The Immoralist — Chapter 13

Chapter 14 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

So I tried, once again, to close my hand upon my love. But what need had I of quiet happiness? The happiness Marceline gave me, and that she stood for in my eyes, was like rest offered to a man who does not feel tired. — But since I felt that she was weary and that she had need of my love, I wrapped her in it and pretended it came from my own need of it. I felt her suffering intolerably; it was to heal her of it that I loved her.

Ah! passionate care, tender vigils! As other men inflame their faith by exaggerating its observances, so did I develop my love. — And Marceline, I tell you, took at once to hoping again. There was still so much youth in her; in me so much promise, she believed. We fled from Paris as though for a second wedding. But from the very first day of the journey she began to grow much worse: we had to stop as early as Neuchâtel.

How I loved that lake with its dull green shores! nothing alpine about it, and its waters, like the waters of a marsh, mingle long with the land and filter among the reeds. In a very comfortable hotel I was able to find Marceline a room looking out upon the lake; I did not leave her all day long.

She was so far from well that the very next day I sent for a doctor from Lausanne. He was anxious — quite needlessly — to know whether I already knew of other cases of tuberculosis in my wife's family. I answered that I did; yet I knew of none; but it was distasteful to me to say that I myself had been all but given up for it, and that before nursing me Marceline had never been ill. And I laid the whole blame on the embolism, though the doctor would see in it nothing but an incidental cause and assured me that the disease went back much further. He urged upon us the open air of the high Alps, where Marceline, he declared, would recover; and as it happened that my own wish was to spend the whole winter in the Engadine, we set out again as soon as Marceline was well enough to bear the journey.

I remember every sensation of that road as though it were an event. The weather was clear and cold; we had brought our warmest furs… At Chur, the ceaseless racket of the hotel kept us almost entirely from sleeping. I would have made light of a sleepless night, which would have left me no more tired; but Marceline… And it was not so much the noise that vexed me as her being unable, in spite of the noise, to find sleep. She had such need of it! — Next day we started before dawn; we had booked the seats of the coupé in the Chur diligence; the relays are well arranged and make it possible to reach Saint-Moritz in a single day.

Tiefenkasten, the Julier, Samaden… I remember it all, hour by hour; the wholly new quality of the air and its harshness; the sound of the horses' bells; my hunger; the midday halt in front of the inn; the raw egg I broke into the soup, the brown bread and the coldness of the sour wine. — Such coarse fare suited Marceline badly; she could eat almost nothing but a few dry biscuits which I had luckily taken care to bring for the road. — I see again the fall of day, the swift climb of the shadow up the wooded slopes; then another halt. The air grows keener and rawer all the time. When the diligence stops, one plunges to the very heart of the night and into a limpid silence; limpid… there is no other word. The least sound takes on, against that strange transparency, its perfect quality and its full sonority. We start off again into the night. Marceline coughs… Oh! will she never stop coughing? I think back to the Sousse diligence. It seems to me I coughed better than that. She strains too hard… How weak she looks, and how changed; in the shadow, like this, I should hardly know her. How drawn her features are! Did one always see the two black holes of her nostrils like that? — Oh! she is coughing dreadfully. That is the plainest result of her nursing. I loathe sympathy; every contagion hides in it; one ought to sympathize only with the strong. — Oh! she really can bear no more! Shall we not soon be there?… What is she doing?… She takes her handkerchief; carries it to her lips; turns away… Horror! is she too going to spit blood? — Brutally I tear the handkerchief out of her hands. In the half-light of the lantern I look… Nothing. But I have shown my anguish too plainly; Marceline sadly tries to smile and murmurs:

"No; not yet."

At last we arrive. It is none too soon; she can hardly stand. The rooms prepared for us do not satisfy me; we shall pass the night in them, and tomorrow we shall change. Nothing seems to me fine enough, or too dear. And as the winter season has not yet begun, the immense hotel is nearly empty; I can take my choice. I take two spacious rooms, light and simply furnished; adjoining them a large sitting-room ending in a wide bow-window from which one can see both the hideous blue lake and some brutal mountain or other, its slopes either too wooded or too bare. It is there that our meals will be served to us. The apartment costs a fortune, but what does that matter to me! I no longer have my lectures, it is true, but I am having La Morinière sold. And then we shall see. Besides, what need have I of money? What need have I of any of it?… I have grown strong now… I think a complete change of fortune must be as much of an education as a complete change of health… Marceline, for her part, needs luxury; she is weak… ah! for her I want to spend so much, and so much more, that… And I conceived at once a horror and a taste for that luxury. I washed my sensuality in it, bathed it there, and then wished it vagabond.

