The Immoralist — Chapter 11

Chapter 12 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

It was in the rue S***, near Passy, that we settled. The apartment, which one of Marceline's brothers had pointed out to us and which we had been able to look over during our last passage through Paris, was a great deal larger than the one my father had left me, and Marceline could not help feeling some alarm, not only at the higher rent, but at all the expenses we were about to let ourselves be drawn into. To all her fears I opposed a factitious horror of the provisional; I forced myself to believe in it and deliberately exaggerated it. Certainly the various costs of settling in would exceed our income that year, but our fortune, already handsome, was bound to grow handsomer still; I counted for that on my course of lectures, on the publication of my book, and even — with what folly! — on the new yields from my farms. I therefore stopped at no expense, telling myself with each one that I was binding myself so much the more, and claiming to suppress at the same stroke every vagabond humour I might feel, or fear to feel, in myself.

The first days, and from morning till night, our time was spent going about; and although Marceline's brother very obligingly offered afterwards to spare us a good many of these errands, Marceline was not slow to feel very tired. Then, instead of the rest she needed, she had, as soon as we were installed, to receive visit upon visit; the remoteness in which we had lived until then made them flow in now, and Marceline, out of the habit of society, neither knew how to cut them short nor dared to close her door; I found her, in the evening, worn out; — and if I did not disquiet myself over a fatigue whose natural cause I knew, at least I contrived to lessen it, often receiving in her place, which hardly amused me, and sometimes returning the visits, which amused me even less.

I have never been a brilliant talker; the frivolity of drawing rooms, their wit, is a thing in which I could take no pleasure; yet I had frequented a good many of them formerly — but how far off that time was! What had happened since? I felt myself, beside other people, dull, sad, tiresome, at once an embarrassment and embarrassed… By a singular piece of ill luck, you, whom I already considered my only true friends, were not in Paris and were not to return there for a long while. Could I have spoken to you better? Would you perhaps have understood me better than I did myself? But of all that was growing in me and that I am telling you today, what did I know? The future appeared to me altogether certain, and never had I believed myself more its master.

And even had I been more clear-sighted, what recourse against myself could I have found in Hubert, in Didier, in Maurice, in so many others whom you know and judge as I do. I very soon recognized, alas, the impossibility of making myself heard by them. From the first talks we had, I saw myself as though constrained by them to play a false part, to resemble the man they believed I had remained, on pain of appearing to feign; and, for greater convenience, I therefore feigned to have the thoughts and the tastes attributed to me. One cannot at once be sincere and appear so.

I saw somewhat more willingly the men of my own field, archaeologists and philologists, but found in talking with them hardly more pleasure and no more emotion than in turning the leaves of good historical dictionaries. At first I could hope to find a rather more direct understanding of life among certain novelists and certain poets; but if they had it, this understanding, it must be owned that they scarcely showed it; it seemed to me that most of them did not live at all, contented themselves with appearing to live and, for very little, would have considered life a tiresome hindrance to writing. And I could not blame them for it; and I do not assert that the error did not come from me… Besides, what did I mean by: to live? — That is precisely what I should have liked to be taught. — The one and the other talked skilfully of the various events of life, never of what gives rise to them.

As for the few philosophers, whose part it should have been to inform me, I had long known what was to be expected of them; mathematicians or neo-criticists, they kept as far as possible from troubling reality and concerned themselves with it no more than the algebraist with the existence of the quantities he measures.

Back with Marceline, I did not hide from her the tedium these acquaintances caused me.

“They are all alike,” I would say to her. “Each one is a duplicate of another. When I speak to one of them, it seems to me I am speaking to several.”

“But, my dear,” Marceline would answer, “you cannot ask each man to differ from all the rest.”

“The more they resemble one another, the more they differ from me.”

