Claude's Confession by Émile Zola

I toil and hope. I pass the days seated at my little table, putting aside my pen for long hours to caress some ideal blonde whom the ink would soil. Then, I resume my work, decking my heroines with the rays of my dreams. I forget the snow and the empty closet. I live I know not where, perhaps in a cloud, perhaps amid the down of an abandoned nest. When I write a phrase sprucely and coquettishly draped, I imagine I see angels and hawthorns in bloom.

I have the holy gayety of toil. Ah! how foolish I was to be sad, and how deceived I was in thinking myself poor and alone! Yesterday my chamber was hideous; now it smiles upon me. I feel around me friends whom I cannot see, but who are legion and who all put out their hands to me. So great is their number that they hide from me the walls of my den.