PEOPLE SAID TO ME IN THE STREET WHAT THE SERGEANT HAD
SAID to me in the forest. "There you are," they said; "straight
ahead. You can't go wrong."

And I came in fact to a group of great squat buildings full of
windows, through which you could see, like a cage full of flies,
men moving about, but only just moving, as if they were contend-
ing very feebly against Heaven knows what impossibility.
So this was Ford's? And then all about one, and right up to the
sky itself, the heavy many-sided roar of a cataract of machines,
shaping, revolving, groaning, always about to break down and
never breaking down.

"So here we are," said I to myself. "It's not very exciting...."
It was even worse than everywhere else. I went closer, to a door
where it said on a slate that there were men wanted.

I wasn't the only one waiting. One of the others in the queue
told me that he'd been there two days and was still in the same
place. He'd come from Yugoslavia, this goat, to get a job. Another
down-and-out addressed himself to me; he said he'd come to
take a foreman's job just because he felt like it--a madman, a
bluffer.

Hardly any one spoke English in this crowd. They gazed at
one another distrustfully, like animals used to being thrashed.
A urinous, sweaty smell rose from their ranks, like at the hospital.
When they talked to you, you avoided their mouths, because the
poor already smell of death inside.

It was raining on our little army, as we stood very close together
in single file under the eaves. People looking for jobs can
be packed together very tight. What he liked about Ford's, an
old Russian confided in me, was that they took on anybody and
anything. "Only look out," he advised me, "don't miss a day here,
because if you do they'll throw you out in a jiffy and in another
two two's they'll have put one of those mechanical things in your
place, they're always handy; and then if you want to come back,
you're out of luck." He spoke good Parisian, this Russian; he'd
been a taxi-driver for years but then they'd shot him out after a
cocaine affair at Bezons and in the end, playing zanzi with a fare
at Biarritz, he'd staked his taxi and lost it.

It was true what he'd said about their taking on anybody at
Ford's. He hadn't lied. I didn't believe him, though, because
tramps are very apt to talk a lot of hooey. There's a point of
poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It
finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you
were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly respon-
sible. They had us stripped, of course, to start with. The examin-
ation took place in a sort of laboratory. We filed slowly through.
"You're in terrible shape," the assistant informed me, as I came
up, "but that doesn't matter." And I'd been afraid they might
refuse to give me the job because of the fevers I'd had in Africa,
as soon as they noticed, if by any chance they prodded my liver.
But not at all; they seemed very pleased to find invalids and
wrecks in our little lot.

"In the job you'll have here, it won't matter what sort of a
mess you're in," the examining doctor assured me at once.

"So much the better," I replied; "but you know, sir, I'm an
educated man and I once studied medicine myself...

He at once gave me a dirty look. I realized that I'd again
gone and put my foot in it, to my own disadvantage.

"Your studies won't be any use to you here, my lad. You
haven't come here to think, but to go through the motions that
you'll be told to make.... We've no use for intellectuals in this
outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of
advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will
think for you, my friend. Don't forget it."

He was right to warn me. It was better that I should under-
stand their way of doing things and know what to expect. I'd
made enough silly mistakes in the past to last me another ten
years at least. I meant to be taken for a good little worker from
now on. When we'd put on our clothes again, we were sent off
in slow-moving single files and hesitant groups towards the places
where the vast crashing sound of the machines came from. The
whole building shook, and oneself from one's soles to one's
ears was possessed by this shaking, which vibrated from the
ground, the glass panes and all this metal, a series of shocks from
floor to ceiling. One was turned by force into a machine oneself,
the whole of one's carcass quivering in this vast frenzy of noise,
which filled you within and all around the inside of your skull
and lower down rattled your bowels, and climbed to your eyes
in infinite, little, quick unending strokes. As you went along, you
lost your companions. You gave them a little smile when they
fell away, as if it was all the greatest fun in the world. You
couldn't speak to them any longer or hear them. Each time, three
or four stayed behind around a machine.

You resist, though, all the same; you find it difficult to dislike
your own substance; you long to stop it all and be able to think
about it and hear your heart beating clearly within you; but
now it's impossible. It can't stop. Disaster is in this unfortunate
steel trap, and we, we're spinning round in it with the machines,
and with the earth itself. All one great whirling thing. And a
thousand little wheels, and hammers never falling at one time,
their thunders crowding one against the other, some of them so
violent that they spread sort of silences around themselves which
make you feel a little better.

The little bucking trolley car loaded with metal bits and pieces
strives to make headway through the workmen. Out of the light!
They jump aside to let the hysterical little thing pass along.
And hop! There it goes like a mad thing, clinking on its way amid
belts and flywheels, taking the men their rations of fetters.

The workmen bending solicitously over the machines, eager to
keep them happy, are a depressing sight; one hands them the
right-sized screws and still more screws, instead of putting a
stop once and for all to all this smell of oil, and this vapour which
burns your throat and your eardrums from inside.

It isn't shame which makes them hang their heads. You give in
to noise as you give in to war. You let yourself drift to the ma-
chines with the three ideas you have left aflutter somewhere
behind your forehead. And it's all over.... Everywhere you look
now, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still
manage to remember something about has hardened like iron and
lost its savour in your thoughts.

You've become old, all of a sudden,--disgustingly old. Life out-
side you must put away; it must be turned into steel too, into
something useful. You weren't sufficiently fond of it as it was,
that's why. So it must be made into a thing, into something solid.
By Order.

I tried to speak to the foreman, shouting into his ear. He answer-
ed by grunting like a pig, and merely made signs to show me,
very patiently, the extremely simple job I should be engaged on
from then onwards, forever. My minutes and hours, the rest of
my time, would be spent like the rest of them here, in passing
small bolts to the blind man next to me who sorted them out in
size, sorted them out now as he had been sorting them out for
years, the same bolts. I was very bad at it from the start. No one
blamed me at all, but after three days on this first job, I was
moved on, a failure already, to trailing around with the little
trolley of nuts and oddments which went coasting along from one
machine to another. There I left three, here a dozen, yonder only
five. No one spoke to me. One only lived in a sort of suspense
between stupefaction and frenzy. Nothing mattered except the
continuous feeding of the several thousand machines which ordered
all these men about.

When at six o'clock everything stops, you carry the noise away
in your head. I had a whole night's noise and smell of oil in mine,
as if I'd been fitted with a new nose, a new brain for evermore.
So by dint of renunciation, bit by bit I became a different man
--a new Ferdinand. All the same, the wish to see something of the
people outside came back to me. Certainly not any of the hands
from the factory; my mates were mere echoes and whiffs of
machinery like myself, flesh shaken up for good. What I wanted
was to touch a real body, a body rosy and alive, in real, soft,
silent life.

I knew nobody in this town, particularly no women. After a lot
of trouble, I collected the vague address of a "house", a secret
joint in the northern quarter of the town. I wandered about that
part on several consecutive evenings after work, reconnoitering.
The street looked the same as any other, though cleaner perhaps
than mine.

I'd discovered the little house where these goings-on took place;
it had a garden around it. You had to go in quick so that the cop
on a near-by beat could not have noticed anything. It was the first
place I'd been to in America where I was received without brutal-
ity, even kindly, for my five dollars. And they were goodlooking
young women there, plump, bursting with health, grace and strength,
really almost as beautiful as the ones at the Gay Calvin Hotel.

And then too, these at least could be handled quite frankly.
I couldn't help going back there regularly. All my pay was spent
there. When evening came, I needed the promiscuous transports
of these splendid ever-ready creatures, to fashion myself a new
soul. The movie was no longer any good to me, too gentle an
antidote which produced no real effect against the materialistic
horror of the factory. I had to seek starker tonics to keep me
going, a more radical cure. A very moderate fee was all that was
charged me in this house, merely by way of a settlement between
friends, because I'd brought these ladies a tricky system or two
from France. No little tricks on Saturday nights, though; then
trade was at its height and I had to make way for baseball teams
making whoopee, magnificently lusty sods, to whom pleasure
seemed to come as easily as breath itself.

While the players took their joy--which keyed me up too--I
used to write short stories in the kitchen. The enthusiasm these
athletes showed for the personnel of the place fell undoubtedly
short of my own impotent fervour. In the autonomy of their
own health, these basebailers set no great store by physical
perfection. Beauty is like alcohol or comfort; one gets accust-
omed to it and takes it for granted.

They visited the house chiefly for fun. Often they'd end up
fighting like hell. Then the police would come along and carry
off the lot in little vans.

I soon felt for Molly, one of the young women in this place,
an emotion of exceptional trust, which in timid people takes the
place of love. I can remember, as if I'd seen her yesterday, her
gentleness and her long white legs, marvellously lithe and mus-
cular and noble. Whatever they may say, true aristocracy in a
human being is shown in legs, there's no doubt about it.

We became intimate in body and companionable in our minds,
and went out for long walks in town together every week. Molly
was well off; she made close on a hundred dollars a day at the
house. Whereas I at Ford's wasn't earning more than six. The love
she performed for a living didn't tire her at all. Americans manage
like birds in these matters.

In the evening, when I'd finished peddling my little truck around,
I forced myself to look cheerful when I went to see her after
supper. You've got to be gay with women, at any rate at the start.
I was harassed by an overwhelming vague desire to talk to her
about things, but hadn't the strength. Molly understood the stupor
of industrial workers, she was used to the ways of factory hands.

One evening quite suddenly, apropos of nothing, she offered me
fifty dollars. I looked at her at first. I didn't dare take it. I thought
of what my mother would have said at such a thing. And after
that I reflected that my mother, poor woman, had never offered
me as much herself. To please Molly, I went at once and bought
with her dollars a beautiful buff-coloured suit (four piece), which
was what was being worn that spring. They'd never seen me looking
so smart when I turned up that evening at the bordello. The
good lady who ran the place put on her great big gramophone just
to teach me to dance.