And then I would go on more sadly:

“Not one of them has known how to be ill. They live, they have the air of living and of not knowing that they live. Besides, I myself, since I have been among them, live no longer. Today, among other days, what have I done? I had to leave you at nine o'clock: hardly, before setting out, had I time to read a little; that is the one good moment of the day. Your brother was waiting for me at the notary's, and after the notary he did not let go of me; I had to see the upholsterer with him; he was in my way at the cabinetmaker's and I got rid of him only at Gaston's; I lunched in the neighbourhood with Philippe, then I found Louis, who was waiting for me at the café: heard with him Théodore's absurd lecture, which I complimented as we came out; to refuse his invitation for Sunday I had to go with him to Arthur's; with Arthur, went to see an exhibition of watercolours; went to leave cards at Albertine's and at Julie's… Worn out, I come home and find you as tired as myself, having seen Adeline, Marthe, Jeanne, Sophie… and when in the evening, now, I go over all these occupations of the day, I feel my day so vain and it seems to me so empty that I should like to catch it back in its flight, to begin it again hour after hour, and I am sad enough to weep.”

Yet I could not have said either what I meant by living, or whether the taste I had acquired for a life more spacious and airy, less constrained and less careful of others, were not the very simple secret of my uneasiness; that secret seemed to me far more mysterious: the secret of one raised from the dead, I thought, for I remained a stranger among the rest, like a man who comes back from among the dead. And at first I felt only a rather painful bewilderment; but soon a very new sentiment dawned. I had felt no pride, I affirm it, at the publication of the works that earned me so much praise. Was this pride, now? Perhaps; but at least no shade of vanity was mingled with it. It was, for the first time, the consciousness of my own worth: what separated me, distinguished me from others, was what mattered; what no one but I said or could say, that was what I had to say.

My course began soon after; the subject bearing me on, I swelled my first lesson with all my new passion. Apropos of the extreme Latin civilization, I depicted artistic culture rising to the surface of a people after the manner of a secretion, which at first indicates plethora, a superabundance of health, then at once congeals, hardens, opposes itself to every perfect contact of the mind with nature, hides beneath the persisting appearance of life the diminution of life, forms a sheath in which the hampered mind languishes and soon withers, then dies. Finally, pushing my thought to its limit, I said that Culture, born of life, kills life.

The historians blamed a tendency, they said, to over-hasty generalizations. Others blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who had understood me least.

It was on coming out from my lecture that I saw Ménalque again for the first time. I had never seen much of him, and, a little before my marriage, he had gone off once more on one of those distant explorations that deprived us of him sometimes for more than a year. Formerly he hardly pleased me; he seemed proud and took no interest in my life. I was therefore astonished to see him at my first lesson. His very insolence, which had at first kept me away from him, pleased me, and the smile he gave me seemed the more charming to me for my knowing it the rarer. Lately an absurd and shameful scandalous lawsuit had given the newspapers a convenient occasion to besmirch him; those whom his disdain and his superiority wounded seized upon this pretext for their revenge; and what irritated them most was that he did not appear affected by it.

“One must,” he answered the insults, “let others be in the right, since that consoles them for having nothing else.”

But “good society” grew indignant, and those who, as the phrase goes, “respect themselves” thought it their duty to turn away from him and so return him his contempt. This was one reason the more for me: drawn towards him by a secret influence, I went up to him and embraced him in friendly fashion before them all.

Seeing with whom I was talking, the last of the importunate withdrew; I remained alone with Ménalque.

After the irritating criticisms and the inept compliments, his few words on the subject of my lecture rested me.

“You are burning what you used to adore,” he said. “That is well. You set about it late; but the flame is all the better fed for it. I do not yet know whether I understand you rightly; you intrigue me. I do not talk willingly, but I should like to talk with you. Dine with me, then, this evening.”

“My dear Ménalque,” I answered him, “you seem to forget that I am married.”

“Yes, that is true,” he went on; “seeing the cordial frankness with which you dared to come up to me, I might have thought you freer.”

I feared I had wounded him; still more, that I might appear weak, and I told him I would join him after dinner.