Meanwhile Marceline was getting better, and my constant care was winning the day. As she had difficulty in eating, I ordered delicate, tempting dishes to stimulate her appetite; we drank the best wines. I persuaded myself that she took great pleasure in them, so much did those foreign vintages amuse me that we tried each day. There were harsh wines of the Rhine; Tokays almost syrupy that filled me with their heady virtue. I remember an odd Barba-grisca, of which only one bottle was left, so that I could never know whether the preposterous taste it had would have been found again in the others.

Every day we went out driving; then, once the snow had fallen, in a sleigh, wrapped to the chin in furs. I came in with my face on fire, full of appetite, and then of sleep. — Meanwhile I had not given up all work, and every day I found more than an hour in which to meditate on what I felt I had to say. Of history there was no longer any question; for a long time now my historical studies had interested me only as a means of psychological investigation. I have told you how I had been able to fall in love with the past again, when I thought I saw troubling resemblances in it; I had dared to claim that, by pressing the dead hard enough, I might obtain from them some secret indication about life… Now young Athalaric himself might have risen from his tomb to speak to me; I no longer listened to the past. — And how should an ancient answer have satisfied my new question: What more is man capable of? That was what it mattered to me to know. What man has said up to now, is it all he could say? Has he been ignorant of nothing in himself? Is there nothing left him but to repeat?… And every day there grew in me the confused sense of untouched riches, which cultures, decencies, moralities covered, hid, and stifled.

It seemed to me then that I had been born for some unknown kind of discovery; and I grew strangely impassioned in that dark search of mine, for which, I know, the searcher had to abjure and thrust away from him culture, decency, and morality.

I came to relish nothing in others but their wildest manifestations, and to deplore that any constraint whatever should repress them. I came near to seeing in honesty nothing but restrictions, conventions, or fear. It would have pleased me to cherish it as a rare difficulty; our manners had made of it the mutual and commonplace form of a contract. In Switzerland it is part of the comfort. I understood that Marceline had need of it; but I did not for all that hide from her the new course of my thoughts. At Neuchâtel already, when she was praising that honesty which there exudes from the walls and from the faces:

"My own is amply enough for me," I retorted; "I hold honest folk in horror. If I have nothing to fear from them, neither have I anything to learn. And they, for that matter, have nothing to say… Honest Swiss people! Good health does them no good… Without crimes, without history, without literature, without arts, they are a sturdy rose-bush with neither thorns nor flowers…"

That this honest country would bore me was what I knew beforehand; but at the end of two months, that boredom turning into a kind of rage, I could think of nothing but going away.

It was the middle of January. Marceline was better, much better: the small continuous fever that had slowly been undermining her had died out; fresher blood was giving her cheeks their color again; she walked willingly once more, though not far; she was no longer, as before, constantly weary. I had no great trouble in persuading her that all the benefit of that bracing air had been gained, that nothing could be better for her now than to go down into Italy, where the mild favor of spring would complete her recovery — and above all I had no great trouble in persuading myself, so weary was I of those heights.

And yet, now that in my idleness the hated past regains its force, it is these memories, above all others, that haunt me. Swift runs in the sleigh; the joyous lash of the dry air, the spatter of the snow, appetite; — uncertain walking in the fog, the strange sonority of voices, the abrupt appearance of objects; reading in the well-sealed sitting-room, the landscape through the pane, the frozen landscape; — the tragic waiting for snow; — the disappearance of the outer world, the voluptuous huddling of one's thoughts… Oh, to skate again with her, out there, alone, on that small pure lake ringed with larches, lost; then to come home with her, in the evening…

The descent into Italy had for me all the dizziness of a fall. The weather was fine. As we sank into air that was warmer and denser, the rigid trees of the summits, the regular larches and firs, gave way to a vegetation rich in soft grace and ease. It seemed to me that I was leaving abstraction for life, and, although it was winter, I imagined scents everywhere. Ah! for far too long we had laughed at nothing but shadows! My privation intoxicated me, and it was with thirst that I was drunk, as others are drunk with wine. The hoard I had laid up of my life was admirable; on the threshold of that tolerant and promising land, all my appetites broke out. An enormous reserve of love swelled in me; at times it flowed up from the depths of my flesh to my head and set my thoughts running wild.