After that, Molly and I went off to the movies to try out my
new suit. On the way there she asked me if I was jealous or any-
thing, my clothes were making me look so sad. They made me not
want to go back to the factory, either. A new suit upsets all your
ideas. She kissed the stuff of my new suit with little passionate
kisses, when people weren't looking. I tried to think of something
else.

What a woman this Molly of mine was, though! What generosity!
What a body! What fullness of youth! A feast of desires.

And I began to be all restless again. Pimp, by any chance? I
wondered.

'Don't go back to the works!" Molly urged me, making it
worse. 'Find some small job in an office instead.... Translat-
ing, for example; that's really your line ... you like books...
She was very sweet giving me this advice; she wanted me to be
happy. For the first time in my life a human being was trying
to help me, my own real self, from inside, if I can say it that
way, putting theirself in my place, not merely judging me from
theirs, like everybody else.

Ah, if only I'd met Molly when there was still time to choose
between one road and another! Before I lost my enthusiasm over
that slut of a Musyne and that horrid little bitch Lola! But it was
too late to be young again. I didn't believe in it any more. One
gets old very quickly--and what's more, in an unalterable way.
You notice that by how you've grown attached to your unhappi-
ness, despite yourself. It's that Nature is stronger than you are,
that's all. She tries us out in one mould and we can't ever es-
cape it again. I'd started out myself in a restless direction; grad-
ually you take your role and your destiny seriously, without
properly realizing it, and then when you spin around, it's too late
to change it. You've got all restless; it's fixed that way for
always.

Molly tried very sweetly to keep me by her, to dissuade me.

"Life's as enjoyable here as it is in Europe, you know, Ferdin-
and. We shouldn't be unhappy together...." And in a sense she
was right. "We'll invest what we earn. We'll buy ourselves a
shop.... We'll be like every one else."

She said these things to calm my scruples. Plans for the future.
... I agreed with her. I was even rather ashamed of all the trouble
she took to hold me. I was very fond of her, of course, that's
certainly true, but I was fonder still of my own obsession, of my
longing to run away from everywhere in search of something, God
knows what; prompted no doubt by stupid pride, by a conviction
of some kind of superiority.

I didn't want to annoy her; she guessed it and forestalled my
anxiety. She was so sweet to me that in the end I confessed to
her about being harassed by this mania for beating it from every
place I was at. For days on end she listened to me tiresomely
spreading and explaining myself as I struggled among my phantoms
and my conceits, and she didn't lose patience with me at all.
On the contrary, she simply tried to help me to overcome this
vain and silly agony of mind. She didn't quite understand what
I was driving at with all my talk, but all the same she was ready
to side with me and not my bugbears, or vice versa, whichever I
preferred. She was so gentle in her persuasion that her goodness
became familiar to me and almost personal. But then it seemed to
me that I was beginning not to play fair with this confounded fate
of mine, my raison d'etre, as I called it, and I immediately stop-
ped telling her what was in my thoughts. I turned back alone into
myself, happy to be more miserable now than I'd been before,
because I'd carried back with me into my loneliness a new kind
of distress, something too which bore a resemblance to genuine
feeling.

All that's very ordinary. But Molly was gifted with angelic
patience, and she happened to have a fierce belief in vocations.
Her youngest sister, for instance, at the University of Arizona,
had caught a craze for photographing every sort of little bird in its
nest and eagles in their eyries. So in order that she should be able
to pursue further this fascinating pastime, Molly used to send
her photographer-sister fifty dollars regularly every month. Truly
a heart of infinite goodness, with something really sublime in it,
which could be turned into cash,--not mere bluff, like mine and
so many others. Where I was concerned, Molly wanted nothing
better than to aid me financially in my greasy adventurings. Al-
though at times I struck her as pretty crazy, my obsession seemed
to her genuine and definitely worthy of not being encouraged.
She only begged me to keep a sort of little account for her of an
allowance for expenses which she wished to make me. I couldn't
bring myself to accept this gift. A last shred of decent feeling
prevented me from making more out of this really much too lofty,
generous nature, from speculating further on it. Thus I deliber-
ately fell out with Providence.

At this point I even felt shamed into making an effort or two
to go back to work. Nothing, however, came of my heroic little
gesture. I went as far as the gates of the factory, but on this
boundary line I stood rooted and the thought of all those machines
whirring away in wait for me irrevocably quashed my wish for
work.

I went and stood in front of the main boiler-room window and
watched that multiform monster roaring and pumping and compress-
ing something, I don't know what from I don't know where, through
a thousand shining pipes as complicated and as evillooking as
forest lianas. One morning when I was standing there, gazing
fatuously in, my Russian taxi-driver came along. "Well, buddy,"
he remarked, "you certainly let yourself out all right. ... You
haven't been along for three weeks.... They've got a machine-
thing in your place now.... After all, it's what I warned you
would happen...."

"That being so," I said to myself, "that's that, at any rate....
There's no point in going back now...." And off I went back into
town. On my way home I looked in at the Consulate; I thought
I'd ask if they'd heard anything of a Frenchman called Robinson.

"Yes, indeed we have," the consular people told me. "He's been
along here twice and he's got a false passport and all.... He's
wanted by the police. Do you know the man?" I left it at that.

From then onwards I expected to run into Robinson any minute.
I felt it bound to happen. Molly was very kind and sweet to me
still. In fact, she was even kinder now that she was convinced
I really did want to go away. It wasn't any good, though, being
kind to me. We often went for walks together on the outskirts of
the town these last farewell afternoons.

Little grassy mounds there were, and clumps of birch trees
around miniature lakes, and people dotted about, reading grey-
looking magazines under a sky leaden with clouds. We avoided
being complicated and confidential in our talks, Molly and I. Besides,
there it was: she was too sincere to have much to say when
she was hurt. What went on inside was enough for her, inside
her heart. We kissed. But I didn't kiss her at all well, as I should
have, on my knees. I was always rather thinking about something
else, about not wasting time, or tenderness, as if I wanted to keep
it all for something grand, something sublime and later on, but
not for Molly, and not really even for that. As if Life were going
to take away from me and hide from me, while I was devoting all
of myself to kissing Molly, what I wanted to know about it,
about Life itself beyond all this blackness; and then I shouldn't
have enough fervour left and in the end I should have lost every-
thing through being weak, and Life, the one and only mistress of
all true men, would have tricked me as she had tricked every
one else.

We walked back towards the crowds and then I'd leave her at
the place because at night she was kept busy by her customers
until the early hours. While she was looking after them, I felt
after all very unhappy and this feeling of unhappiness spoke so
clearly to me of her that I felt even more with her then, than
when she was actually by my side. I used to go to a movie to
while away the time. Coming out of there, I'd get onto a tram
somewhere and be carried around through the night. Soon after
two o'clock, timid passengers would board the tram, of a sort you
never meet either earlier or later than at that hour, always so pale
and sleepy, in quiet groups, going out to the suburbs.

If you went all the way with them, they took you far. Well be-
yond the factories, towards indistinct lodgings and little streets
of jumbled houses. On cobblestones glistening with dawn rain
the daylight laid a tint of blue. My tram companions and their
shadows disappeared together. They shut their eyes against the
day. It was difficult to make them talk. Too tired. They didn't
complain, these shades, no; it was they who cleaned the shops
at night, all the shops and all the offices in town, after closing
time. They seemed less restless than us daytime folk. Perhaps
because they'd got right down to the very heel of people and
things.

On one such night, when I'd got onto yet another tram and we
had come to the end of the route and every one was quietly getting
off, I thought I heard my name called: "Ferdinand! Hey, Ferdinand!"
It sounded obstreperous, of course, in that dark place. I didn't
like it at all. Above the roofs the sky was already returning,
in little cheerless patches cut into by the eaves. Some one was
calling me. Turning around, I recognized him at once: Leon! He
came up whispering and we talked. He too had been cleaning an of-
fice like all the others. That's all he'd been able to get in the way
of a billet. He trod along very ponderously, really majestically, as
if he'd just accomplished some dangerous and, so to speak, sacred
mission in the town. It's what happens to these night charmen,
I'd already noticed it. Fatigue and solitude bring out God's image
in man. He too had that look about his eyes, as he opened them
wider than ordinary eyes, in that bluish half-light we were in. He
too, even he, had also cleaned rows and endless rows of lavatories
and polished a whole prairie land of silent floors.

He went on, "I recognized you at once, Ferdinand! By the way
you stepped onto the tram. Fancy, just by that sad look you had
when you found there wasn't a woman on it. Isn't that so? Isn't
that just like you?" It was true; it was, of course, just like me.
Certainly I had the morals of a stoat. So there was nothing to be
surprised at in his very accurate suggestion. But what did surprise
me, much more, was that he had not got on in the States, either.
That wasn't at all what I should have expected.

1 told him about the business of the galley and Santa Tapeta.
But he didn't understand what I meant. "You're ill," he replied,
quite simply. A cargo boat he'd come by. He would have tried
to get in at Ford's too, but really his papers were too blatantly
faked, he wouldn't have dared show them; so he didn't try. "Just
about good enough to carry around in one's pocket," he explained.
They didn't look into such things much when engaging you for
night duty. They didn't pay well either, but there wasn't any
fuss made. ... A sort of Foreign Legion of the night.

"What about you?" he asked, "What are you doing? Are you
still bitten? Haven't you had enough bad breaks and funny
business yet? Do you still want to run around and see places?"

"I want to go back to France," I told him, "I've seen plenty.
As you say, I've had enough."