In Paris, always in passage, Ménalque lodged at a hotel; he had had several rooms fitted up there for this stay, in the manner of an apartment; he kept his servants there, ate apart, lived apart, had spread over the walls, over the furniture whose commonplace ugliness offended him, certain costly stuffs he had brought back from Nepal and which he was finishing, he said, of soiling before making a present of them to a museum. My haste to join him had been so great that I surprised him still at table when I came in; and as I excused myself for disturbing his meal:

“But,” he said to me, “I have no intention of interrupting it, and fully count on your letting me finish it. If you had come to dinner, I should have offered you some Shiraz, that wine Hafiz sang of, but it is too late now; one must be fasting to drink it; will you at least take some liqueur?”

I accepted, thinking that he would take some too; then, seeing that only one glass was brought, I expressed my surprise:

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I hardly ever drink any.”

“Would you be afraid of getting drunk?”

“Oh!” he answered, “on the contrary! But I hold sobriety to be a more powerful intoxication; in it I keep my lucidity.”

“And you pour out drink for others…”

He smiled.

“I cannot,” he said, “require my virtues of everyone. It is a fine thing already if I find my vices in them…”

“You smoke, at least?”

“No more than that. It is an impersonal intoxication, a negative one, and too easily won; what I look for in intoxication is an exaltation and not a diminution of life. — Let us leave that. Do you know where I have come from? — From Biskra. — Having learned that you had just been staying there, I wanted to seek out your traces. What had he come to do at Biskra, then, this blind scholar, this reader of books? — I am in the habit of being discreet only about what is confided to me; as for what I learn of myself, my curiosity, I confess it, is without bounds. So I searched, ferreted, questioned, everywhere I could. My indiscretion has served me, since it has given me the desire to see you again; since, in place of the routine-bound scholar I saw in you not long ago, I know that I must now see… it is for you to explain to me what.”

I felt that I was blushing.

“What have you learned about me, then, Ménalque?”

“You wish to know? But do not be afraid! You know your friends and mine well enough to know that I can speak of you to no one. You saw whether your lecture was understood?”

“But,” I said with a slight impatience, “nothing yet shows me that I can speak to you more than to the others. Come! What is it you have learned about me.”

“First, you had been ill.”

“But there is nothing in that…”

“Oh! that is already very important. Then I was told that you liked to go out alone, without a book (and it was there that I began to admire you), or, when you were no longer alone, accompanied less willingly by your wife than by children… Do not blush, or I shall not tell you the rest.”

“Tell it without looking at me.”

“One of the children — his name was Moktir, if I remember — handsome as few are, a thief and a cheat as no one else is, seemed to me to have a good deal to tell; I drew out, I bought his confidence, which, as you know, is not easy, for I believe he was still lying when he said he lied no longer… What he told me about you — tell me, then, whether it is true.”

Ménalque meanwhile had risen and taken from a drawer a little box which he opened.

“Were these scissors yours?” he said, holding out to me something shapeless, rusted, blunted, twisted out of true; I had no great difficulty, however, in recognizing there the little scissors Moktir had spirited away from me.

“Yes; they are the ones, they were my wife's.”

“He claims to have taken them from you while your head was turned, one day when you were alone with him in a room; but the interesting thing is not there; he claims that at the instant he was hiding them in his burnous, he understood that you were watching him in a mirror and caught the reflection of your eyes spying on him. You had seen the theft and you said nothing! Moktir showed himself much surprised at that silence… and so was I.”

“I am no less so at what you tell me: what! so he knew that I had caught him!”

“That is not what matters; you were playing at who could be the cleverer; at that game these children will always get the better of us. You thought you had hold of him, and it was he who had hold of you… That is not what matters. Explain your silence to me.”

“I should be glad if someone would explain it to me.”

We remained for some time without speaking. Ménalque, who was walking up and down the room, absently lit a cigarette, then threw it away at once.

“There is in this,” he went on, “a ‘sense,’ as other people call it, a ‘sense’ that seems to be wanting in you, my dear Michel.”

“The ‘moral sense,’ perhaps,” I said, forcing myself to smile.

“Oh! merely the sense of property.”

“It does not appear to me that you have a great deal of it yourself.”

