He stares out the window at a small moat, glistening in the sun, at the grove of elms lining the entrance way to the chateau, at the church spires in the distance. Just beyond his sight, the zeedijk holds back the North Sea, and its mental image intrudes upon his reveries. A windmill is visible in the distance. Still in his dressing gown, he sits in his octagonal study, prolonging to its limit the morning meditations of a chambriste [Editor's Note].

In his lap lies a letter from an English philosopher which he reads for the second time so that he may savor a single sentence: "All the masters of the secrets of nature who have ever existed or now exist seem simply dwarfs or pygmies when compared with your transcendent genius."
 

The elms have begun autumn's metamorphosis, their leaves transformed only in the past week into bright reds and oranges, but he inspects them with indifference through his window's latticed frame. The grid it imposes upon all the manifestations of the external takes him back to that earlier moment when another tree and another window induced one of the discoveries that brought him fame [Editor's Note].

A small mirror on the table at his side shows him his face. Not yet having donned a wig, his hair captures his attention. It is turning gray. He ponders for a moment his often-promised plan to invent a corrective for this embarrassment, this perpetual index of his aging.

Turning his attention to the papers on the table at which he sits, the manuscript of the book he has been writing, he reads aloud, quietly, a passage of which he is most proud:

Je supposerai donc qu'il y a, non point un vrai Dieu, qui est la souveraine source de verite, ais un certain mauvais ge'nie, non moins ruse' et trompeur que puissant, qui a employe toute son industrie a' me tromper. Je penserai que le ciel, l'air, la terre, les couleurs, les figures, les sons et toutes les que nous voyons, ne sont que des ilusions et tromperies, dont il se sert pour surprendre ma credulite. Je me considerai moi-meme comme n'ayant point de mains, point d'yeux, point de chair, point de sang, comme n'ayant aucuns sens, mais croyant faussement avoir toutes ces choses. He demeurerai obstinement attache a cette pensee; et si, par ce moyen, il n'est past en mon pouvoir de parvenir a la connaissance d'aucune verite, a tout le moins il est en ma puissance de suspendre mon jugement. C'est pourquoi je prendrai garde soigneusement de ne point recevoir en ma croyance aucune faussete, et preparai, si bien mon esprit a toutes les ruses de ce grand trompeur, que, pour puissant et ruse qui'il soit, il ne me pourra jamais ren imposer.

Returning to his bedroom, he completes his toilet. With the attention to detail of one who cares a great deal about his appearance, he puts on his clothes: his stockings (first a pair made of silk, then another of gray wool), fixed by a garter just beneath the knee, shoes with silver buckles, breeches (brown for travel, instead of his customary domestic black), a doublet and, over it, a gray cassock, a made-in-Paris wig, a woolen scarf, a trademark beaver hat, and finally his sword.

Dismissing the servant, he uses the chamber pot.
 

	Now he is ready for his trip to Leiden, half a league away.
	Since the fall weather is pleasant and mild, he decides to walk, passing along the dunes by the sea.