Belle chambre double

2000 One morning, when Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He was lying on his back in the shape of a breastplate and, if he lifted his head a little, he could see his brown, slightly bulging belly divided by arcs into rigid sections. The bedding barely covered him and seemed ready toslide off at any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared to the size of the rest of his body, wiggled helplessly before his eyes. "What's happening to me?" he thought. This was not a dream. His room, a real human room if a little too small, rested peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay on the table - Samsa was a traveling salesman - and above it hung a picture he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and placed in a pretty golden frame. It showed a lady in a hat and fur boa, sitting cross-legged, raising a heavy fur muff that covered her entire lower arm to the viewer. Gregor then turned to the window to look at the gloomy weather. Rain drops could be heard hitting the glass, which made him quite sad. "What if I just sleep some more and forget all this nonsense? ", he thought, but he couldn't do it, because he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn't get into that position. No matter how much he threw himself to his right, he would always fall back to where he was. He must have tried a hundred times, closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at his wobbly legs, and only stopped when he began to feel a slight, dull pain in that spot that he had never felt before. "Oh, my God," he thought, "what a painful career I have chosen! Traveling day after day. Such an activity requires much more effort than if one were working at home, and on top of that there is the curse of travel, the worry of connections, the bad and irregular food, the contact with different people..."