“I have so little of it that here, you see, nothing is mine; not even, or rather least of all, the bed I lie down in. I have a horror of rest; possession encourages it, and in security one falls asleep; I love living well enough to insist on living awake, and so, in the very midst of my riches, I keep up this feeling of a precarious state, by which I exasperate, or at least exalt, my life. I cannot say that I love danger, but I love a hazardous life and want it to demand of me, at every instant, all my courage, all my happiness and all my health…”

“Then what is it you reproach me with?” I broke in.

“Oh! how ill you understand me, my dear Michel; and for once that I am foolish enough to try to profess my faith!… If I care little, Michel, for the approval or disapproval of men, it is not in order to come and approve or disapprove in my turn; those words have not much meaning for me. I have been talking far too much about myself just now; believing myself understood carried me away… I meant simply to tell you that for a man who has no sense of property, you seem to possess a great deal; that is serious.”

“What do I possess that is so very much?”

“Nothing, if you take it in that tone… But are you not opening your course of lectures? Are you not a property owner in Normandy? Have you not just installed yourself, and luxuriously, at Passy? You are married. Are you not expecting a child?”

“Well!” I said, out of patience, “that merely proves that I have known how to make myself a life more ‘dangerous’ (as you put it) than yours.”

“Yes, merely,” Ménalque repeated ironically; then, turning round abruptly and holding out his hand to me:

“Come, good-bye; that is enough for this evening, and we should say nothing better. But we shall meet again soon.”

For some time I did not see him again.

New occupations, new anxieties took me up; an Italian scholar pointed out to me some new documents he had brought to light, which I studied at length for my course. To feel that my first lecture had been ill understood had spurred my desire to throw a different and a stronger light on those that followed; I was thus led to lay down as doctrine what at first I had only ventured as an ingenious hypothesis. How many assertive men owe their force to the good fortune of not having been understood from a hint! For myself I cannot distinguish, I confess, what share of obstinacy may have mingled with the natural need to assert. What I had that was new to say seemed to me the more urgent the more trouble I had in saying it, and above all in making it heard.

But how pale, alas, sentences became beside acts! Was not Ménalque’s life, his slightest gesture, a thousand times more eloquent than my course? Ah! how well I understood from that time forward that the almost wholly moral teaching of the great philosophers of antiquity had been by example as much as, and even more than, by words!

It was at my own house that I saw Ménalque again, nearly three weeks after our first meeting. It was almost at the end of an over-crowded gathering. To avoid being disturbed every day, Marceline and I preferred to leave our doors wide open on Thursday evenings; we could then close them the more easily on the other days. So every Thursday those who called themselves our friends came; the fine size of our drawing rooms allowed us to receive a great many of them, and the gathering went on far into the night. What drew them, I think, was chiefly Marceline’s exquisite grace and the pleasure of talking among themselves, for as for me, from the second of these evenings on I found nothing more to listen to, nothing to say, and hid my boredom badly. I wandered from the smoking room to the drawing room, from the anteroom to the library, caught now and then by a phrase, observing little and looking about me as though at random.

Antoine, Étienne and Godefroy were discussing the last vote of the Chamber, sprawled in my wife’s delicate armchairs. Hubert and Louis were handling without any care, and creasing, some admirable etchings from my father’s collection. In the smoking room Mathias, the better to hear Léonard, had laid his burning cigar down on a rosewood table. A glass of curaçao had been spilled on the carpet. Albert’s muddy boots, as he lay impudently on a divan, were soiling a fabric. And the dust one breathed was made of the horrible wearing away of things… A furious desire took hold of me to push all my guests out by the shoulders. Furniture, hangings, prints, at the first stain lost all their value for me; stained things, things stricken with disease and as it were marked out by death. I should have liked to protect everything, to put everything under lock and key for myself alone. How happy Ménalque is, I thought, who has nothing! With me it is because I want to preserve that I suffer. What, at bottom, does all this matter to me?… In a smaller and less brightly lit drawing room, shut off by a pane of clear glass, Marceline was receiving only a few intimates; she lay half stretched out among cushions; she was dreadfully pale, and seemed to me so tired that I was suddenly frightened and promised myself that this reception should be the last. It was already late. I was going to look at the hour on my watch when I felt in my waistcoat pocket Moktir’s little scissors.

