The Death of a Nobody — Jules Romains

An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:One afternoon Jacques Godard, walking past the Panthéon, suddenly thought to himself: Why, I have never been up to the top in my life. What waste! Every excursionist treats himself to that, and I, who have lived in Paris thirty-five years, have only seen the dome from the pavement.Into the monument he went, and, following the directions of the caretaker, he began to plod up the spiral staircase.There were so many steps, and the movement of a man toiling upwards through this massive structure seemed so insignificant, that Godard felt like a minute insect crawling up a wall.Upright at last upon the highest platform, several things astonished him : first, that there should be such a wind, and that on this mild spring day, three hundred feet above the streets, the air should have such an eager, wintry nip in it. Besides, he had expected the height to give him a different feeling. Was it greater or less than he had expected? He could not tell. Above all, the appearance of Paris disconcerted him. He had understood before that Paris was large, but in the abstract, emotionless sort of way in which he knew the Sahara was a desert. His old profession, too, had not fitted him to grasp the size of a town. He had been an engine-driver on an express, and he was used to rushing in four minutes from its centre to its ramparts. Speed belittles space : congregated masses of buildings and huddled suburbs melt before it; walls and houses lose solidity as they stream past a train. Almost before the first whistle was silent the circumference of Paris would collapse behind him like a pricked balloon. On the return journey Godard used to see the town ahead of him—for an instant—like a pile of muddy snow which, the next, the engine had swept aside. The fortifications passed in a flash. Then he had only to shut off steam and put on the brakes in order to glide on, the wheels grinding on the rails and bumping over the points, on under smoky bridges, till he touched the buffers of the terminus.But from up here what astonished him even more than the size of the town was its complexity. What extraordinary differences between the blocks of houses! What a tangle of lives underneath that covering! The rumpled panorama of roofs and walls lay like a heaving, tumbled blanket over living forms still more furiously agitated.His eyes searched the distance for his own quarter and his own home. After long hesitation he marked down a little white reef rising out of the mist. So it's in that mess over there. Then he felt oddly moved. An uncomfortable kind of regret took possession of him, like the sinking feeling of a man who has missed a treat. To think I live down there, all the time in the middle of this! The discovery pleased him less than the sense of what he had already missed dejected him. He reproached himself for having only understood so late what energies lay under cover of the city smoke. How many things had followed the windings of those streets, driven and directed by how many different forces! What criss-crossing of interests and relationships, just like the iron trusses reinforcing a block of concrete! And nothing of all this life had ever passed the threshold of his little widower's flat! I never go out. I never amuse myself; I don't exist!More to the left he noticed a green blur which he identified as the cemetery of Père Lachaise. I am a free man. Yes, free as the rest. But who bothers about me? Who ever thinks of a poor fellow like me? It wouldn't make much difference if I died.His glance now took in the whole town. I should like to know if one single person in it ever thinks of me. He had no wish to go down again. He would only have wanted to go if one of those hundreds of thousands of forces had magically transported him home in a second, home to his room, where he would have felt no longer the stupefaction of a solitary being.In the eyes of the world Godard's existence was confined to two narrow rooms at Menilmontant. He had retired five years ago, and he had not managed to create for himself a little round of humble pleasures. At most he amused himself by framing old illustrations, and by gilding wooden objects which he made himself. He often thought about his wife. Sometimes, in the evening, before going to bed, the hush in his room seemed about to whisper something ominous, and his shoulders shivered as though a cold fog had crept behind his back and dimmed the lamp. Then he would miss the dead woman and promise to go next day to her grave. He always kept his word. About one o'clock he would take the electric tram. In the sunlight, in the suburban cemetery, his heart grew softer and lighter, and before going back it was his habit to take a glass of beer, always at the same house and at the same marble-topped table, a table which had a...