After several hours of walking, I reached the massive hill of stones that supports the little city dominated by the great church. After climbing the narrow, steep street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic dwelling built for God on Earth, vast as a city, full of low chambers crushed beneath vaults, and high galleries supported by frail columns. I entered this giant granite jewel, light as lace, covered with towers and slim pinnacles, in which winding staircases rise up, and which hurl into the blue sky of day, and the dark sky of night, their strange heads bristling with chimeras, devils, fantastic animals, monstrous flowers, and which are linked to each other by slender, finely carved arches.

When I was at the summit, I said to the monk who was with me, “Father, how happy you must be here!”

He answered, “It is very windy, Monsieur”; and we set to talking as we watched the sea rise, as it came running onto the sand and covering it with a breastplate of steel.

And the monk told me stories, all the old stories of this place, legends, always more legends.

One of them particularly struck me. The local people, the ones who live on the hill, claim they hear voices at night in the sands. They say they hear two goats bleating, one with a strong voice, the other with a feeble voice. Scoffers assert they’re the cries of seabirds, which sometimes resemble bleating, and sometimes human moans; but late-night fishermen swear they have seen, roaming about on the dunes, between the two tides, around the little town cast so far from the world, an old shepherd, whose head, covered with his cloak, could never be seen; and who led, walking in front of them, a billygoat with a man’s face, and a nanny-goat with a woman’s face, both with long white hair, talking ceaselessly, arguing with each other in an unknown language, then suddenly stopping to bleat with all their might.

I said to the monk, “Do you believe this?”

He murmured, “I don’t know!”

I said, “If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago? Why haven’t you yourself seen them? Why haven’t I seen them, myself?”

He replied, “Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look, here is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks men down, destroys buildings, uproots trees, whips the sea up into mountains of water, destroys cliffs, and throws great ships onto the shoals; here is the wind that kills, whistles, groans, howls—have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists.”

I fell silent before this simple reasoning. This man was a wise man, or perhaps an idiot. I wasn’t able rightly to tell; but I fell silent. What he said then, I had often thought.

July 3. I slept badly; there must indeed be a feverish influence here, for my coachman suffers from the same illness as I do. When I returned yesterday, I noticed his unusual pallor. I asked him:

“What is wrong with you, Jean?”

“I can no longer rest, Monsieur; my nights are eating up my days. Since Monsieur left, that’s what’s been sticking to me like a curse.”

The other servants are doing well, though, but I am very afraid of a relapse.

July 4. Without a doubt, I have caught it again. My old nightmares are coming back. Last night, I felt someone squatting over me, who, with his mouth over mine, was drinking in my life through my lips. Yes, he was sucking it in from my throat, just like a leech. Then he rose, sated, and I woke up, so wounded, broken, and annihilated, that I could no longer move. If that goes on for a few more days, I will definitely go away again.

July 5. Have I lost my reason? What I saw last night is so strange that my head spins when I think of it!

As I do now each evening, I had locked my door; then, since I was thirsty, I drank half a glass of water, and I noted by chance that my carafe was full to its crystal stopper.

Then I went to bed, and fell into one of my dreadful sleeps, from which I was snatched after about two hours by an even more frightful shock.

Imagine a man asleep, who is being killed, and who wakes up with a knife in his lung, with a death rattle, covered in blood, who can no longer breathe, who will die, and doesn’t understand why—that’s what it’s like.

Having finally come to my senses, I was thirsty again; I lit a candle and went towards the table where my carafe was. I raised it and tipped it over my glass; nothing poured out.—It was empty! It was completely empty! First, I was at a complete loss; then, all of a sudden, I experienced such a terrible emotion that I had to sit down, or rather, fall into a chair. Then I bounded up again to look around me. Then I sat down again, overcome with astonishment and fear, before the transparent crystal! I contemplated it fixedly, trying to comprehend. My hands were trembling! Someone must have drunk this water. Who? Me? It must be me; it could only be me. So I was a sleepwalker, then, and was living, without knowing it, this double mysterious life, which makes us suspect that there are two beings inside us, or that a foreign being, unknowable and invisible, animates our captive body when our soul is dulled; and our body obeys this other being as it does ourselves, or obeys it more than ourselves.

Who can understand my abominable anguish? Who can understand the emotion of a man, of a healthy mind, wide awake, full of reason, who looks through the glass of a carafe, terrified that a little water has disappeared while he slept. And I stayed there till daylight, without daring to return to my bed.

July 6. I am going mad. Again someone drank the entire contents of my carafe last night—or rather, I drank it.

But is it me? Is it me? Who could it be? Who? Oh my God! am I going mad? Who can save me?

July 10. I have just carried out some surprising experiments.

Without a doubt, I am mad! And yet …

On July 6, before I went to bed, I placed on my table some wine, some milk, some water, some bread, and some strawberries.

Someone drank—I drank—all the water, and a little milk.