Free The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre Page A

day: the country round him sweltering in a haze that smelt of flies, indeed he had just caught one and had torn its wings off. He had noticed that its head resembled the sulphured tip of a kitchen match, so he had fetched the scraper from the kitchen and rubbed it against the fly’s head to see if it would catch fire. All this in an idle sort of mood; the feeble, lackadaisical sport of a bored little boy, who knew quite well that the fly would not catch fire. On the table there were some tattered magazines, and a handsome Chinese vase, green and grey, with handles like parrots’ claws. Jules had told him that the vase was three thousand years old. Mathieu had gone up to the vase, his hands behind his back, and stood, nervously a-tiptoe, looking at it: how frightening it was to be a little ball of breadcrumb in this ancient fire-browned world, confronted by an impassive vase three thousand years old. He had turned his back on it, and stood grimacing and snuffling at the mirror without managing to divert his thoughts; then he had suddenly gone back to the table, picked up the vase, which was a heavy one, and dashed it on the floor — it had just happened like that, after which he had felt as light as gossamer. He had eyed the porcelain fragments in amazement: something had happened to that three-thousand-year-old vase within those fifty-year-old walls, under the ancient light of summer, something very disrespectful that was not unlike the air of morning. He had thought to himself: ‘I did it,’ and felt quite proud, freed from the world, without ties or kin or origins, a stubborn little excrescence that had burst the terrestrial crust.
    He was sixteen, a raffish youth, lying on the sand at Arcachon, looking at the long, flat ocean waves. He had just thrashed a lad from Bordeaux, who had thrown stones at him, and he had forced him to eat sand. Seated in the shade of the pines, out of breath, his nostrils filled with the odour of resin, he felt somehow like a little explosive entity suspended in the atmosphere, spherical compact, mysterious. He had said to him self: ‘I will be free,’ or rather he hadn’t said anything at all, but that was what he wanted to say and it was in the nature of a bet: he had made a bet with himself that his whole life should be cast in the semblance of that unique moment. He was twenty-one, he was reading Spinoza in his room, on a Shrove Tuesday, gaily-painted carts were passing down the street laden with cardboard figures: he had looked up and again made his bet, with that philosophic emphasis which Brunet and himself had recently assumed: he had said to himself: ‘I shall achieve my salvation!’ Ten times, a hundred times, he had made that same bet. The words changed as his age increased, to suit his intellectual attitudes, but it was one and the same bet: and Mathieu was not, in his own eyes a tall rather ungainly fellow who taught philosophy in a public school, nor Jacques Delarue the lawyer’s brother, nor Marcelle’s lover, nor Daniel and Brunets friend: he was just that bet personified.
    What bet? He passed his hands over his eyes, now wearied by the light: he no longer really knew: he was subject — more and more often now — to long moments of exile. To understand his bet, he had to be feeling exceptionally alert.
    ‘Ball, please.’
    A tennis ball rolled up to his feet, a little boy ran towards him racquet in hand. Mathieu picked up the bail and threw it. He was certainly not particularly alert: he sweltered in that depressing heat, he could do no more than submit to the ancient and monotonous sensation of the daily round: in vain he repeated the once inspiring phrases: ‘I must be free: I must be self-impelled, and able to say: “I am, because I will: I am my own beginning.”’ Empty, pompous words, the commonplaces of the intellectual.
    He got up. An official got up, an official who was worried about money and was going to visit the sister of one of his old pupils. And he