Guy Maupassant: The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 1

After this introduction by the express, we have the miseries of the hotel; of some great hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange room, and the dubious bed! I am most particular about my bed; it is the sanctuary of life. We intrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it so that they may be reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and feathers.

There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected, venerated, and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly possessions.

I cannot lift up the sheets of an hotel bed without a shiver of disgust. What have its occupants been doing in it the night before? Perhaps dirty, revolting people have slept in it. I begin, then, to think of all the horrible people with whom one rubs shoulders every day, people with suspicious-looking skin which makes one think of the feet and all the rest! I call to mind those who carry about with them the sickening smell of garlic or of humanity. I think of those who are deformed and purulent, of the perspiration emanating from the sick, and of everything that is ugly and filthy in man.

And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am going to sleep! The mere idea of it makes me feel ill as I get in.

And then the hotel dinners – those dreary table d'hôte dinners in the midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted up by a wretched composite candle under a shade.

Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know anything more wretched than when it is getting dark on such an occasion? One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces which one has never seen before and will never see again; listening to people talking about matters which are quite indifferent to you in a language that perhaps you do not understand. You have a terrible feeling, almost as if you were lost, and you continue to walk on so as not to be obliged to return to the hotel, where you would feel more lost still because you are at home , in a home which belongs to anyone who can pay for it, and at last you fall into a chair of some well-lit café, whose gilding and lights overwhelm you a thousand times more than the shadows in the streets. Then you feel so abominably lonely sitting in front of the glass of flat bock

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Literally, "The bird flies" – a pun on the verb voler, which means both "to fly" and "to steal."

Nickname for Napoleon III.

Jevôdre voir vô comment vô faites le painture? Velé vô? Je été très curièux .

J'êtê joujours avec vô la même qu-autre fois .