![]() It was all too easy to lose oneself in a past half real, half imaginary, and so be blind to the present. ![]() The real meaning of history would have escaped me, because I had never been close enough to people. But even if I held their flagging interest for a brief half hour, I should know, when I had finished, that nothing I had said to them was of any value, that I had only given them images of history brightly colored-waxwork models, puppet figures strutting through a charade. ![]() The notes I had written for the lectures I was to give during the coming autumn were scholarly, precise, with dates and facts that I should afterwards dress up in language designed to strike a spark in the dull minds of inattentive students. It was inevitable, always, during the last days of holiday but this time, more than ever before, I was aware of time having passed too swiftly, not because the days had been over full but because I had achieved nothing. Outside Le Mans, the depression that had grown upon me during the past twenty-four hours had intensified. ![]() ![]() It had not once let up since Tours, and all I had seen of the countryside I loved was the gleaming surface of the route nationale, rhythmically cut by the monotonous swing of the windscreen-wiper. I left the car by the side of the cathedral, and then walked down the steps into the Place des Jacobins. ![]()
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