That illusion of spring did not last long. The abrupt change of altitude may have unsettled me for a moment, but as soon as we had left the sheltered shores of the lakes, Bellagio, Como, where we lingered a few days, we found winter and rain. The cold, which we had borne well in the Engadine, no longer dry and light as on the heights but damp now and sullen, began to make us suffer. Marceline started coughing again. Then, to escape the cold, we went farther south: we left Milan for Florence, Florence for Rome, Rome for Naples, which, under the winter rain, is surely the most dismal city I know. I dragged a nameless boredom about with me. We came back to Rome to look, in default of warmth, for some semblance of comfort. On the Monte Pincio we rented an apartment that was too large, but admirably situated. At Florence already, dissatisfied with the hotels, we had taken for three months an exquisite villa on the Viale dei Celli. Another man would have wished to live there always… We did not stay twenty days. At every new stage, however, I took care to arrange everything as though we were never to leave again. A stronger demon drove me on… Add to this that we carried no fewer than eight trunks. There was one filled entirely with books, and which, during the whole journey, I did not open even once.

I would not allow Marceline to concern herself with our expenses, or to try to keep them down. That they were excessive I certainly knew, and that they could not go on. I had ceased counting on the money from La Morinière; it brought in nothing now, and Bocage wrote that he could find no buyer. But every consideration of the future ended only in making me spend more. Ah! what need should I have of so much, once I was alone!… I thought; and, full of anguish and of expectation, I watched Marceline's frail life dwindling faster still than my fortune.

Although she left every care to me, these headlong journeys tired her; but what tired her more — I dare now admit it to myself — was the fear of my thought.

"I see it plainly," she said to me one day, "I quite understand your doctrine — for it is a doctrine now. It is beautiful, perhaps," — then she added lower, sadly: "But it does away with the weak."

"That is as it should be," I answered at once, in spite of myself.

Then it seemed to me that I felt that delicate creature, under the terror of my brutal words, fold in upon herself and shiver… Ah! perhaps you are going to think that I did not love Marceline. I swear that I loved her passionately. Never had she been, or seemed to me, so beautiful. Illness had refined her features and, as it were, made them rapt. I scarcely ever left her now, surrounded her with unceasing care, protected her, watched over every moment of her days and of her nights. Light as her sleep was, I trained my own sleep to be lighter still; I watched her fall asleep and I woke the first. When at times, leaving her for an hour, I wished to walk alone in the country or in the streets, some anxiety of love I cannot name, and the dread of her being left dull, quickly called me back to her; and sometimes I summoned up my will, protested against that hold upon me, said to myself: is that all you are worth, you sham great man! — and forced myself to prolong my absence; — but then I came back with my arms full of flowers, flowers from an early garden or hothouse flowers… Yes, I tell you; I cherished her tenderly. But how am I to express this?… The less I respected myself, the more I venerated her; — and who shall say how many passions and how many hostile thoughts can dwell together in one man?…

The bad weather had long since ended; the season was advancing; and suddenly the almond trees flowered. — It was the first of March. I go down in the morning to the Piazza di Spagna. The peasants have stripped the countryside of its white boughs, and almond blossom loads the sellers' baskets. My delight is such that I buy a whole grove of it. Three men carry it home for me. I come back with all that spring. The branches catch on the doorways; petals snow down upon the carpet. I put them everywhere, in every vase; I whiten the sitting-room with them — Marceline, for the moment, is out. Already I am rejoicing in her joy… I hear her coming. Here she is. She opens the door. What is the matter with her?… She staggers… She bursts into sobs.