“And why had he stolen them, that boy, if it was only to spoil them at once, to destroy them?” — At that moment someone tapped me on the shoulder; I turned round abruptly: it was Ménalque.

He was, almost alone among us, in evening dress. He had only just arrived. He asked me to present him to my wife; I should certainly not have done it of my own accord. Ménalque was elegant, almost handsome; enormous drooping moustaches, already grey, cut across his pirate’s face; the cold flame of his eye indicated more courage and decision than kindness. He was no sooner in front of Marceline than I understood that she did not like him. After he had exchanged with her a few commonplace civilities, I drew him off to the smoking room.

That very morning I had learned of the new mission with which the Colonial Ministry was charging him; various newspapers, recalling his adventurous career on this occasion, seemed to have forgotten their base insults of the day before and could find no terms warm enough in which to praise him. They vied with one another in exaggerating the services rendered to the country, to humanity at large, by the strange discoveries of his last explorations, exactly as though he undertook nothing except with a humanitarian aim; and they extolled in him traits of self-denial, of devotion, of boldness, exactly as though he were to look for his reward in such praise.

I began to congratulate him; he cut me short at the first words:

“What! you too, my dear Michel; and yet you at least had not begun by insulting me,” he said. “Leave such foolishness to the newspapers. They seem astonished today that a man of disreputable morals should nevertheless still have a few virtues. I cannot make within myself the distinctions and reservations they claim to establish, and I exist only as a whole. I lay claim to nothing but the natural, and, for each action, the pleasure I take in it is my sign that I ought to have done it.”

“That may lead you far,” I said to him.

“I count on it,” Ménalque went on. “Ah! if only all those about us could be persuaded of it. But most of them believe they can get nothing good out of themselves except by constraint; they like themselves only when counterfeited. It is himself that each man aspires least of all to resemble. Each sets himself a model, then imitates it; he does not even choose the model he imitates; he accepts a model ready chosen. And yet there are, I believe, other things to be read in man. People do not dare. They do not dare turn the page. — Laws of imitation; I call them laws of fear. People are afraid of finding themselves alone: and they do not find themselves at all. This moral agoraphobia is odious to me; it is the worst of cowardices. And yet it is always alone that one invents. But who here is seeking to invent? What one feels in oneself that is different is precisely what one has that is rare, what gives each man his value — and that is just what people set about suppressing. They imitate. And they claim to love life.”

I let Ménalque talk on; what he was saying was precisely what I myself, a month before, had been saying to Marceline; and I ought therefore to have agreed with him. Why, out of what cowardice, did I interrupt him, and say to him, imitating Marceline, word for word the sentence with which she had then interrupted me: “You cannot, my dear Ménalque, ask everyone to differ from everyone else…” Ménalque broke off abruptly, looked at me in a strange way, then, as Eusèbe was just then coming up to take leave of me, he turned his back on me without ceremony and went off to talk with Hector.

No sooner had I said it than my sentence seemed to me stupid; and what distressed me above all was that it might make Ménalque believe I had felt myself attacked by his words. — It was late; my guests were leaving. When the drawing room was almost empty, Ménalque came back to me:

“I cannot leave you like this,” he said to me. “No doubt I misunderstood what you said. Let me at least hope so…”

“No,” I answered. “You did not misunderstand it… but it had no meaning at all; and I had no sooner said it than I suffered from its stupidity — and above all from feeling that it was going to range me in your eyes precisely among those you were arraigning just now, and who, I assure you, are as odious to me as they are to you. I hate all people with principles.”

“They are,” Ménalque went on, laughing, “the most detestable thing in this world. One can expect from them no kind of sincerity; for they never do anything but what their principles have decreed they ought to do, or else they look on what they do as ill done. At the mere suspicion that you might be one of them, I felt the words freeze on my lips. The distress that seized me at once showed me how keen my affection for you was; I hoped that I had been mistaken — not in my affection but in the judgment I was passing.”

