If my days were to go on like that, nothing would separate me from my death-- nothing! Not a thing! To be bored is to die! My life was dead, and yet I had to live.

It was suicide.

Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver.

I killed myself with minutes and hours." "Amy!" said the man.
"Then, by dint of seeing the days born in the morning and miscarrying in the evening, I became afraid to die, and this fear was my first passion.
"Often, in the middle of a visit I was paying, or in the night, or when I came home after a walk, the length of the convent wall, I shuddered with hope because of this passion.
"But who would free me from it?
Who would save me from this invisible shipwreck, which I perceived only from time to time?
Around me was a sort of conspiracy, composed of envy, meanness and indifference.
Whatever I saw, whatever I heard, tended to throw me back into the narrow road, that stupid narrow road along which I was going.
"Madame Martet, the one friend with whom I was a little bit intimate, you know, only two years older than I am, told me that I must be content with what I had.

I replied, 'Then, that is the end of everything, if I must be content with what I have.