"What is it? My poor Marceline…"

I hurry to her, cover her with tender caresses. Then, as if to excuse her tears:

"The smell of these flowers hurts me," she says…

And it was a faint, faint, a discreet smell of honey… Without a word I seize those innocent fragile branches, break them, carry them off, fling them away, exasperated, the blood in my eyes. — Ah! if she can no longer bear even this little of spring!…

I often think back on those tears, and I believe now that, already feeling herself condemned, it was out of regret for other springs that she wept. — I think too that there are strong joys for the strong, and feeble joys for the feeble whom strong joys would injure. As for her, the least pleasure intoxicated her; a little more brilliance and she could no longer bear it. What she called happiness was what I called rest, and I neither wished nor was able to rest.

Four days later we set out again for Sorrento. I was disappointed to find no more warmth there. Everything seemed to shiver. The wind, which never stopped blowing, tired Marceline greatly. We had wanted to put up at the same hotel as on our earlier journey; we found the same room again… We looked with astonishment, under the dull sky, at all that disenchanted setting, and at the dreary hotel garden that had seemed so charming to us when our love walked in it.

We resolved to go by sea to Palermo, whose climate was praised to us; we returned to Naples, where we were to take ship and where we lingered still. But at Naples at least I was not bored. Naples is a living city where the past does not impose itself.

Nearly every moment of the day I stayed near Marceline. At night she went to bed early, being tired; I watched her fall asleep, and sometimes lay down myself; then, when her more even breathing told me she was sleeping, I got up without a sound, dressed again without a light; I slipped outdoors like a thief.

Outside! oh! I could have cried out with gladness. What was I going to do? I do not know. The sky, overcast by day, had freed itself of clouds; the almost full moon was shining. I walked at random, without aim, without desire, without constraint. I looked at everything with a new eye; I listened for every sound with a more attentive ear; I breathed in the damp of the night; I laid my hand on things; I prowled.

On the last evening we spent at Naples I prolonged this vagabond debauch. Coming back, I found Marceline in tears. She had been frightened, she told me, having woken abruptly and no longer felt me there. I calmed her, explained my absence as best I could and promised myself not to leave her again. — But from the very first night at Palermo I could not hold out; I went out… The first orange trees were in flower; the least breath of air brought their scent…

We stayed only five days at Palermo; then, by a long detour, we came back to Taormina, which we both wished to see again. Have I said that the village is perched rather high in the mountain; the station is down beside the sea. The carriage that took us to the hotel had to bring me back at once toward the station, where I was going to claim our trunks. I had stood up in the carriage to talk with the driver. He was a young Sicilian from Catania, as handsome as a line of Theocritus, radiant, fragrant, savoury as a fruit.

"Com'è bella la Signora!" he said in a charming voice, watching Marceline move away.

"Anche tu sei bello, ragazzo," I answered; and, as I was leaning toward him, I could not hold back and, in a moment, drawing him against me, kissed him. He let me do it, laughing.

"I Francesi sono tutti amanti," he said.

"Ma non tutti gli Italiani amati," I returned, laughing too… I looked for him on the following days, but could not manage to see him again.

We left Taormina for Syracuse. Step by step we were unmaking our first journey, going back up toward the beginning of our love. And just as, week by week, on that first journey, I had been moving toward recovery, so week by week, as we advanced toward the South, Marceline's condition grew worse.

By what aberration, what obstinate blindness, what deliberate madness did I persuade myself, and above all try to persuade her, that she needed still more light and warmth, did I invoke the memory of my convalescence at Biskra… Yet the air had grown mild; the bay of Palermo is gentle and Marceline was happy there. There, perhaps, she would have… But was I master of choosing what I willed? of deciding my desire?

At Syracuse the state of the sea and the irregular service of the boats forced us to wait eight days. Every moment that I did not spend beside Marceline I spent in the old harbour. O little port of Syracuse! smells of soured wine, muddy lanes, the stinking stall where dockers, vagrants and drunken boatmen rolled about. The company of the worst men was delectable company to me. And what need had I to understand their language well, when all my flesh savoured it. In my eyes the brutality of their passion still took on a hypocritical look of health, of vigour. And it was no use telling myself that their wretched life could not have for them the taste it took on for me… Ah! I should have liked to roll under the table with them and to wake only at the sad shiver of morning. And beside them I exasperated my growing horror of luxury, of comfort, of all that I had surrounded myself with, of that protection which my new health had shown to be needless, of all those precautions one takes to preserve one's body from the hazardous contact of life. I imagined their existence further on. I should have liked to follow them further, and to enter into their drunkenness… Then suddenly I saw Marceline again. What was she doing at that moment? She was suffering, weeping perhaps… I got up in haste; I ran; I went back to the hotel, over whose door there seemed to be written: The poor do not come in here.

