I had traveled widely, studied the most esoteric sciences, learned more than ten trades. Life treated me a little the way an organism treats a foreign body: it was obviously trying either to enclose me or to expel me, and I myself thirsted for ‘something else.’ I thought I found this something else in religion. I entered a monastery. A curious monastery. What, where—it doesn’t matter; you should know, however, that it belonged to an order that was, to say the least, heretical.

“There was, in particular, a very curious custom in the rule of the order. Every morning our Superior handed each man—there were about thirty of us—a piece of paper that had been folded twice. One of these pieces bore the inscription: TU HODIE, and the Superior alone knew who had received it. I really believe that on certain days all the pieces were blank, but since no one knew, the result—you will see—was the same. ‘It’s you today’—this meant that the brother so designated, unbeknownst to the others, would play the roll of Tempter for the day. I have witnessed, among certain small African tribes and other peoples some ghastly practices—human sacrifices, cannibal rites. But I have never encountered in any religious or magical sect a custom as cruel as this institution of the daily Tempter. Imagine thirty men, living a communal life, already half-crazed by the perpetual terror of sin, looking at one another with the obsessive thought that one of them, without knowing whom, is specially charged with testing their faith, their humility, and their charity. There you have a diabolical caricature of a great idea—the idea that in my fellow man as in myself, there is both a person to hate and a person to love.

“One thing proves to me the diabolical nature of this custom: not one of the monks had ever refused to play the role of Tempter. Not one, when the tu hodie was handed to him, had the slightest doubt that he was capable and worthy of playing such a part. The tempter was himself a victim of a monstrous temptation. As for me, I accepted this role of agent provocateur several times, obeying the order, and it is the most shameful memory of my life. I accepted until one day I understood the trap I had fallen into. Up to that moment I had always unmasked the Satan on duty. These unfortunates were so naïve! Always the same tricks, which they thought were so subtle, poor devils! All their cleverness consisted of playing on a few fundamental falsehoods, such as ‘following the rules to the letter is good only for idiots who cannot grasp their spirit,’ or ‘alas, with my health I cannot attempt such exertions.’

“Once, however, the devil for the day managed to catch me. This time he was a cheerful strapping rough-hewn fellow, with a child’s blue eyes. During our rest period, he moved over to me and said, ‘I see that you’ve recognized me. There’s no fooling you, you are really too observant. Besides, you don’t need this game to know that temptation is all around us, or rather within us. But look at the unfathomable spinelessness of man: all the means he’s been given to stay alert he uses, in the end, to ornament his sleep. We wear a hair shirt the way we would wear a monocle, we chant matins the way other people play golf. Ah, if only today’s scientists, instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life easier, would put their ingenuity into fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor! There are plenty of machine guns, but of course that would be overdoing it …’

“He spoke so well that on that very evening, with my brain on fire, I obtained from my Superior the authorization to occupy my leisure hours with inventions and fabrications of this kind. I immediately set to work inventing mind-boggling devices: a pen for overly fluent writers that spotted or splattered every five or ten minutes; a tiny portable phonograph, equipped with a listening device like those on hearing aids that conduct the sound through the bones and which would shout at you at the least likely moments, for example: ‘Just who do you think you are?’ There was a pneumatic cushion, which I called ‘the soft pillow of doubt,’ which deflated unexpectedly beneath the sleeper’s head; a mirror whose curvature was carefully designed in such a way—that one gave me trouble!—that every human face was reflected in it as a pig’s head; and many others. I was thus fully employed—to the extent that I no longer even recognized the daily tempters. They had fun encouraging me. Then one morning I received the tu hodie.