? Nothing. Cold solitude, sombre isolation! Oh! To live , always , in the centre of a crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever lighting up my soul, without a loving hand ever stretching towards me! Terrible and nameless punishment! Who could ever understand you? To carry within you ineffable treasures of love and to be to hide them like a shame, like a crime! To have a soul of fire and tell oneself: a virgin will never accord you the sacred rights of a husband. This supreme consolation of man on Earth, I can never taste it. Oh! Death! Death would truly be for me the hour of deliverance! Another Jew, I await it like the most frightening end of all ordeals!!! But you remain to me, my God! You wished that I belong to no one here, by none of these terrestrial links which raise man up in perpetuating your divine work! Sad and deprived, I can still raise my eyes towards you , because you at least, you will not push me away!
Five or six weeks after my visit to the prefect, I received the invitation to present myself in Paris, to M. the chief of the railway of… This letter filled me with joy. At the prospect of a trip to Paris joined the hope of soon abandoning a country that I viewed with horror, and finally escaping this ridiculous inquisition of which I was the object. The prefect I would see soon sincerely shared my satisfaction and entreated me not to defer my departure. My poor mother was radiant, even though the idea of a coming separation sadly intruded on this compensation which seemed to her already the dawn of a radiant future.
Always good and provident, M. de Saint-M… urgently recommended I go to Paris, to see one of his great-nephews who had lived there for a long time. He was not a stranger to me. He knew me. He knew my mother, and how devoted his family were to her. He welcomed me like a brother. Thanks to him I didn’t know the terrible shame of the thrust and for the first time into the whirlwind of tumultuous Paris.
The day after my arrival, he accompanied me to the administration of … where I saw the chief of the railway, M… I won’t write his very recognisable name here. In the short interview I had with him, I asked him as a favour to be employed in Paris, this he promised me. His last words were these: “Return to B… and wait for your nomination as soon as possible.”
I therefore left Paris two days later, having barely registered it, but counting on being able to revisit properly. The time I passed at B… was untroubled by serious incident. I went out every day and always . The noise of my adventure started to die down. The situation was better understood now that it was out in the open. I must say that those to whom I was showed me greater sympathy since the initial shock of recent events. “Poor child,” said a mother whose daughter had been my friend and study companion, “I like him more now because I can doubly appreciate him. He must have suffered terribly.”