Marceline always received me in the same way; without a word of reproach or of doubt, and forcing herself in spite of everything to smile. — We took our meals apart; I had served to her all the best that the indifferent hotel could set aside. And during the meal I thought: a piece of bread, some cheese, a stalk of fennel is enough for them and would be enough for me as it is for them. And perhaps out there, quite close by, there are some who are hungry and who have not even that meagre pittance… And here on my table is enough to fill them for three days! I should have liked to break down the walls, to let the guests come flooding in… For to feel that men were suffering hunger was becoming a frightful anguish to me. And I would go back to the old harbour, where I scattered at random the small coins with which I had filled my pockets.

Man's poverty is a slave; in order to eat it accepts work without pleasure; all work that is not joyous is detestable, I thought, and I paid for the idleness of several of them. I said: "Don't work, then: it bores you." I dreamed for each of them of that leisure without which no novelty, no vice, no art can come into flower.

Marceline was not mistaken about what I was thinking; when I came back from the old harbour I did not hide from her what sorry people surrounded me there. — Everything is in man. Marceline saw clearly enough what I was so bent on discovering; and when I reproached her with believing too often in virtues that she invented in each being as she went along:

"You," she said to me, "are content only when you have made them show some vice. Don't you see that our gaze develops, exaggerates in each person the very point on which it fastens? and that we make him become what we claim he is."

I should have liked her not to be right, but I had to admit to myself that in every being the worst instinct seemed to me the most sincere. — And then, what was it I called sincerity?

At last we left Syracuse. The memory and the desire of the South obsessed me. At sea Marceline was better… I see again the tone of the sea. It is so calm that the ship's wake seems to last upon it. I hear the sounds of dripping, the liquid sounds; the washing of the deck, and on the planks the slap of the washers' bare feet. I see Malta again, all white; the approach to Tunis… How changed I am!

It is hot. The weather is fine. Everything is splendid. Ah! I should like a whole harvest of voluptuousness to be distilled here in every sentence… In vain should I try now to impose upon my account more order than there was in my life. Long enough I have tried to tell you how I became who I am. Ah! to rid my mind of this unbearable logic!… I feel nothing but what is noble in me.

Tunis. Light more abundant than strong. Even the shade is filled with it. The air itself seems a luminous fluid in which everything bathes, into which one plunges, in which one swims. — This land of voluptuousness satisfies desire but does not quiet it, and every satisfaction exalts it.

A land on holiday from works of art. I despise those who can recognize beauty only when it has already been transcribed and wholly interpreted. The Arab people have this admirable thing about them, that their art they live, they sing and squander it from day to day; they do not fix it and do not embalm it in any work. That is at once the cause and the effect of the absence of great artists… I have always held the great artists to be those who dare grant the right of beauty to things so natural that afterwards whoever sees them says: "How is it that until now I had not understood that this too was beautiful?…"

At Kairouan, which I did not yet know, and where I went without Marceline, the night was very beautiful. Just as I was about to go back and sleep at the hotel, I remembered a group of Arabs lying out in the open on the mats of a little café. I went off and slept close against them. I came back covered with vermin.

The damp heat of the coast weakening Marceline greatly, I persuaded her that what we needed was to reach Biskra as quickly as possible. It was the beginning of April.

This journey is very long. The first day we reach Constantine in one stretch; the second day Marceline is very tired and we go only as far as El Kantara. — There, toward evening, we looked for and found a shade more delicious and cooler than the light of the moon at night. It was like an inexhaustible draught; it streamed down as far as us. And from the bank where we sat one could see the blazing plain. That night Marceline cannot sleep; the strangeness of the silence and of the least sounds troubles her. I am afraid she has a little fever. I hear her stirring on her bed. The next day I find her paler. We set off again.