“Your judgment was indeed a false one.”

“Ah! was it not,” he said, taking my hand abruptly. “Listen; I must be going soon, but I should like to see you again. My journey this time will be longer and more hazardous than all the others; I do not know when I shall come back. I am to leave in a fortnight; here, no one knows that my departure is so near; I tell you in confidence. I go at daybreak. The night before a departure is for me, every time, a night of frightful anguish. Prove to me that you are not a man of principles; may I count on your being willing to spend this last night with me?”

“But we shall see each other before then,” I said, a little surprised.

“No. During this fortnight I shall be at home to nobody; and I shall not even be in Paris. Tomorrow I leave for Budapest; in six days I must be in Rome. Here and there are friends whom I want to embrace before leaving Europe. Another is waiting for me in Madrid…”

“Very well; I shall spend that night of vigil with you.”

“And we shall drink Shiraz wine,” said Ménalque.

A few days after that evening, Marceline began to be less well. I have said already that she was often tired; but she avoided complaining, and as I attributed this fatigue to her condition, I thought it quite natural and avoided worrying about it. An old doctor, rather stupid, or insufficiently informed, had at first reassured us far too completely. However, new disorders, accompanied by fever, decided me to call in Doctor Tr., who passed at that time for the most judicious specialist. He was astonished that I had not called him sooner, and prescribed a strict regimen which for some time already she ought to have been following. Out of a very imprudent courage, Marceline had until that day overtaxed herself; until her delivery, which was expected toward the end of January, she was to keep to the long chair. A little uneasy, no doubt, and in more pain than she cared to admit, Marceline submitted very gently to the most vexatious prescriptions. A brief revolt shook her nevertheless when Tr. ordered her quinine, in doses which she knew her child might suffer from. For three days she obstinately refused to take it; then, as the fever increased, to that too she had to submit; but this time it was with a great sadness and as though with a painful renunciation of the future; a kind of religious resignation broke down the will that had upheld her until then, so that her condition suddenly grew worse during the few days that followed.

I surrounded her with still more care and reassured her as best I could, using the very words of Tr., who saw nothing at all serious in her condition; but the violence of her fears ended by alarming me in my turn. Ah! how dangerously our happiness already rested upon hope! and upon what an uncertain future! I who at first found savour in nothing but the past — the sudden savour of the instant was able to intoxicate me for a day, I thought, but the future disenchants the present hour, still more than the present disenchanted the past; and ever since our night at Sorrento, already all my love, all my life project themselves upon what is to come.

Meanwhile the evening came that I had promised to Ménalque; and in spite of how it troubled me to leave Marceline for a whole winter night, I made her accept as best I could the solemnity of the appointment, the gravity of my promise. Marceline was a little better that evening, and yet I was uneasy; a nurse took my place beside her. But once in the street, my anxiety took on a new force; I pushed it away, struggled against it, angry with myself for not freeing myself from it better. In this way I came little by little to a state of over-tension, of singular exaltation, very different from and at the same time very close to the painful anxiety that had given rise to it, but closer still to happiness. It was late; I walked with long strides; the snow began to fall thickly; I was happy to breathe at last a keener air, to fight against the cold, happy against the wind, the night, the snow; I savoured my own energy.

Ménalque, who heard me coming, appeared on the stair landing. He had been waiting for me without patience. He was pale and looked a little tense. He relieved me of my coat, and made me exchange my wet boots for soft Persian slippers. On a small round table, near the fire, sweetmeats had been set out. Two lamps lit the room, less than the hearth did. Ménalque, from the very first, asked after Marceline’s health. To keep matters simple, I answered that she was very well.

“Your child — you expect it soon?” he went on.

“In two months.”

Ménalque bent toward the fire, as though he wished to hide his face. He said nothing. He kept silent so long that in the end I was quite ill at ease, no more knowing what to say to him than he to me. I rose, took a few steps, then, coming close to him, laid my hand on his shoulder. Then, as if pursuing his own thought:

“One must choose,” he murmured. “What matters is to know what one wants…”

“Well! do you not want to go?” I asked him, uncertain what meaning I ought to give his words.