"You're right," he said, "we're through.... You get old without
noticing it. I know what it's like. ... I'd like to go back myself,
but it's these damn papers. ... I'll hang around till I can
get some good ones.... Must say it's not a bad job I've got.
There are worse. But I don't seem to learn their language....
There are some chaps in the cleaning line been at it thirty years
and haven't got beyond 'Exit', because it's written up on the doors
you clean, and 'Lavatory.' See what I mean?"

I saw what he meant. If ever Molly failed me, I too would have
to go and get a job cleaning up offices at night. There's no reason
why that should come to an end.

In fact, when one is in the war, one says things will be better
when peace comes and you bite into that hope as if it were a loll-
ipop, and it isn't; it tastes like filth. You don't dare say so at
first, not wishing to upset any one's feelings. After all, one's
really quite a nice-mannered chap.... And then one fine day, one
spits the thing out in front of everybody. One's fed up with muck
and misery. But people suddenly say you've been very badly brought
up. And that's all there is to it.

We met two or three times after that, Robinson and I. He seemed
depressed. A French deserter who distilled bootleg liquor for the
lads of Detroit had let him in on his business to some extent.
Robinson was tempted. "I'd quite like to make a little moonshine
myself to pour down their dirty gullets," he confided to me.
"On my own. But the thing is now I've got cold feet.... I'm sure
the first time a cop started snooping around on me, I'd crumple up.
I've seen too many of them in my time.... Besides, I feel so
sleepy all the time.... Naturally; sleeping by day's no sleep
at all. And that's not counting the stinking dust you fill your
lungs with in those offices. See what I mean? It knocks a chap
up...."

We arranged to meet again another night. I went back to see
Molly, and I told her all about it. She tried very hard not to
show how much I hurt her, but all the same it wasn't difficult to
see that I did. I kissed her more often now, but she'd been really
and truly hurt; her hurt was much deeper than ours is, because
what happens with us is that we're more given to making things
out worse than they are. With American women, it's just the op-
posite.One hesitates to see it, to admit it, it may be pretty humil-
iating, but all the same it really is genuine sorrow; it's not
pride, it's not jealousy either, nor just making a scene--it's real
heartache, and you are forced to admit that inside we are lacking
all that; and as for the pleasure of being really hurt, we are not
capable of it. One's ashamed of not being richer in heart and in
everything else, and of having after all judged humanity lower than
it really is.

From time to time though, Molly would allow herself to utter
some little reproach, but always very moderately, very gently.

"You're a dear, Ferdinand," she'd say to me, "and I know you
try not to be as bad as the others, but I don't think you know in
your heart of hearts what you really do want, Ferdinand. You'll
have to find some way of earning your living when you get back to
France. And anyway, you won't be able to stroll around all night
dreaming, like you do here.... Which is what you're so fond
of doing ... while I work. Have you thought of that, Ferdinand?"
In a way she was absolutely and entirely right, but every one
is made differently. I hated the idea of hurting her. Especially as
she was so easily hurt.

"Molly, I promise you that I do love you ... that I'll always
love you as much as I can ... in my own way."

My way wasn't much, though. Molly was fine, she had a fine,
real body; there it was, it was tempting enough. But I had this
awful liking for phantoms as well. Perhaps not entirely my own
fault. Life forces you to have far too much to do with phantoms.

"You're very fond of me, Ferdinand, I know that," she said
reassuringly. "Don't be upset about me.... You're sort of ill
with this desire of yours always to be discovering something
new.... That's all it is. It's just your particular road in life,
I suppose. Going along, all on your own.... Well, he travels
furthest who travels alone.... Will you be leaving soon then?"

"Yes, I'm going to finish off my studies in France and then I'll
come back," I told her brazenly.

"No, Ferdinand, you won't ever come back.... Besides, I shan't
be here." She wasn't fooled.

The time to go came. We went down to the station one evening a
little before the time she usually went back to the house. I had
been to say good-bye to Robinson earlier in the day. He wasn't
pleased at my going, either. I seemed always to be saying good-
bye to people. ... On the platform, while we waited for the
train, Molly and I, a couple of men passed. They pretended not
to recognize her, but they whispered together.

"You're on your way now, Ferdinand. You really are doing
exactly what you want to do, aren't you, Ferdinand? That's the
important thing. Nothing else matters as much...."

The train came in. I wasn't so sure what I wanted to do once
I saw the engine. I kissed Molly with all the fervour I had left
in my wretched carcass. I was sad for once, really sad, sad for
everybody, for myself, for her, for all men.

Maybe that is what one is looking for throughout life, that and
nothing more; the greatest misery there is to feel, so as to become
oneself truly before death.

Years have gone by since that departure, many years....I have
often written to Detroit and to every address I could remember,
where they might have known her and might have traced her. I
have never had any answer.

The house is shut now. That's all I have been able to find out.
Good, admirable Molly, I should like her, if she ever reads these
lines of mine, to know for certain that I have not changed towards
her, that I love her still and always shall, in my own way; that she
can come to me here, whenever she may care to, and share my
bread and my furtive destiny. If she is no longer beautiful, ah,
well, no matter! The more's the pity, we'll manage somehow. I've
kept so much of her beauty with me still, so warm, so much alive,
that I've enough for both of us, and it will last another twenty
years, long enough to see us through.

Surely I needed to be very mad to leave her, and mad in a cold-
blooded, dirty way. All the same, I've held on to my soul till now
and if tomorrow death came to take me, I know I should not be
as heavy, or as ugly, or as hard, as the others are, because of all
the kindness and the dreams Molly made me a present of during
those few months in the United States.





TO HAVE RETURNED FROM THE OTHER WORLD ISN'T EVERYTHING!
You pick up the thread of your sticky, precarious life where you
left it straggling behind you. There it is waiting for you.

For weeks and months still I hung around the Place Clichy, my
old starting place, and thereabouts, doing odd jobs for a living in
the Batignolles quarter. What they were is of no importance. In the
rain and poring over hot auto engines, when June had come, burning
your throat and nose, almost like Ford's. My amusement was to
watch the people pass, people going to their theatre or the Bois
of an evening.

Always more or less on my own in my spare time, I spent hours
looking through books and papers and all the things I had seen
as well. Once I'd begun studying again, I eventually got through
my examinations, somehow or other, while I earned my living
at the same time. The Science of Medicine is well defended, let me
tell you; the Faculty is a battlemented stronghold. Rows of pots
and very little jam. Anyway, now that I had survived five or six
years of academic tribulations, I'd got my degree all right,--such
a swell degree. So I went and set myself up in the suburbs, the
right sort of practice for me, at Garenne-Rancy, which you come
to on your way out of Paris just beyond the Porte Brancion.
I hadn't any big ideas myself, nor much ambition either, just
the wish to breathe a bit more freely and feed a bit better. I
stuck my name plate on the door and waited.

The inhabitants of Raney came and looked at my name plate,
suspiciously. They even went and asked at the police station
whether I was a real doctor or not. Yes, they were told, I was.
He's registered as one, he is a doctor. Then every one in the
district went about remarking that there was a new doctor in town,
besides all the others. "He won't earn his bread and butter," was
the concierge's prophecy. "There are far too many doctors round
here already." And that was perfectly true.

In the suburbs it is mostly by tram that life returns in the
morning. Strings of them rattle past, chock-full of vacant faces,
clanking up the Boulevard Minotaure to work.

The young ones seemed almost happy to be going to work. They
urged on the traffic, clinging on to running boards, the dear
boys, laughing gaily. Extraordinary! But when for twenty years
you've known the telephone box at the local bistrot, so dirty that
you keep mistaking it for the lavatory, you've no wish to joke
about serious matters any more, or about Raney in particular.
Not when you realize where you've been stranded. The houses
obsess you, foul-smelling interiors behind secretive facades--
their hearts the landlord's property. Him you never see. He wouldn't
dare to show himself. Sends round his agent, the bastard. Yet
they say in the quarter that the landlord's quite a good fellow
when you meet him. That may mean nothing.

The sky at Raney is same as at Detroit, a sooty light lying like
dew on the common all the way from Levallois. A waste of buildings
fast in a black quagmire. Chimney stacks, tall or short, looking
the same from a distance as stakes in seaside mud. And we
ourselves inside all that.

You've got to have the courage of a crab at Raney too, especially
when you're getting on in years and know perfectly well that
you'll never get out of it again. At the other end of the tramway
lines there's that grim bridge spanning the Seine, an open sewer.
All along the embankment at night and on Sunday people clamber
up on to the ledge to pee. The sight of the water flowing past makes
men muse. They micturate with a sense of eternity, like sailors.
Women don't ever stop to think, Seine or no Seine. The tram in
the morning carries its crowds along to be squeezed in the Metro.
You'd think, to see them all tearing in that direction, that some-
thing terrible must have happened the other way, at Argenteuil,
that their homes were on fire. As each day breaks, this thing takes
hold of them, they cling in bunches to every passing car. One vast
rout. Yet they are only running to an employer in Paris, to the
man who saves them from dying of hunger; they're in a panic
they might miss him, the cowards. But he makes you sweat for
your pittance. Ten years later you smell of it still, and twenty
years and longer. You don't get it for nothing.

There is a good deal of chattering in the tram, just to start the
day well. The women bleat faster than sheep. They'd hold up the
whole line for a mislaid centime. Of course, some of them are
sozzled already, mostly the ones that get down at Saint-Ouen for
the market, the demi-bourgeoises. "How much are carrots?" they
shout long before they get there, just to show they've got
the money.

Heaped like a rubbish in a can, one crosses the whole of Raney
in that metal box, and stinks a good bit too, especially in summer-
time. At the town walls you quarrel and shout just once more and
then are lost to view; the Metro swallows you all and all of you,
faded suits, shabby dresses, silk stockings, indigestion and feet as
dirty as socks, collars as impossible and stiff as a quarter's rent,
abortion to come and ex-service heroes,--all of it trickles down-
stairs smelling of coal-tar soap and Condy's fluid, into the black
hole, grasping a return ticket which itself costs as much as a
couple of loaves of bread.

