I was one of those beings divinely formed for unhappiness, who seem to have spent nine hundred years in their mother’s womb before emerging woefully to spend a desolate childhood in the worthless society of men . . .

I felt as if I had fallen from some empyrean into an endless wasteland, and human beings seemed to me like so much vermin. That was my perception of human society at the age of fourteen—and it remains the same today.

One day, however, I revolted; the malice of my fellow students had finally crossed some unremembered line. Unsheathing a knife, I leapt with bombastic bravado on a group of forty young jokers. I was frothing at the mouth, crushed with blows, superb . . .

 

LÉON BLOY—Le désespéré