There’s no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. I don’t know what game or irony of creation makes it impossible for man to be both things at once. And yet, to my misfortune, this duality occurs in me. Endowed with both virtues, I’ve never been able to make myself into anything. It wasn’t a surfeit of one quality, but of two, that made me unfit to live life.

Whenever and wherever I had an actual or potential rival, I promptly gave up, without a moment’s hesitation. It’s one of the few things in life about which I never hesitated. My pride could never stand the idea of me competing with someone else, particularly since it would mean the horrid possibility of defeat. I refused, for the same reason, to take part in competitive games. If I lost, I always fumed with resentment. Because I thought I was better than everyone else? No: I never thought I was better in chess or in whist. It was because of sheer pride, a ruthless and raging pride that my mind’s most desperate efforts could do nothing to curb or stanch. I kept my distance from life and the world, and an encounter with any of their elements always offended me like an insult from below, like the sudden defiance of a universal lackey.

In times of painful doubt, when I knew from the start that I’d go wrong, what made me furious at myself was the disproportionate weight of the social factor in my decisions. I was never able to overcome the influence of heredity and my upbringing. I could pooh-pooh the sterile concepts of nobility and social rank, but I never succeeded in forgetting them. They’re like an inborn cowardice, which I loathe and struggle against but which binds my mind and my will with inscrutable ties. Once I had the chance to marry a simple girl who could perhaps have made me happy, but between me and her, in my soul’s indecision, stood fourteen generations of barons, a mental image of the whole town smirking at my wedding, the sarcasm of friends I’m not even close to, and a huge uneasiness made of mean and petty thoughts — so many petty thoughts that it weighed on me like the commission of a crime. And so I, the man of reason and detachment, lost out on happiness because of the neighbors I disdain.

How I’d dress, how I’d act, how I’d receive people in my house (where perhaps I wouldn’t have to receive anyone), all the uncouth expressions and naïve attitudes that her affection wouldn’t veil nor her devotion make me forget — all of this loomed like a specter of serious things, as if it were an argument, on sleepless nights when I tried to defend my desire to have her in the endless web of impossibilities that has always entangled me.

I still remember — so vividly I can smell the gentle fragrance of the spring air — the afternoon when I decided, after thinking everything over, to abdicate from love as from an insoluble problem. It was in May, a May that was softly summery, with the flowers around my estate already in full bloom, their colors fading as the sun made its slow descent. Escorted by regrets and self-reproach, I walked among my few trees. I had dined early and was wandering, alone like a symbol, under the useless shadows and faint rustle of leaves. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a desire to renounce completely, to withdraw once and for all, and I felt an intense nausea for having had so many desires, so many hopes, with so many outer conditions for attaining them and so much inner impossibility of really wanting to attain them. That soft and sad moment marks the beginning of my suicide.