There's the slow anguish of the thought of instant dismissal al-
ways hovering in the brain of tardy office workers, with a curt
reference from the boss, when he wants to cut down overhead
expenses. Shuddering recollections of the Slump, of the last time
one was out of a job, and all the advertisements one had to read,
penny papers, penny papers ... waiting in queues in search of
work. Such memories strangle a man, however settled he may look
in his year-round overcoat.

The city conceals its crowds of dirty feet as well as it can in
its underground electric sewers. They don't come to the surface
again until Sunday. Then, when they're at large, you have to stay
indoors yourself. Watch them amusing themselves on Sunday and
it's enough to make you never want to be gay again. Around the
entrance to the Metro curls the endemic smell of drawn-out wars,
of half-burnt, mangled villages, of abortive revolutions and busi-
nesses gone bankrupt. The local garbage men are busy year in and
year out burning the same little heaps of damp rubbish in ditches
to the lee of the wind. They go around coughing to the neighbouring
drug store instead of overturning the trams into a gutter and
going off to smash up the local tollgates. No guts, no nothing.
When the war comes, the next one, they'll make money again selling
ratskins, cocaine and gas masks.

I had found a little apartment on the outskirts of the district
for my consulting room. From it I could see the workman who
always seems to be standing about in the street, with his arm in
a sling, a casualty from the machines, gazing into space, not
knowing what to do or what to think about, without enough in his
pockets to go and get a drink--and come alive again.

Molly had been right. I was beginning to understand what she
meant. Studies change you, they make a man proud. Before, one
was only hovering around life. You think you are a free man, but
you get nowhere. Too much of your time's spent dreaming. You
slither along on words. That's not the real thing at all. Only
intentions and appearances. You need something else. With my
medicine, though I wasn't very good at it, I had come into closer
contact with men, beasts and creation. Now it was a question of
pushing right ahead, foursquare, into the heart of things. Death
comes chasing along after you, you've got to get a move on, and
you have to find something to eat too, while you're searching, and
dodge war as well. That makes an awful lot of things to do. It
isn't easy.

Meanwhile, no patients came to see me--not so as you'd notice
them, that is. It's always a bit slow at the start, people told
me reassuringly. For the time being it was mostly I myself who
was sick.

Nothing could be worse than Garenne-Rancy, I felt, when busi-
ness is at a standstill. My word, yes. It's best not to have to do
any thinking in a place like that--and here had I actually come
there to have a quiet time to think in--from the other end of
the world too! I'd gone and put my foot in it! Proud little fool!
A dark, heavy cloud of depression had come my way. ... It was
no laughing matter, and there was nothing I could do about it.
There's no tyrant like one's own brain.

Below me lived Bezin, the little antique dealer, who always said
to me when I stopped at his door, "You can't have everything,
Doctor! Either betting or a little glass of something now and
then--it's one or the other! A man's got to choose. Personally,
I'm all for a drink. I'm not fond of studying form."

The stuff he liked best of all was gentiane-cassis. Not a bad lit-
tle man normally, and then after a few drinks not half so nice to
know.... When he went to buy junk on the second-hand market,
he'd stay out three days at a time "on a trip", as he put it.
They'd bring him back home. And he'd say:

"I know what the future's going to be like.... One long petting
party. With films showing most of the time.... Why, it's pretty
much like that already...."

He could see still further into the future when he was in that
state. "I know there won't be any more boozing. ... I'm the last
of the drinkers. I have to hurry. ... I know just where I go
wrong."

Everybody coughed in my street. It was mostly all there was to
do. You've got to go up to the Sacre-Coeur to get a sight of the
sun, because of all the smoke.

It's a fine view you get from up there: you can see perfectly well
where we are, where all those houses we live in are, right away in
the distance. But when you look for them in detail, you can't
make them out, not even your own house, everything you can see
is so ugly and all so equally ugly.

Farther away still there's the Seine, winding in dirty, glaring
zigzags from one bridge to the next.

When you live in Raney, you don't even realize how sad you
have become. You just don't want to be doing anything much.
Chiefly because you have to economize on everything all the
time, you come not to have any wants.

For several months I borrowed money here and there. Every
one was so poor and so suspicious in my district that only at
nighttime could they make up their minds to come and see me, and
yet I was an inexpensive doctor. I spent nights and nights chasing
after ten and fifteen francs in little courtyards with no moon.
In the morning the street sounded like a drum with the beating
of carpets. One morning I met Bebert, the concierge's nephew,
raising a cloud on the pavement with a broom; his aunt was out
shopping and he was keeping the lodge for her.

At Raney whoever failed to raise his own little whirlpool of dust
around seven o'clock was looked upon in his own street as a pretty
dirty sort of skunk. You flapped your mat out of doors, a sign of
cleanliness, and that meant that you kept your house in decent
order. That was enough. Your breath might be foul, but after that
you were O.K. Bebert was swallowing all the dust he raised as well
as what was beating out over him from the upper windows. A few
streaks of sunlight did reach the ground, but it was like the inside
of a church, pale, soft, mystical beams of sunlight.

Bebert saw me coming. I was the doctor who lived on the corner,
where the busses stop. Too green he looked, Bebert, an apple that
would never ripen properly. He was scratching himself and it made
me want to scratch too. I had my fleas as well, it's true, caught off
sick people at night. They hop into your overcoat eagerly enough;
it's the warmest, dampest place they can find. You're taught all
about that at the Faculty.

Bebert stopped sweeping to wish me good-day. They watched us
talking from every window.

If it's a question of loving something, it's less of a risk to love
children than grown men; you always have the excuse of at least
hoping that they'll be more decent than you are yourself, later on.
You can't be sure.

A smile of pure affection which I have never been able to forget
danced on his glistening little face. A gay thing for the world to
see. Few people have any particle of that left, after twenty years,
any of ready animal affection. The world is not what one thought.
That's all. So one has altered the expression on one's face. God,
yes--and not just a little, either. One was wrong.... And damnably
tough one's become in no time at all! That is what shows on your
face twenty years later. There's been a mistake made. One's
face is just a mistake.

"Hey, Doctor!" Bebert said to me, "Didn't they pick up a chap
on the Place des Fetes last night with his throat slit across by a
razor? Weren't you on duty? It's true, isn't it?"

"No, I wasn't on duty, Bebert. It wasn't me, it was Doctor
Frolichon."

"Oh, that's too bad. My aunt said she hoped it would have been
you and that you could have told her all about it."

"It'll have to wait till the next time, Bebert, I'm afraid."

"They often kill guys around here, don't they?" Bebert remarked.

I crossed his puddle of dust but the municipal sweeper rumbled
past at that moment and a great typhoon swirled up from the gut-
ters, filling the whole street with even thicker and more pep-
pery clouds of dust. You couldn't see a thing. Bebert skipped
about with joy, sneezing and yelping. His haggard little face,
his mop of greasy hair, his legs like an emaciated monkey's, all
bobbed about convulsively at the end of his broom.

Bebert's aunt came back from shopping. She'd already had her
little tot of something and she smelt slightly too of ether; that
was a habit she'd picked up once when she worked for a doctor and
had had such aches in her wisdom-teeth. She only had two teeth left
in the front of her mouth but these she brushed assiduously.

"When you have worked for a doctor, like I have, you know
what hygiene means." She gave medical consultations in the
neighbourhood, and further afield, as far as Bezons.

I should have liked to know whether Bebert's aunt ever thought
about anything. No, she didn't think at all. She talked a hell of
a lot without thinking at all. When we were alone, with no possible
eavesdroppers about, she would try to get free medical advice
out of me. It was flattering, in a sort of way.

"Bebert, Doctor--I can tell you because you're a medical man
--is a nasty, dirty little boy! He abuses himself. I've noticed
it going on for two months now and I can't think who can have
taught him such a loathsome habit. I've always brought him up
well. ... I tell him he mustn't. But he won't listen to me."
"Tell him he'll go mad," I said: classical advice.

Bebert, who was listening, wasn't a bit pleased. "I don't; it's
not true. It was the Gagat kid who suggested I--"

"There you are, you see; I thought so," said his aunt. "You know
the Gagats, the people on the fifth floor? They are a vicious fam-
ily. It seems that the grandfather used to go in for flagellation....
Ugh, I ask you, flagellation! Look, Doctor, while we're on the
subject, couldn't you make him out a syrup of some kind that
would stop him playing with himself?"

I followed her into the lodge to prescribe an anti-vice tonic for
little Bebert. Of course I was too kind to every one, I realize that.
No one ever paid me. I gave consultations on sight, chiefly out of
curiosity. It's a mistake. People revenge themselves for the kindnes-
ses you do them. Bebert's aunt, like all the rest, took advantage
of my being so disinterested and proud, the most unfair advantage.
I did nothing about it. I let myself be fooled. These sick people
had me in their power, they snivelled more and more each day, they
led me by the nose. And at the same time they showed me, one after
another, all the horrible deformities hidden away in their hearts
which they revealed to no one but me. Such hideousness cannot be
adequately paid for. It slips through your fingers like a slimy snake.

I'll spill it all one day, if I can live long enough to tell everything.
"Listen, you swine! Let me be nice to you for a few more
years; don't kill me yet. Just look humble and helpless and I'll
tell you everything. I promise you that. And you'll suddenly turn
tail like those sticky caterpillars that used to crawl around my
hut in Africa, and I will make you more cunningly cowardly and
obscene than ever, so much so that at the last maybe you'll
die of it."

"Is it sweet?" asked Bebert, meaning the syrup.