Biskra. So this is what I have been coming to… Yes; here is the public garden; the bench… I recognize the bench where I sat in the first days of my convalescence. What was I reading there?… Homer; since then I have not opened him again. — Here is the tree whose bark I went to feel. How weak I was then!… Look! here are children… No, I recognize none of them. How grave Marceline is! She is as changed as I am. Why does she cough, in this fine weather? — Here is the hotel. Here are our rooms; our terraces. — What is Marceline thinking? She has not said a word to me. — As soon as she reaches her room she stretches out on the bed; she is tired and says she wants to sleep a little. I go out.

I do not recognize the children, but the children recognize me. Forewarned of my arrival, they all come running. Is it possible that these are they? What a disappointment! What can have happened? They have grown frightfully… In barely a little more than two years — it is not possible… what fatigues, what vices, what idleness have already laid so much ugliness on these faces, where so much youth used to blaze. What vile labours have so early warped these beautiful bodies? There is something like a bankruptcy here… I ask questions. Bachir is a dishwashing boy in a café; Ashour earns a few sous with great difficulty breaking stones for the roads; Hammatar has lost an eye. Who would have believed it? Sadeck has settled down; he helps an elder brother sell bread in the market; he seems to have grown stupid. Agib has set up as a butcher beside his father; he is getting fat; he is ugly; he is rich; he will no longer speak to his companions who have come down in the world… How honourable careers do stupefy a man! Am I to find among them, then, the very thing I hated among us? — Boubaker? — He is married. He is not fifteen. It is grotesque. — And yet no; I saw him again that evening. He explains: his marriage is only a sham. He is, I believe, a thorough debauchee! But he drinks; he is losing his shape… And so this is all that remains? So this is what life makes of them! — I feel by my intolerable sadness that it was very largely them I had come back to see. — Ménalque was right: memory is an invention of unhappiness.

And Moktir? — Ah! that one is just out of prison. He keeps out of sight. The others no longer have anything to do with him. I should like to see him again. He was the handsomest of them all; is he going to disappoint me too?… They find him. They bring him to me. — No! this one has not failed. Even my memory did not represent him to me as so superb. His strength and his beauty are perfect… Recognizing me, he smiles.

"And what were you doing, then, before you were in prison?"

"Nothing."

"You stole?"

He protests.

"What do you do now?"

He smiles.

"Well then, Moktir! if you have nothing to do, you shall come with us to Touggourt." — And I am suddenly seized with the desire to go to Touggourt.

Marceline is not well; I do not know what is happening within her. When I come back to the hotel that evening, she presses herself against me without a word, her eyes closed. Her wide sleeve, slipping back, lets her wasted arm be seen. I caress her, and rock her a long while, like a child one wants to put to sleep. Is it love, or anguish, or fever that makes her tremble so?… Ah! perhaps there would still be time… Am I not going to stop? — I have looked for and I have found what makes my worth: a kind of stubbornness in the worst. — But how am I to bring myself to tell Marceline that tomorrow we leave for Touggourt?…

At this hour she is asleep in the next room. The moon, long since risen, now floods the terrace. — It is a brightness that is almost frightening. There is no hiding from it. My room has white flagstones, and it is there above all that it shows. Its flood comes in through the wide-open window. I recognize its light in the room and the shadow the door casts there. Two years ago it came in further still… yes, precisely there where it reaches now — when I got up, giving up all thought of sleep. I was leaning my shoulder against the jamb of that very door. I recognize the stillness of the palms… What words was it, then, that I had read that evening?… Ah! yes; the words of Christ to Peter: “Now you gird yourself, and you go where you would go…” Where am I going? Where would I go?… I have not told you that from Naples, this last time, I went one day, alone, as far as Paestum… Ah! I could have sobbed before those stones! The ancient beauty appeared there, simple, perfect, smiling — abandoned. Art is going out of me, I feel it. To make room for what else? It is no longer, as it once was, a smiling harmony… I no longer know the dark god I serve. O new God! grant me to know still other races, unforeseen kinds of beauty.

The next day, at first light, the coach carries us off; Moktir is with us. Moktir is as happy as a king.