“So it seems.”

“You are hesitating, then?”

“What would be the good? — You who have a wife and a child, stay… Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know only one. To envy another man’s happiness is folly; one would not know how to use it. Happiness is not to be had ready-made, but made to measure. — I leave tomorrow; I know it: I have tried to cut this happiness to my own size… Keep the quiet happiness of the hearth…”

“It was to my own size too that I had cut my happiness,” I cried. “But I have grown. Now my happiness is tight on me. Sometimes I am almost strangled by it!…”

“Bah! you will get used to it!” said Ménalque; then he planted himself in front of me, plunged his gaze into mine, and as I could find nothing to say, he smiled a little sadly: “One believes that one possesses, and one is possessed,” he went on. “Pour yourself some Shiraz, my dear Michel; you will not taste it often; and eat some of those rose-colored sweets the Persians take with it. For this evening I want to drink with you, to forget that I leave tomorrow, and to talk as if this night were long… Do you know what makes poetry today, and philosophy above all, a dead letter? It is that they have separated themselves from life. Greece, now, idealized out of life itself; so that the artist’s life was already of itself a poetic achievement; the philosopher’s life, a putting into action of his philosophy; so that too, mingled with life instead of ignoring one another, philosophy feeding poetry, poetry expressing philosophy, the thing had an admirable power to persuade. Today beauty no longer acts; action no longer troubles itself to be beautiful; and wisdom operates apart.”

“Why,” said I, “do you who live your wisdom not write your memoirs? — or simply,” I went on, seeing him smile, “the recollections of your travels?”

“Because I do not wish to remember,” he answered. “In doing so I should think I was keeping the future from coming and letting the past encroach. It is out of the perfect forgetting of yesterday that I create the newness of each hour. To have been happy is never enough for me. I do not believe in dead things, and I confuse being no longer with never having been.”

These words irritated me at last, running too far ahead of my own thought; I should have liked to draw back, to stop him; but I sought in vain for a contradiction, and besides I was irritated at myself still more than at Ménalque. So I kept silent. He, now going back and forth like a caged beast, now bending toward the fire, would fall silent for a long while, and then, abruptly, would say:

“If only our mediocre brains knew how to embalm memories properly! But memories keep badly. The most delicate are stripped bare, the most voluptuous rot; the most delicious are the most dangerous afterward. What one repents of was delicious to begin with.”

Again, a long silence; and then he would go on:

“Regrets, remorse, repentance — these are the joys of a while ago, seen from behind. I do not like to look backward, and I leave my past far off behind me, as the bird, in order to fly, leaves its shadow. Ah! Michel, every joy is always waiting for us, but it wants to find the bed empty, to be the only one, and that we should come to it as a widower comes. — Ah! Michel! every joy is like that manna of the desert which spoils from one day to the next; it is like the water of the spring Amélès which, Plato tells us, could be kept in no vessel… Let each instant carry away everything it had brought.

Ménalque talked on for a long time yet; I cannot set down here all his sentences; many of them, however, engraved themselves in me, the more deeply for my having wished to forget them the more quickly; not that they taught me anything very new — but they abruptly laid bare my own thought; a thought I had covered with so many veils that I had almost been able to hope it smothered. So the evening wore away.

When, in the morning, after seeing Ménalque to the train that carried him off, I set out alone to go back to Marceline, I felt full of an abominable sadness, of hatred for Ménalque’s cynical joy; I wanted it to be a sham; I strove to deny it. I was vexed at having been able to answer him nothing: I was vexed at having said a few words that might have made him doubt my happiness, my love. And I clung to my doubtful happiness, to my “quiet happiness,” as Ménalque called it; I could not, alas, keep uneasiness away from it, but I claimed that this uneasiness served as nourishment to love. I leaned toward the future, where already I saw my little child smiling at me; for him my morality was forming itself anew and growing strong… Decidedly, I walked with a firm step.