"For heaven's sake, don't make it sweet," the aunt said; "dirty
little beast! He doesn't deserve it should be sweet, and anyway,
he steals enough sugar from me as it is. He is thoroughly naughty,
thoroughly depraved! He'll end up by murdering his mother!"

"I haven't got a mother," Bebert flatly retorted, knowing exactly
what he was about.

"Hell!" said his aunt. "I'll lay across you with the broom handle,
if you answer me back." She went and seized the broom, but Be-
bert had slipped out into the street. "You vicious old thing!"
he shouted at her from the doorway. His aunt blushed and came
back into the lodge. There was a silence. We changed the con-
versation.

"Doctor, perhaps you ought to go and see the lady at Number 4,
Rue des Mineures. The husband used to work at the notary's office;
he's been told about you. I said you were the kindest doctor in the
world with ill people."

I knew at once that Bebert's aunt was going to lie to me. Froli-
chon is her favourite doctor. She always recommends him when
she can, and me she invariably runs down if she gets the chance.
My humanitarianism makes her hate me in a thoroughly animal
way. After all, she is an animal, one mustn't forget that. Only
Frolichon, whom she admires, makes her pay on the nail, so she
consults me on the quiet. It must be an absolutely gratuitous visit
for her to have recommended me, or else some extremely shady
affair. But as I left, I remembered Bebert.

"You ought to take him for walks," I said; "the kid doesn't get
out enough."

"Where could the two of us go? I can't stray far from my lodge."

"Well, take him to the Park on Sundays then."

"But the Park's even more full of people and dust than this
place is! You're all on top of one another."

She's quite right in what she says. I think of somewhere else
to suggest.

Timidly, I suggest the cemetery. The cemetery at Garenne-
Rancy is the only place of any size in the whole neighbourhood
where there are a few trees.

"Why, that's true, I hadn't thought of that; we could go there,
of course!" At that moment Bebert reappeared.

"Listen, Bebert, would you like to go for walks in the cemetery?
I have to ask him, Doctor, because he's as obstinate as a mule
about walks, you know...

As a matter of fact, Bebert has no opinion on the subject. But
the aunt is pleased with the idea, and that is enough. She has a
weakness for cemeteries, like all Parisians. You'd say that on this
point she was really about to do some thinking. She considers all
the pros and cons. The town walls are infra dig.... The Park is
too dusty.... But the cemetery now, the cemetery's all right. And
the people who go there on Sundays are on the whole respectable
people who behave themselves properly. And, besides, it's very
convenient, because you can do your shopping in the Boulevard
de la Liberte on the way back; some of the shops are kept
open there on Sundays.

Yes, that was it. "Bebert," she concluded, "take the Doctor
round to Madame Henrouille's in the Rue des Mineures. You
know where Madame Henrouille lives, don't you, Bebert?"
Bebert knows where every place is, as long as it's an excuse
for a stroll.

Between the Rue Ventru and the Place Lenine there is nothing
now but tenement houses. Contractors have taken over everything
that was left of the country there, Les Garennes, as it was called.
There is just a wee bit of it left, on the outskirts, a few vague
strips of land beyond the last gas lamp.

A detached house or two survives and moulders away, sandwiched
between the larger buildings: four rooms with a large stove in
the passage downstairs. For the sake of economy, the stove is
kept barely alight. It smokes in the damp atmosphere. These are
the detached dwellings, such as remain, of people with a certain
amount of invested capital. They are not rich people who have
stayed on here; certainly the Henrouilles weren't, whom I'd been
sent to see. But all the same, they were folks with a certain
little something put by.

The Henrouilles' house, when you went into it, smelt, besides
the smoke, of lavatories and stew. The place had just been paid
for. That had meant fifty long years of scraping for the Hen-
rouilles. As soon as you went in there and saw them, you
wondered what was the matter with them both. Well, the matter
with the Henrouilles, what was all wrong about them, was never
in fifty years having spent a penny, either of them, without
regretting it. They had a house fashioned as it were out of their
own flesh and personal endeavour, like a snail. But a snail man-
ages to do that without fussing about it.

The Henrouilles, on the other hand, couldn't get over having
gone through life merely so as to have a house, and that gave them
a very strange look, like people who have just been dug out of
some place alive. People must pull very odd faces when they are
taken out of an oubliette.

Before they were married the Henrouilles had already thought
of buying a house. First each thought of it on his own, then they
both thought of it together. They had refused to think of anything
else for half a century, and when life had forced them to think
of something else, of the war, for instance, and above all of
their son, it had made them quite ill.

When, as a newly married couple, they had moved into their lit-
tle house, each with ten years' savings in hand, it wasn't quite
finished. It still stood in the middle of the fields. In winter you
needed your sabots to get to it; you left them at the fruiterer's
at the corner of the Rue Revolte in the morning, when you went
to work, at six o'clock, by horse tram to Paris, three kilometres
away, for a penny.

You need to have very good health to get through a whole
lifetime doing that. There was a photograph of them over the
bed, on the first floor, taken on their wedding day. Their bedroom,
all their bedroom furniture, had been paid for a long time ago.
All the bills that have been paid these ten, twenty, forty years
are lying pinned together in the top drawer of the chest of drawers,
and the book in which the accounts are kept, right up to date,
is downstairs in the dining room, where no one ever eats. Henrouille
will show you all these things if you ask him. On Saturdays he
balances the accounts in the dining room. They themselves have
always eaten in the kitchen.

I learned all that, bit by bit, from them and then from other
people and finally from Bebert's aunt. When I got to know them
better, they themselves told me their great fear, the worry of their
whole lives, that their son, their one and only son, who was in
business, might do badly. For thirty years that awful thought had
pretty well spoiled their sleep at night. In the pen business, that
boy of theirs. Just think what ups and downs there have been in
the pen trade these last thirty years! There probably hasn't been
a worse, a more uncertain business than the pen trade.

Of course, there are some businesses that are so bad you do
not even think of borrowing money to put them on their feet
again, but there are others which entail borrowing almost all
the time. When they thought of a loan like that, even now with the
house paid for and all, the Henrouilles would get up from their
chairs and look at each other and blush. What would they do in
a case like that? They would refuse.

They had decided from the first to refuse to lend any sum
however small, ever.... For the sake of their principles and so
as to keep something for their son, a legacy, the house, his
patrimony. That's the way they had thought it out. He was a
sensible lad, it's true, their son, but it's so easy in business
to be led astray....

When they asked me, I thought exactly as they did.

My mother too had had a business. And her business had never
brought us in anything but sorrow, a little bread and a lot of
trouble. So I had no love of business, either. I could understand
at once the danger this boy was in, the possibility of his having
to consider borrowing money to get out of some tight corner. There
was no need to explain these things to me. Papa Henrouille himself
had worked for fifty years as a small clerk in a notary's office
on the Boulevard Sebastopol. So he knew any amount of cases of
ruined fortunes. He told me one or two, hair-raising ones. His
own father's in the first place; it was because of his father going
bankrupt that Henrouille hadn't been able to go in for teaching
but had had to start right away and become a clerk. You don't
easily forget that sort of thing.

Then at last their house was really their own, properly paid
for and all, not a penny owing, and they had nothing more to
worry about, either of them, with regard to their financial
security. That was in their sixty-sixth year.

Just then he began to feel somewhat unwell; or rather he had
really had this thing a long time now, but he hadn't thought
about it, because there was still the house to be paid for. When
that was all arranged and settled and signed, he began to think
about his curious malady. It was a kind of dizziness that came
over him and a whistling in both his ears like steam.

It was about that time too that he began to buy a daily paper,
as they could afford it now. There was a bit in the paper, as a
matter of fact, telling all about what Henrouille felt in his ears.
So he bought the medicine which the advertisement recommended,
but it didn't make any difference to how he felt; quite the re
verse; the whistling seemed to get louder than ever. Louder per-
haps because he thought more about it? Anyway, the two of them
went and saw the doctor at the hospital. "It's heightened blood
pressure," he told them.

The phrase made a big impression on him. But really this new
worry came to him at just the right time. He had worried him-
self so sick for such a number of years over the house and his
son's reverses that now there was a sort of sudden gap in the
fabric* of continual anxiety which through year after year of
liabilities had hemmed him in and kept him in a state of craven
agitation. Now that the doctor had spoken to him of the pressure
of blood in his arteries, he listened to its throbbing deep in his
ear, against his pillow. He even got out of bed to feel his pulse
and then he would stand there in the darkness a long time beside
his bed, feeling his body shake in little soft throbs as his
heart beat. It was going to kill him, that throbbing, he told
himself; he had always been frightened of life; now there was
something else he feared--his death, his own blood pressure--
just as for forty years he had feared not being able to finish
the payments on his house.

He had always been unhappy, as unhappy as he was now, but all
the same he had to set to and find a good new reason for being
miserable. It isn't quite as easy as it looks. It is not merely
a question of saying: "I'm unhappy." You've got to prove it to
yourself, convince yourself definitely. That was all he wanted:
to be able to find a good, solid reason for the fear he felt, a
reason that really counted. The doctor had said he had a pressure
of twenty-two. Twenty-two is a good deal. The doctor had taught
him how to find his own way towards Death.

Their son, the pen manufacturer, practically never put in an
appearance. Once or twice around Christmas time he came to see
them. And that was all. But really he could often have come to
see them now. Papa and Mamma had nothing left to lend. Anyway,
he had practically given up coming.

It took me longer to get to know Madame Henrouille; she had
no fear on her mind, not even the fear of her own death, which
did not enter her thoughts. She only complained of getting old,
but it didn't really bother her; it was just that everybody else
did the same; and she complained that life was "getting dearer."
Their life's work had been accomplished. The house was paid
for. So, to settle the last bills a bit sooner, she had started
to sew buttons onto waistcoats for one of the great stores. "It's
unbelievable how many you've got to sew on to earn five francs!"