Chegga; Kefeldorh…; M’reyer… dreary stages along a road drearier still, interminable. I had expected these oases, I confess, to be more cheerful. But nothing any more save stone and sand; then a few dwarf bushes oddly in flower; here and there some attempt at palms, fed by a hidden spring… To the oasis I now prefer the desert… that land of deadly glory and intolerable splendour. Man’s effort there looks ugly and wretched. Now every other country wearies me.

“You love the inhuman,” says Marceline. But how she looks at it herself! and with what avidity!

The weather turns a little bad on the second day; that is to say, the wind rises and the horizon grows dull. Marceline suffers; the sand one breathes burns and irritates her throat; the overabundant light tires her eyes; this hostile landscape bruises her. — But it is too late now to turn back. In a few hours we shall be at Touggourt.

It is of this last part of the journey, though it is still so recent, that I have the least clear memory. It is impossible for me now to see again the landscapes of the second day, or what I did first at Touggourt. But what I do still remember is my impatience and my haste.

It had been very cold that morning. Toward evening a burning simoom rises. — Marceline, worn out by the journey, went to bed as soon as we arrived. I had hoped to find a rather more comfortable hotel; our room is dreadful; the sand, the sun and the flies have tarnished, dirtied, faded everything. Having eaten almost nothing since dawn, I have the meal served at once; but everything seems bad to Marceline, and I cannot persuade her to take anything. We have brought with us the makings of tea. I busy myself with these derisory attentions. For dinner we make do with a few dry biscuits and this tea, to which the salt water of the country has given its detestable taste.

By a last semblance of virtue, I stay beside her until evening. And suddenly I feel as though I too were at the end of my strength. O taste of ashes! O weariness! Sadness of superhuman effort! I scarcely dare look at her; I know too well that my eyes, instead of seeking hers, will go and fasten horribly on the black holes of her nostrils; the expression of her suffering face is atrocious. She does not look at me either. I feel her anguish as though I were touching it. She coughs a great deal; then falls asleep. Now and then a sudden shiver shakes her.

The night may be a bad one, and before it is too late I want to know whom I might turn to. I go out. In front of the hotel door, the square of Touggourt, the streets, the very air are strange to the point of making me believe that it is not I who see them. — After a few moments I go back in. Marceline is sleeping quietly. I alarmed myself for nothing; in this bizarre country one supposes danger everywhere; it is absurd. And, sufficiently reassured, I go out again.

A strange nocturnal animation on the square; a silent coming and going; the clandestine gliding of white burnooses. Now and then the wind tears off shreds of strange music and brings them from I know not where. Someone comes up to me… It is Moktir. He was waiting for me, he says, and was sure I would come out again. He laughs. He knows Touggourt well, comes here often, and knows where he is taking me. I let myself be led by him.

We walk on in the night; we go into a Moorish café; it was from there that the music was coming. Arab women are dancing there — if one can call a dance that monotonous gliding. — One of them takes me by the hand; I follow her; she is Moktir’s mistress; he comes with us… The three of us go into the narrow, deep room whose only furniture is a bed… A very low bed, on which one sits. A white rabbit, shut up in the room, takes fright at first, then grows tame and comes to eat out of Moktir’s hand. Coffee is brought us. Then, while Moktir plays with the rabbit, this woman draws me to her, and I let myself go to her as one lets oneself go to sleep…

Ah! here I might feign, or say nothing — but what is this account to me, if it ceases to be truthful?…

I go back alone to the hotel, Moktir staying there for the night. It is late. A parched sirocco is blowing; a wind all laden with sand, and torrid in spite of the night. After four steps I am streaming with sweat; but suddenly I am in too great a hurry to get back, and it is almost at a run that I return. — She may have woken… perhaps she needs me?… No; the window of the room is dark. I wait for a brief lull in the wind before opening it; I go in very softly in the dark. — What is that sound?… I do not recognize her cough, though… Is it really she?… I strike a light…

