I am no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country—that is to say; the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black—has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.

As to the idea of a native country, that is to say a certain bit of ground traced out on a map and separated from other bits by a red or blue line: no. For me, my native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well. I am as much Chinese as I am French, and I cannot rejoice about our victories over the Arabs because I am saddened by their defeats. I love those harsh, enduring, hardy people, the last of the primitives, who at midday lie down in the shade under the bellies of their camels and, while smoking their chibouks, poke fun at our good civilization, which quivers with rage over it.

I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where one sees the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s arse. I don’t give a shit for Normandy and la belle France . . . I think I must have been transplanted by winds to this land of mud; surely I was born elsewhere—I’ve always had what seem to be memories of intuitions of perfumed shores and blue seas. I was born to be the emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke hundred-foot long pipes, to have six thousand wives and fourteen hundred catamites, scimitars to slice off heads I don’t like the looks of, Numidian horses, marble pools.

A bourgeois would say, ‘If you go, you’ll be greatly disillusioned.’ But I have rarely experienced disillusion, having had few illusions. What a stupid platitude, always to glorify the lie and say that poetry lives on illusions.

My life, which in my dreams is so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else’s: monotonous, sensible, stupid. I’ll attend law school, be admitted to the bar and end up as a respectable assistant district attorney in a small provincial town such as Yvetot or Dieppe. . . . Poor madman, who dreamt of glory, love, laurels, journeys, the Orient.