And then to go and deliver her work, there was always the
business of taking a second-class ticket on the bus; and one
evening too she'd been roughly handled. A foreign woman had done
it, the first and the only foreigner she had ever spoken to in her
life; and then only to shout insults at her.

The walls of their house had been dry in the old days, when air
circulated freely all round it, but now that tall houses closed
it in on all sides, everything was damp in the house; even the
curtains were stained with moisture.

When the house had become theirs, Madame Henrouille's face
was a happy and smiling one for a whole month afterwards;
she was as delighted as a nun after communion. She it was who
had said to Henrouille: "You know, Jules, from now on we can
take the paper every day, we can afford it...." Just like that she
said it. She had thought of her husband, she had taken a look
at him, and then after that she had taken a look round and she
had thought of his mother, Mother-in-law Henrouille. And then
she grew serious again all of a sudden, as she had been before
the house was entirely paid for. And that is how it all began
all over again, when that thought came to her, because there was
further saving to be done because of that old mother of her
husband, whom they seldom mentioned among themselves or to
any one outside the family.

She lived down at the bottom of the garden amid an accumulation
of old brooms and chicken crates and all the shadows of the neigh-
bouring buildings. She lived in a low shed, which she practically
never came out of. And it was a tremendous business just to get
her her food. She would not let any one into her shelter, not
even her son. She was afraid of being murdered, she said.

When the idea came to the daughter-in-law of saving a bit more,
she tried just hinting at the subject in a few words at first
to her husband, feeling her way, to see if, for instance, they
couldn't send the old lady to St. Vincent's Convent, where the
nuns looked after poor old things of that sort. The son did not
say yes and he didn't say no. Something else was on his mind
at the moment, those noises in his ears which never stopped.
He worried about them and listened to them until he told himself
that these awful sounds would stop him getting to sleep. And
indeed he did listen to them instead of falling asleep, whistl-
ings, drummings, rumblings ... It was a new torment. He fretted
about it all day and all night. He was carrying every sort of
noise inside his head.

Bit by bit, though, as months of this sort of thing went by, his
worry began to wear out and there wasn't enough of it left to
take up all his time. So then he went to market with his wife
at Saint-Ouen. The market of Saint-Ouen was the cheapest in the
neighbourhood, it was said. They started out in the morning for
the whole day, which they spent adding up and commenting on
the prices of different articles, and calculating what they could
have saved if instead of doing one thing they had done something
else. ... At about eleven in the evening at home they would begin
to be afraid once more of being murdered. It was quite a regular
fear with them. He felt it less than she did. It was mostly those
noises in his ears which he would cling to desperately at that
hour of the evening when it was very quiet outside in the street.
"I'll never be able to sleep if this goes on!" he'd say to him-
self out loud, so as to upset himself still more. "You've no
idea what it's like!"

But she had never tried to understand what he meant, nor to
imagine what chafed him so about the buzzing in his ears. "You
can hear me all right, can't you?" she'd ask him.

"Yes," he told her.

"Well, that's all right then. You would do better to think
about your mother, who costs us such a lot, and about the way
prices are going up every day.... And her quarters, which have
become so poisonously dirty...."

The charwoman who came to them three hours each week to
do the washing was the only visitor they had had for many
years. She also helped Madame Henrouille to make her bed, and
so that the charwoman should be certain of repeating it about
the neighbourhood, every time in ten years that they turned
the mattress together, Madame Henrouille would announce in
as loud a tone as possible: "We never keep any money in the
house," This was meant as a hint and a warning, so as to
discourage burglars and possible murderers.

Before they went up to their room, they went the rounds toge-
ther, shutting all the doors and windows, one of them supervis-
ing the other. Then they went along to the shed at the bottom
of the garden, to see if Mother-in-law's lamp was still alight.
That showed that she was still alive. She burned an awful lot of
oil. That lamp was never put out. She too was frightened of
murderers, and frightened of her son and daughter at the same
time. She had lived there for twenty years and she had never
opened her windows, winter or summer, and she had never put
out the lamp.

Her son kept his mother's money for her, her little income.
He looked after it carefully. Her meals were left on her doorstep
for her. And they kept her money. It was the proper way to
do things. But she complained about this arrangement, and not
only about that; she complained about everything. Through her
closed door she shouted abuse at any one who came near her
hut. "It's not my fault if you are growing old, Grandma," the
daughter-in-law would try to reason with her. "You have your
ailments like all old people have...

"Old yourself, you little slut! You're a bad lot, you are! You'll
be killing me yourself one of these days with your foul tricker-
ies!"

She denied her age ferociously, old Mother-in-law Henrouille.
... Inside her redoubt, she battled irreconcilably against the
buffetings of the whole wide world. She stuck out against the
contact, the fates, the resignation of the outside world like a
dirty imposture. She wouldn't hear a word about all that. "Lies
and trickery!" she'd shout. "You made it all up yourself!"

She defended herself with terrific stubbornness against everything
that went on outside her broken-down abode and against all entice-
ments towards a good understanding or any form of reconciliation.
She was quite certain that if she opened her door the enemy forces
would rush in on her and seize hold of her, and that then the
game would really be up.

"They're very cunning nowadays," she'd shout. "They've got
eyes all round their heads and they're full of gaping mouths all
over them, and all they do is lie ... That is what they are
like ..."

She talked in a harsh voice, as she had learned to talk in
Paris at the Temple Market as a little girl, a peddler there with
her mother. She came of a time when the young people had not
yet learnt to hear themselves grow old.

"I shall have to get some work to do if you won't give me my
money," she would shout to her daughter-in-law. "Do you hear
me, you hussy? I want work!"

"But you're not strong enough, Grandma!"

"Oh, I'm not strong enough, aren't I? Try coming into my
kennel--I'll soon show you whether I'm strong enough or not!"

So they left her to look after herself for a while in her hut.
All the same, they insisted on showing me the old lady, by hook
or by crook; that's what I had come for, and all sorts of sub-
terfuges were necessary before she'd receive us. But I couldn't
really make out what was wanted of me. Bebert's aunt, the
concierge, had told them I was a nice doctor, a very kind and
easy-going man.... They wanted to know if I could make the
old woman keep quiet just by giving her some medicines to
take.... But what they really wanted more, at bottom (partic-
ularly the daughter-in-law) was that I should get her shut up
for them once and for all.... After we had knocked at her
door for a good half hour, she finally flung it open suddenly,
and popped out there in front of me, with her watery red eyes....
But a bright expression danced in them above her flaccid, grey
cheeks, a lively glance which you noticed at once and which made
you forget all the rest, because it was light and youthful and
gave you a feeling of pleasure, in spite of yourself, and in-
stinctively you found yourself trying to remember and retain
something of it afterwards.

This gay glance of hers enlivened everything in the shadows
round with something young and blithe about it, a minute but
sparkling enthusiasm of a kind we no longer possess. Her voice,
which was hoarse when she shouted, sounded sprightly and
charming when she talked normally; then she made her words
and her sentences frisk about and skip and come bouncing
merrily back, as people could with their voices and everything
in the days when not to be able to tell a story well or sing a
song when necessary was considered feeble, deplorable and stupid.
Age had covered her, like an old, swaying tree, with jaunty
branches.

She was a gay old Henrouille; discontented and grimy, yet gay.
The bleakness she had lived in for more than twenty years had
affected her spirit not at all. On the contrary, it was from the
outside world that she had shrunk in self-defence, as if the grow-
ing cold and all the frightfulness and death itself were to come
to her from there, not from inside. From inside herself she seemed
to fear nothing. She seemed certain of her own head as of something
definite and solid and understood, understood once and for all.

And there was I, always chasing after mine, chasing it all over
the world.

Mad, they said she was, "mad"; it's easily said. She hadn't
come out of her burrow more than three times in twelve years,
that's all it was! Maybe she had her own reasons.... She
didn't want to lose anything.... She wasn't going to tell us
though, who wouldn't have been wise enough to understand her,
anyway.

Her daughter harked back to her scheme of getting the old lady
shut up. "Don't you think that she is mad, Doctor? We can't get
her to go out.... And yet that would do her good occasionally.
... Yes, Grandma, it would do you good, really it would....
Don't say that it wouldn't! I assure you it would do you good."
The old woman shook her head, firmly, obstinately, angrily, when
she was spoken to like that.

"She won't let us look after her properly.... The shed's in
a filthy mess. It's cold in there and she hasn't a fire.... Really,
we can't have her going on living like that. We can't, can we,
Doctor?"

I pretended not to understand. As for Henrouille, he had stayed
behind by the stove; he preferred not to know exactly what we
were all up to, his wife, his mother and me.

Then the old lady became angry again.

"Give me back all my belongings and I tell you I'll go away
from here! I have enough to live on! You need never hear of
me again! And we'll have done with all this once and for all."

"Enough to live on? But, Grandma, you'd never be able to
get along on your three thousand francs a year, Grandma! Living
has become much more expensive since the last time you went out.
Wouldn't it be ever so much better, Doctor, if she were to go
and live with the Sisters, as we tell her she should? The Sisters
would look after her well.... They're so sweet and good."

But the prospect of St. Vincent's horrified her.

"Me go to the Sisters? The Sisters?" she rejoined at once. "I've
never been to them yet.... Why shouldn't I go to the cure while
you're about it? Eh? If I haven't enough money, as you say, well
then, I'll go to work again!"

"Work? Why, Grandmamma! Where will you work? Ah, Doctor, just
listen to that! Work--at her age! When she's nearly eighty!
That's madness, Doctor. Who would dream of taking her? You're
mad, Grandma!"

"Mad! Nonsense! Not at all! But you re certainly wrong somewhere,
you dirty little beast!"