Marceline is sitting half up in her bed; one of her thin arms clutches the bars of the bed and holds her upright; her sheets, her hands, her nightgown are drenched with a flood of blood; her face is all soiled with it; her eyes are hideously enlarged; and no cry of agony could terrify me as her silence does. — I look on her sweating face for a little place where I may set a dreadful kiss; the taste of her sweat stays on my lips. I bathe and cool her forehead, her cheeks… Against the bed, something hard beneath my foot: I stoop and pick up the little rosary she asked me for not long ago in Paris, and that she has let fall; I slip it into her open hand, but at once her hand sinks and lets it fall again. — I do not know what to do; I want to go for help… Her hand catches at me desperately, holds me back; ah! does she believe, then, that I mean to leave her? She says to me:

“Oh! you can wait a while yet.” She sees that I want to speak:

“Say nothing to me,” she adds; “all is well.” — Again I pick up the rosary; I put it back into her hand, but again she lets it go — what am I saying? she makes it fall. I kneel beside her and press her hand against me.

She lets herself sink, half against the bolster and half against my shoulder, and seems to sleep a little, but her eyes stay wide open.

An hour later she sits up again; her hand frees itself from mine, clenches on her nightgown and tears the lace of it. She is choking. — Toward daybreak, a fresh vomiting of blood… I have finished telling you my story. What more should I add? — The French cemetery at Touggourt is hideous, half devoured by the sands… What little will I had left, I spent it all in tearing her away from those places of distress. It is at El Kantara that she lies, in the shade of a private garden she loved. All this is barely three months ago. Those three months have set it ten years away.

Michel remained silent for a long time. We too said nothing, each of us seized by a strange uneasiness. It seemed to us, alas, that in telling it to us Michel had made his action more legitimate. Not knowing at what point to disapprove of it, in the slow explanation he gave of it, made us almost his accomplices. We were as though committed to it. — He had finished this account without a tremor in his voice, without an inflection or a gesture to bear witness that any emotion troubled him — whether he took a cynical pride in not appearing moved before us, or whether, out of a kind of modesty, he feared to provoke our emotion by his tears, or whether, finally, he was not moved at all. I cannot make out in him, even now, how much is pride, how much strength, how much dryness or reserve. — After a moment he went on:

What frightens me, I confess, is that I am still very young. It seems to me at times that my real life has not yet begun. Tear me away from here now, and give me reasons for being. I can no longer find any myself. I have freed myself, that may be; but what does it matter? I suffer from this freedom with nothing to use it on. It is not, believe me, that I am weary of my crime, if it please you to call it so — but I must prove to myself that I have not overstepped my right.

When you first knew me, I had a great fixity of thought, and I know that this is what makes real men; — I have it no longer. But this climate, I think, is the cause of it. Nothing so discourages thought as this persistence of blue sky. Here all inquiry is impossible, so closely does pleasure follow upon desire. Surrounded by splendour and by death, I feel happiness too present, and my surrender to it too unvarying. I lie down in the middle of the day to cheat the dreary length of the days and their unbearable leisure.

Here, you see, I have some white pebbles that I let soak in the shade, then hold a long while in the hollow of my hand, until the calming coolness they have taken on is exhausted. Then I begin again, alternating the pebbles, putting back to soak those whose coolness has run dry. Time passes in this, and evening comes… Tear me away from here; I cannot do it myself. Something in my will has broken; I do not even know where I found the strength to leave El Kantara. Sometimes I am afraid that what I have suppressed may take its revenge. — I should like to begin over again from nothing. I should like to rid myself of what remains of my fortune; look, these walls are still covered with it… Here I live on almost nothing. A half-French innkeeper prepares a little food for me. The child you put to flight as you came in brings it to me evening and morning, in exchange for a few coppers and caresses. This child, who turns wild before strangers, is with me as tender and faithful as a dog. — His sister is an Ouled-Naïl who goes back every winter to Constantine, where she sells her body to passers-by. She is very beautiful, and in the first weeks I suffered her sometimes to spend the night beside me. But one morning her brother, little Ali, surprised us lying together. He showed himself greatly angered and would not come back for five days. Yet he is not ignorant of how or on what his sister lives; he used to speak of it before in a tone that showed no embarrassment at all… Was he jealous, then? — Besides, the little joker has had his way; for, half out of boredom, half for fear of losing Ali, since that adventure I have not kept the girl again. She has not taken it ill; but every time I meet her she laughs and jokes about my preferring the child to her. She maintains that it is he above all who keeps me here. Perhaps she is a little right…