For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds. I ought perhaps, in order to explain the intoxication that lay for me in this sudden discovery, to stress the fact that nothing had so weighed on me from childhood up as the conviction that I was an utterly superfluous individual, uninteresting to other people and at most an object of indifference.
