Free The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre

time to sleep: it found nourishment and grew: time passed with abrupt and fateful jerks. The pustule expanded and time passed. ‘I must find the money in forty-eight hours.’
    The Luxemburg, warm and white, statues and pigeons, children. The children ran about, the pigeons flew away. Racing children, white flashes, tiny turmoils. He sat down on an iron chair: ‘Where shall I find the money? Daniel won’t lend me any. I’ll ask him, all the same...and then, as a last resort, I can always try Jacques.’ The grass rippled up to his feet, the youthful stone posterior of a statue caught his eye, the pigeons — birds of stone — were cooing: ‘After all, it’s only a matter of a fortnight, this Jew fellow will surely wait until the end of the month, and on the 29th, I shall get my pay.’
    Mathieu stopped abruptly: he saw himself think, and he loathed himself: ‘At this same hour, Brunet is walking through the streets, enjoying the sunshine, light-hearted because he can look ahead, he walks through a city of threaded glass that he will soon destroy, he feels strong, he is walking with rather a mincing, cautious gait because the hour has not yet come to smash it all; he waits, he hopes. And what about me? Marcelle is with child. Will Sarah manage to get round that Jew? Where is the money to come from? That’s what I think!’ Suddenly he again saw once more two close-set eyes beneath black brows: ‘Madrid. I wanted to get there. And that’s the truth. But it couldn’t be fixed.’ And suddenly he thought: ‘I’m getting old.’
    ‘I’m getting old. Here I am, lounging in a chair and believing in nothing. And yet I also wanted to set out for a Spain of mine. But it couldn’t be fixed. Are there many Spains? I am there, absorbing the ancient taste of blood and iron-tainted water; — I am my own taste, I exist. That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst. Thirty-five years. For thirty-five years I’ve been sipping at myself and I’m getting old. I have worked, I have waited, I have had my desire: Marcelle, Paris, independence: and now it’s over. I look for nothing more.’ He gazed at that familiar garden, always new, always the same, just like the sea, swept for a hundred years by the same wavelets of colours and of sounds. Here it all was: scurrying children, the same for a hundred years past, the same sunshine on the broken-fingered plaster queens, and on all the trees; Sarah and her yellow kimono; Marcelle pregnant; money. All this was so natural, so normal , so monotonous, it was enough to fill a life, it was life. All the rest — the several Spains, the castles in Spain, was — what? ‘A tepid little lay religion for my benefit? A discreet and seraphic accompaniment to my real life? An alibi? That’s how they view me — Daniel, Marcelle, Brunet, Jacques: the man who aspires to be free. He eats, he drinks, like everybody else, he is a government official, not interested in politics, he reads L’Œuvre , and Le Populaire , he is worried about money. Only, he wants to be free, just as other people want a collection of stamps. Freedom, that is his secret garden: a little scheme with himself as sole accomplice... An idle, unresponsive fellow, rather chimerical, but ultimately quite sensible, who has dexterously constructed an undistinguished but solid happiness upon a basis of inertia, and justified himself from time to time on the highest moral grounds. Is that what I am?’
    When he was seven years old he had been at Pithiviers, staying with his Uncle Jules, the dentist, and one day when all alone in the waiting-room, he had played at ceasing to exist: the idea was to try not to swallow, as though he were holding on his tongue a drop of icy liquid by refraining from the little jerk of deglutition which would send it down his gullet. He had succeeded in completely emptying his head. But that emptiness still had a savour of its own. It had been a silly sort of