"Listen to her, Doctor--raving and insulting me! How do you
expect us to keep her here?"

Then the old lady turned to me, against me, her new danger.
"How does that man know whether I am mad or not? Is he
inside my head? Or inside yours? Would he have to be to know?
Clear out, both of you! Go away, leave my house! You are
wickeder than a hell full of devils, the way you bully me! Why
don't you go and see my son, instead of standing here, jabbering
drivel among the weeds. ... He needs a doctor far more than I
do. He hasn't any teeth left, that son of mine, and he used to have
such beautiful teeth when I looked after him. Go on, go on, get
out, I tell you, the two of you!" And she banged the door in our
faces.

She peered out at us from behind her lamp, watching us go
away up the court. When we had crossed it, when we were far
enough away, she began to laugh. She had defended herself
well.

On our return from this unpleasant expedition, Henrouille was
still standing by the stove, with his back turned to us. But his
wife went on harrying me with questions, all of them with a single
meaning.... She had a little round, dark head. She kept her
elbows glued to her sides while she talked, making no gestures of
any sort. But she was very keen that this visit of the doctor's
should not be wasted, that it should serve some purpose....
The cost of living was going up every day.... The mother-in-
law's contribution was no longer enough.... After all, they
too were growing old.... They could not always live in fear of
the old lady dying without proper care, as they had in the
past. ... Of her setting fire to the place, for example....
Of her dying amid fleas and filth like that. Instead of going
to a nice, proper asylum, where they would look after her
well....

As I looked as if I agreed with them, they became even more
amiable, both of them.... They promised to say a lot of
nice things about me in the neighbourhood.... If I would only
help them, take pity on them. Rid them of the old woman....
She must be so unhappy herself in the surroundings she so ob-
stinately insisted on living in.

"And we might be able to let her cottage," the husband suggest-
ed, suddenly waking up. ... A faux pas, talking like that in
front of me. His wife trod on his foot under the table. He
couldn't understand why.

While they wrangled, I thought of the thousand franc note I
could so easily pocket just by signing that certificate of madness
for them. They seemed to want it frightfully badly.... Bebert's
aunt had probably told them all about me and explained that
there wasn't another doctor in all Raney in such miserable
straits.... That I could be had for the asking.... Frolichon
they wouldn't have offered a job like that to. Frolichon was
straight, a virtuous man.

I was quite absorbed in these reflections when the old woman
burst into the room where we sat plotting. You'd have said she
had guessed as much. What a surprise! She had caught up her
full skirts against her stomach and here she was, like that,
suddenly letting fly at us and at me in particular. She had
come from the bottom of her courtyard just for this.

"Blackguard!" she yelled straight at me. "You can go now,
I've told you so already--get out! There's no point in your
staying here. I'm not going to any madhouse, I tell you, and I
won't go to the convent either! You can talk and lie as much
as you like--you won't get me, you rascal! These rogues will
go before me, these fleecers of an old woman! And you too,
you scum, you'll go to gaol, let me tell you, and pretty damn
quick!"

I was out of luck all right. Just when there was a thousand
francs going begging at one fell swoop! I left at once.

When I was back in the street she leaned out over a little
balcony to shout after me, far in the darkness that was hiding
me. "You cad! You swine!" she yelled. The echoes rang with it.
Damn the rain. I ran from one lamp-post to the next as far as
the public convenience on the Place des Fetes--the first shelter
there was.





IN THE COMFORT STALL, LEG-HIGH, I FOUND BEBERT. HE TOO HAD
gone in there looking for shelter. He had seen me running when I
left the Henrouilles. "Have you come from their place?" he
asked. "They want you now on the fifth floor at home, to see
the daughter. ..." I knew this girl he spoke of well, with her
broad hips, her long downy thighs, and something yielding and
tender about her, that graceful precision of movement which
completes women who are well-balanced sexually. She had come
to see me several times since something had gone wrong with
her stomach. In her twenty-fifth year, after her third miscar-
riage, she was suffering from complications, which her family
called anamia.

She was wonderfully well-built and solid, with a liking for
copulation such as few females have. She was discreet in her
mode of life, careful in speech and behaviour. Not in the least
hysterical. But a gifted, well-nourished, balanced creature; a real
champion in her own class, that's all. A beautiful athlete in
pursuit of pleasure. There's nothing wrong with that. She only
went with married men. And they were all of them people she
knew well, men capable of recognizing and appreciating a fine
natural success, men who don't take any vicious little bit for a
real affair. No, her creamy skin, her charming smile, her walk
and the noble proportions and swing of her hips won for her the
genuine and just admiration of certain business men who knew
what they were about.

Only of course these business men couldn't just divorce their
wives on that account. On the contrary, it was a good reason for
remaining happily married. So each time she was three months
gone with child--it never failed--she went round to see the
midwife. When you've a certain amount of spirit and you haven't
a cuckold in hand, life is no laughing matter all of the time.
Her mother half-opened the landing door for me as cautiously as
if I might have been going to assassinate her. She was whispering,
but she whispered so loudly, so excitedly, that it was worse than
if she had cursed me.

"Heavens above, what can I have done, Doctor, to have deserved
such a daughter? Oh, but you won't tell anybody in the district,
will you, Doctor? I rely on you... She went on and on, flapping
with fright and moaning about what the neighbours might think.
She was in an hypnotic state of nervous imbecility. Such states
go on for quite a time.

She let me get used to the dim light in the corridor, to the
smell of leeks for the soup, to the wall paper and the idiotic
mutterings and her own strangled voice. Finally, amid much
senseless talk and exclamations, we came to her daughter's bed-
side; there lay the patient, utterly prostrate. I attempted to
examine her, but she was losing blood so freely, there was such
a mass of blood, that I couldn't examine her properly. Clots of
it. It was spluttering between her legs as from the decapitated
colonel's neck in the war. I simply put back the great wad of
cotton and pulled up the coverlet.

The mother could see nothing, she could only hear herself talking.
"I shall die, Doctor, I shall die of shame!" she wailed. I didn't
attempt to dissuade her. I did not know what to do. In the little
dining room next door we could see the father pacing up and
down. He did not seem to have been able to make up his mind
what attitude to take in the circumstances. Perhaps he was
waiting for things to take some definite turn before choosing a
point of view. He remained in an entirely vague state of mind.
People move from one piece of play-acting to the next. While
the stage isn't set, they cannot envisage its form or what their
proper part is, so they stand there, doing nothing, in the face
of whatever's happened, their impulses hanging loose like an un-
rolled umbrella, wavering incoherently, reduced to their simple
selves, reduced to nothing. Lost sheep.

But the mother now, she had the leading part, as intermediary
between her daughter and myself. She didn't give a damn what
happened to the play; it was all set and she was having a wonderful
time.

I had only myself to count on to break this disgusting charm.
I hazarded the suggestion that the girl should be removed at
once to the hospital to be operated on immediately.
Alas, what a mistake! I had played straight into her hands,
providing her with the perfect answer, the one she had been
hoping for.

"What a disgrace! To the hospital, Doctor! What a disgrace
for us! That is all that was needed--the last straw!"

There was nothing more I could say. I sat down and listened to
the mother carrying on more noisily than ever, wailing her tragic
absurdities. Too great a humiliation, too much trouble leads to
absolute inertia. The world is too heavy a burden for you to
lift. You give up. While she invoked heaven and hell, howling
with misery, I hung my head and discovered a little pool of blood
forming under the girl's bed and a trickle threading slowly along
the wall towards the door. A drop fell regularly from the mattress.
Plop. Plop. The towels were scarlet now between her legs. All the
same I did ask, timidly, whether the placenta had come away
entirely yet. The girl's pale hands, bluish at the tips, hung down
loose on each side of the bed. My question was answered by the
mother with a further flood of awful lamentations. But to pull
myself together was really more than I could do.

I had been so long overcome by depression myself, I'd been
sleeping so badly, that in this chaos I was no longer in the least
interested as to whether any one thing happened before anything
else. I only reflected that it was easier to be listening to this
mother's wailings sitting down than standing up. It doesn't take
much to give you satisfaction when you have become really
resigned. Besides, what strength of will would have been necessary
to interrupt this wild creature just when she "didn't know how she
was going to save her family honour!" What a game! And how
she yelled! After each abortion, I knew from experience, she
behaved in the same way, trying of course to improve on herself
each time. She would go on like this as long as she felt like
it.... To-day she seemed to me ready to quadruple her efforts.

She too, I thought, as I looked at her, must have been a beautiful,
a juicy piece in her time; but more talkative, I should say;
wasteful of her energies, more demonstrative than the daughter
whose quiet, concentrated intimacy was a truly admirable achieve-
ment of Nature's. These things have not yet been studied in the
marvellous way they deserve. The girl's mother guessed her
daughter's animal superiority over her and jealously disapproved
by instinct of her gift for tremendous delights, for enjoyment to
her innermost depths.

Anyway, the theatrical side of this disaster absolutely thrilled
her. Her mournful tremolos filled our little shrunken world, in
which we were all merely mucking about, thanks to her. And one
couldn't dream of getting her away from it. Still, I ought to have
tried, of course. Tried to do something. It was my duty to, as
they say. But I was too comfortable sitting down and too uncom-
fortable standing up.

It was a bit pleasanter at their place than at the Henrouilles;
just as ugly but more comfortable. Quite cosy, really. Not
sinister like the other hole, only just plain ugly.

Dazed and tired, my eyes wandered round the things in the
room. Little valueless bits and pieces which had always been
in the family; particularly the mantelpiece cover with pink
velvet bobbles which you no longer find in shops now, and the
Neapolitan porcelain, and a work table with a bevelled mirror,
probably from an aunt in the provinces who'd had two of them. I
didn't tell the mother about the pool of blood which I could see
forming under the bed nor about the regular dripping which was
still going on--she would only have shouted the louder and
wouldn't have listened to me. She was never going to stop com-
plaining and waxing indignant. No, she was committed to it.

