MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-1

[0845] a white chamber-pot with a roll of toilet-paper in it. [0846] Nothing was
being left to chance. [0847] I recount these moments with a certain minuteness,
it is a relief from what I feel coming. [0848] I set a pouffe against the easy
chair, sat down in the latter and on the former laid my stiff leg. [0849] The
room was chock-full of pouffes and easy chairs, they ^{[⁁]thronged} all about me,
in the gloom.

[0850] There were also occasional tables, footstools, tallboys,
etc., in abundance. [0851] Strange feeling of congestion that the night dispersed,
though it lit the ch^andelier, which I had left turned on. [0852] My beard was
missing, when I felt for it with anguished hand. [0853] They had shaved me, they
had shorn me of my scant beard. [0854] How had my sleep withstood such libertie^s?

[0855] My sleep as a rule so uneasy. [0856] To this question I found a number of replies.
[0857] But I did not know which of them was right. [0858] Perhaps they were all wrong.
[0859] My beard grows properly only on my chin and dewlap. [0860] Where the pretty
bristles grow on other faces, on ^mine there are none. [0861] But such as it was
they had docked my beard.

[0862] Perhaps they had dyed it too, I had no proof
they had not. [0863] I thought I was naked, in the easy chair, but I finally
realized I was wearing a nightdress, very flimsy. [0864] If they had come and
told me I was to be sacrificed at sunrise^[₰] I would not have been taken
aback. [0865] How foolish one can be.

[0866] It seemed to me too that I had ^been
perfumed, lavender perha^ps. [0868] I said, If only your poor mother could see
you now. [0869] I am no enemy of the commonplace. [0870] She seemed far away, my
mother, far away from me, and yet I was a little closer to her than the
night before, if my reckoning was accurate. [0871] But was it?

[0872] If I was in the
right town, I had made progress. [0873] But was I? [0874] If on the other hand I was
in the wrong town, from which my mother would nec^cessarily be absent, then
I had lost ground. [0875] I must have fallen asleep, for all of a sudden there
was the moon, a huge moon framed in the window. [0876] Two bars divided it
in three ^{[⁁]segments}, of which the middle remained constant, while little by