Read Online Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Nikolái Gógol - Free Book Online Page B

be. Look at me, look at me closely and say whether I am capable of what you think?”
    â€œOh, no, no! Let him who dares think it, let him . . .”
    But he woke up touched and upset with tears in his eyes. “It would be better if you didn’t exist, had no being in the world, were just the creation of an inspired artist! I would not leave the canvas, I would gaze at you always and embrace you, I would live and breathe you, a most perfect dream, and then I would be happy. I would let desire go no further. I would invoke you as a guardian angel in sleeping and waking, and would wait for you when I had to represent the divine and holy. But now . . . What an awful life! What good is it that she is alive? Is the life of a madman pleasant for his friends and relations who never loved him? God, what a life is ours! A constant discord between dream and reality!” Thoughts much like these occupied him unceasingly. He thought of nothing else, hardly even ate anything and waited for the desired apparition with the eager passion of a lover. The constant concentration of ideas on one object finally attained such power over his life and his imagination, that the desired image appeared to him almost daily and always in circumstances contrary to real life, because his thoughts were absolutely pure like the thoughts of a child. By means of these dream visions their object itself seemed to become pure and to be transfigured.
    Taking opium broke up his thought even more, and if ever there was a man in love to the last degree of madness, violently, terribly, overwhelmingly, turbulently, that unfortunate was he.
    Of all his dreams one was the happiest. He saw his studio. He was so overjoyed and sat with his palette in his hand so delightedly! She was there. She was already his wife. She sat by him, leaning her lovely elbow on the back of his chair, and watching him work. Her eyes, languid and faint, were filled with bliss: his whole room exhaled paradise; it was so full of light and so tidy. God Almighty! She leant her lovely head against his breast.... He never had a better dream. He would get up afterwards feeling fresher and looking less absent-minded than before. A strange idea was born in his brain: “Perhaps,” he thought, “she has been dragged by some terrible accident into this depraved life against her will. Perhaps her spirit is inclined towards repentance; perhaps she would herself like to break away from her awful position. And surely one cannot see her go to her ruin indifferently, especially when one only has to stretch out a hand to save her from drowning.” This thought went further. “No one knows me,” he told himself, “and what business am I of anyone’s or what business is anyone of mine. If she shows a real repentance and changes her life, I will marry her. I must marry her, and I will probably do better than most people, who marry their housekeepers, and often even the most despicable creatures. But this action of mine will be magnanimous, and perhaps even great. I shall restore to the world its most beautiful ornament.”
    Having made such a rash plan, he felt the color rising to his cheeks; he went to the mirror and was frightened to see how his cheeks had fallen in and how pale his whole face was now. He began to dress up carefully; he washed; combed his hair, put on a new frock-coat, an elegant waistcoat, flung a cloak round his shoulders and went out into the street. He took a breath of fresh air and felt the freshness enter his heart like a convalescent who has decided to go out for the first time after a prolonged illness. His heart beat fast when he approached the street in which he had not set foot since the fateful meeting.
    He searched for the house a long time; it looked as if his memory had failed him. He walked the length of the street twice without deciding before which house to pause. At last one seemed like it to him. He ran upstairs quickly and knocked