MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-1

[1577] pay. [1578] In your box, in your caves, there too there is a price to pay.
[1579] And which you pay willingly, for a time, but which you cannot go on
paying forever. [1580] For you cannot go on buying the same thing forever,
with your little annuity ^{[⁁]pittance [pittance]}. [1581] And unfortunately there are other needs than
that of rotting in peace, it's not the word, I mean of course my mother
whose image, blunted for some time past, was beginning now to harrow me ^[⁁]again.

[1582] So I went back inland, for my town was not strictly speaking on the sea,
whatever may have been saidtto the contrary. [1583] And to get to it you had
to go inland, I at least knew of no other road ^[⁁]way. [1584] But ^[⁁]For between my town and
the sea there was a kind of swamp which, as far back as I can remember,
and some of my memories have their roots deep in the immediate past,
there was always talk of draining, by means of canals I suppose, or
of transforming into a vast port and docks, or into a city on piles
for the workers, in a word of redeeming somehow or other.

[1585] And with the
same stone they would have killed the scandal, at the gates of their
metropolis, of a stinking steaming swamp in which an incalculable number
of human lives were yearly engulfed, the statistics escape me for the
moment and doubtless always will, so complete is my lack of interest
in ^{[⁁]indifference to} this aspect of the question.

[1586] It is true they actually began to work
and that work is still going on in certain areas in the teeth of adversity,
setbacks, epidemics and the apathy of the Public Works Department, far
from me to deny it. [1587] But from this to proclaiming that the sea came
lapping at the ramparts of my town, there was a far cry. [1588] And I for
my part will never lend myself to such a perversion (of the truth),
until such s^time as I am forced to ^{[⁁]compelled} or find it convenient ^{[⁁]to do so}.

[1589] And I knew
this swamp a little, having risked my life in it, cautiously, on several
occasions, at a period of my life richer in illusions than the one I
am trying to patch together here, I mean richer in certain illusions,
in others poorer. [1590] So there was no way of coming at my town directly,