Alas! when I came in that morning, an unaccustomed disorder struck me from the first room. The nurse came to meet me and told me, in measured words, that dreadful anguish had seized my wife in the night, then pains, although she did not believe herself yet at the term of her pregnancy; that, feeling very ill, she had sent for the doctor, and that he, though he had come in haste during the night, had not yet left the patient; then, seeing my pallor I suppose, she tried to reassure me, telling me that everything was already much better, that… I rushed toward Marceline’s room.

The room was dimly lit; and at first I made out only the doctor, who with his hand enjoined silence on me; then, in the shadow, a figure I did not know. Anxiously, without a sound, I went up to the bed. Marceline’s eyes were closed; she was so terribly pale that at first I thought her dead; but, without opening her eyes, she turned her head toward me. In a dark corner of the room the unknown figure was putting away, hiding, various objects; I saw shining instruments, cotton wool; I saw, or thought I saw, a cloth stained with blood… I felt that I was reeling. I fell almost against the Doctor; he held me up. I understood; I was afraid of understanding.

“The little one?” I asked anxiously.

He gave a sad shrug of the shoulders. — No longer knowing what I did, I flung myself against the bed, sobbing. Ah! sudden future! The ground was giving way abruptly under my step; before me there was nothing now but an empty hole into which I stumbled headlong.

Here everything blurs together into one dark memory. Yet at first Marceline seemed to recover fairly quickly. The holidays at the beginning of the year leaving me a little respite, I was able to spend beside her almost every hour of the day. Beside her I read, I wrote, or I read softly aloud to her. I never went out without bringing her back a few flowers. I remembered the tender care with which she had surrounded me when it was I who was ill, and I surrounded her with so much love that at times she smiled at it, as though happy. Not a word was exchanged on the subject of the sad accident that had bruised our hopes…

Then phlebitis declared itself: and when it began to subside, an embolism suddenly set Marceline between life and death. It was at night; I see myself again bending over her, feeling my own heart, with hers, stop or come back to life. How many nights I watched by her in that way! my gaze obstinately fixed upon her, hoping, by dint of love, to insinuate a little of my life into hers. And if I no longer thought much about happiness, my one sad joy was to see Marceline smile now and then.

My course had begun again. Where did I find the strength to prepare my lectures, to deliver them?… My memory fails me and I do not know how the weeks followed one on another. — One small incident, however, that I want to tell you:

It is a morning, a little while after the embolism; I am beside Marceline; she seems somewhat better, but the strictest immobility is still prescribed for her; she must not even move her arms. I bend down to give her a drink, and when she has drunk and I am still bending near her, in a voice that her agitation makes fainter still, she asks me to open a casket that her eyes point out to me; it is there, on the table; I open it; it is full of ribbons, of scraps of stuff, of little trinkets of no value; — what is it she wants? I bring the box over to the bed; I take out each object one by one. Is it this? that?… no; not yet; and I feel that she is growing a little anxious. — Ah! Marceline! it is that little rosary you want! — She makes an effort to smile.

“Are you afraid, then, that I do not take care of you enough?”

“Oh! my dear!” she murmurs. — And I remember our conversation at Biskra, her timid reproach at hearing me reject what she calls “the help of God.” I go on a little roughly:

“I recovered quite well by myself.”

“I prayed so much for you,” she answers. — She says it tenderly, sadly; I feel in her look a pleading anxiety… I take the rosary and slip it into her weakened hand, which lies on the sheet, against her. A look laden with tears and with love rewards me — but one that I cannot answer; a moment longer I linger, not knowing what to do, ill at ease; at last, unable to bear it:

“Good-bye,” I say to her — and I leave the room, hostile, and as though I had been driven out of it.

Meanwhile the embolism had brought on fairly serious disorders; the dreadful clot of blood, which the heart had thrown off, wearied and congested the lungs, obstructed the breathing, made it difficult and wheezing. I thought I should never see her well again. Sickness had entered into Marceline, inhabited her henceforth, marked her, stained her. It was a damaged thing.