As well hold one's peace and look out through the window
at the grey velvet of evening beginning to cover the street op-
posite, house by house,--first the little ones and then the others;
the tallest at last are taken too, and people scurry about among
them, more and more slowly, doubtful and dim, hesitating across
from one side of the street to the other before going off into the
darkness.

Further away, far beyond the town walls, strings and clusters
of little lights were dotted about the shadows like nails fastening
forgetfulness across the town, and other little lights there were
twinkling among the green ones,--spangles of red light, as if
lots and lots of boats, a whole fleet come from far, were waiting
there all of a shimmer for the great gates of the Night to open
before them.

If this woman had only stopped for a second to breathe, if only
there had been a great moment of silence, one could at least
have let oneself renounce everything; one could have tried to
forget the need to live. But she was on my tracks the whole time.

"Perhaps if I were to wash her, Doctor? What d'you think?"

I answered neither yes nor no, but as I had the chance to speak,
I again advised immediate removal to the hospital. More yelping,
sharper still, more strident, more determined, in answer. Hopeless.

I went slowly towards the door, treading softly.

The shadows now separated us from the bed.

I could barely see the girl's hands now against the sheet, they
looked so much the same in colour.

I went back and felt her pulse. Its beats were weaker, more
fleeting than before. Her breath came only in snatches. I still
could hear the blood dripping to the floor like the ticking of
a watch going slower and slower, becoming more and more feeble.
There was nothing to be done. The mother went before me to the
door.

"Above all, Doctor," she urged me breathlessly, "promise me
that you won't say a word about this to any one?" She implored
me. "Swear you won't?"

I promised anything, everything. I held out my hand. Twenty
francs. She shut the door after me, little by little.

Bebert's aunt was waiting for me downstairs with the proper
grave expression on her face. "How's it going then? Badly?" she
asked me. I realized that she had been waiting for me down there
for the last half-hour to get her usual commission: two francs.
I wasn't going to be allowed to dodge that. "And how did it go
with the Henrouilles?" she enquired. She expected her pourboire
on that too. "They did not pay me," I answered. Perfectly true.
Her smile disappeared and her expression changed. She suspected
me.

"It's an unfortunate thing not to be able to get people to pay
you, though, Doctor. How do you expect people to respect you?
Bills are either paid right away or they don't get paid at all."
Perfectly true, too. I went away. I had put my beans on to boil
before I went out. Now was the time, after dusk, to go and buy
the milk. In the daytime people smiled when they met me in the
street, carrying my bottle of milk. Naturally. No maid.

And then the winter dragged on, spreading out over months and
weeks. There was no way out of the rain and the fog in which
we were sunk.

There were plenty of patients now, but few of them could or
would pay my fees. The medical is an invidious profession.
When one's practice is among the rich, one looks like a lackey;
when it's among the poor, like a thief. Fees! What a business
it is! The people who're ill haven't enough money to buy food
and go to the cinema with--and then are you going to take what
money they have to make up your fees? Just when they are
having a particularly thin time of it, too? It's not very pleasant.
You let it go. You become kindly. And you go to bits.

When January's rent became due, I started by selling my side-
board--to make more room, as I told people, and be able to give
physical culture classes in my dining room. Who believed me?
In February, to pay my income tax, I sold my bicycle and the
gramophone Molly had given me as a parting present. It played
"No More Worries." The tune has stuck in my head to this day.
And it's all I have left. Bezin had my records around in his
shop a long time, and then finally they too were sold.

So as to give an impression of even greater prosperity, I an-
nounced that I was going to buy myself a motor car when the
good weather came, and that was why I was selling off a few
things first. I wasn't really hard-boiled enough to be able to
go in for doctoring seriously. When people came back with me to
the door, after I had told the family what to do and had written
out my prescription, I would launch out on a whole series of
general remarks, just to put off a little longer the moment for
being paid. I didn't know my own business. Most of my patients
were so wretchedly poor, so dingy, and also so morose, that I
always wondered where they were going to find twenty francs
to give me, and if they might not kill me in revenge. Yet I
needed those twenty francs very badly myself. What humiliation!
I shall blush for it for the rest of my life.

And my colleagues go on blithely talking about "fees"! As
if the word were enough in itself and explained everything....
I could not help crying "Shame!" myself, and there was no way
out of that. Everything can be explained away, I realize that. But
it does not alter the fact that the man who has taken five francs
from poor, disgruntled wretches is a scoundrel for the rest of his
days. In fact, it was from this time on that I have known myself
to be as dirty a blackguard as any. It's not that I lived wildly
and wickedly on their five and ten-franc payments. No, indeed.
Because the landlord got most of it, anyway. But even so, that's
no excuse. One would like it to be an excuse, but it isn't quite.
The landlord's lower than dirt, of course; that's all there is to
that.

Through getting all upset in this way and walking about in the
icy winter rain, I began to look like a tubercular case myself.
Naturally. That's what happens when one has to give up all
pleasures. From time to time I would buy myself a couple of
eggs somewhere, but my actual diet was really only plain
vegetables. They take a long time to cook. I spent hours in the
kitchen after consulting time, watching them simmer, and as I
lived on the first floor, I got a beautiful view from there of
the whole of the back yard. Back yards are the dungeons to a row
of apartment houses. I had lots of time to look down into my
own, and particularly to listen to it.

Shouts and calls from a score of houses round sail in and clatter
and echo there, and even the concierges' little birds chirrup after
a spring they will never see again, languishing in their cages near
the waterclosets, which are all grouped together in the shadowy
depths at the end yonder, with their doors always battered and
swinging loose. A hundred drunkards, male and female, inhabit
this structure and fill the air with their puffed-up quarrelling
and confused, exuberant oaths, especially on Saturdays after
lunch. That's the big moment in family life. First there is a lot
of shouting and defiance, when the wine has gone to their heads,
and Father wields a chair, my God, as if it were a battle-axe, while
Mother flourishes a stick of firewood like a sabre. Then the weak
may look to themselves! The littlest one gets it in the neck. A
family scrap flattens everything that cannot retaliate and defend
itself against the wall: children, dogs and cats. After the third
glass of wine, the worst and blackest, it's the dog's turn to suffer;
some one treads heavily on his paw. That will teach him to be
hungry when human beings are hungry too. There's a great laugh
when he runs howling under the bed, like a soul in torment. That's
the signal. Nothing rouses a tipsy woman as much as an animal
in pain and bulls are not always to hand. The argument begins
again vindictively, and as aggressive as an evil dream; the female
sets the pace, shrilly calling her mate to battle. The melee ensues
at once, and breakable objects fly in bits. The courtyard is filled
with the fracas, echoing round in the shadows. The children
squeak with terror. They are finding out what Daddy and
Mummy are really like. Their wailings draw the wrath upon
themselves.

I waited several days to hear what sometimes occurred after
these family scenes.

It used to happen opposite my window on the third floor of
the house across the way.

I could not see anything, but I heard well enough.

There is an end to everything. It is not always death, it's often
something else and a good deal worse, particularly in the case
of children.

That's where they lived, these people, above the courtyard, just
where its shadows thinned out a bit. When the mother and father
were alone together, on the days when this thing happened, they
argued at first at length and then a long silence followed. The
thing was brewing. The little girl was needed first; they called
her in. She knew. She started whimpering at once. She knew
what was going to happen to her. Judging by her voice, she must
have been about ten years old. After a good few times I came to
understand what it was the two of them did to her.

First they tied her up; that took a long time; it was like
preparing for an operation. That excited them. "Little beast!" he
said. "You filthy little brat!" the mother exclaimed. "You're going
to get such a licking!" they both of them cried, while they scolded
her for all sorts of things, things which probably they made up.
They must have been tying her to the bedposts. All this time the
child was whimpering like a mouse in a trap. "Oh, no, you won't
escape, I tell you. You won't escape!" the woman went on, and a
stream of imprecations followed, as if she were talking to a horse.
She was terribly excited. "Be quiet, Mamma!" the little girl an-
swered softly. "Be quiet, Mamma! Whack me--but don't talk
like that, Mamma!" She did not escape; she was given a tremen-
dous thrashing. ... I listened to the end, to be quite certain
that that's what was happening. I could not have eaten
my beans while that was going on. I could not shut my window
either. I wasn't any use at all. I couldn't do anything. I
simply stood there and listened as always, as I did everywhere.
Still, I think I somehow gained strength listening to this thing,
strength to go on further, an odd sort of strength, and next time,
I felt, why, next time I would be able to go deeper, and hear other
cries that I had not heard yet or which I had not been able to
understand before, because there seem always to be some cries
beyond those which one has heard, cries which one has not yet
heard or understood.

When they had thrashed their daughter until she could not yell
any longer, she still cried a bit each time she breathed, a
little sobbing cry.

I would hear the man say then, at that point: "Now come on,
woman! Quick--now!" Happy as anything.

It was the mother he was saying that to, and then the door into
the other room would bang behind them. One day it was she I
heard say to him: "Oh, I adore you, Jules, you complete beast!
The filthier you were, the more I should love you."

That's how they went together, their concierge told me, against
the sink in the kitchen. Any other way they couldn't manage it.
All that I learned about them bit by bit. When I met them in
the street, all three together, there was nothing odd about them.
They went out for a walk like any ordinary family. The father I
also used to see when I passed his shop on the corner of the
Boulevard Poincare, where it said "Shoes For Sensitive Feet"
and he was first salesman.

Most of the time our back yard offered nothing but a spectacle
of unrelieved hideousness, especially in summer, when it rumbled
with the echoes of threats and blows and falls and confused curs-
ing. The sun never reached to the bottom. The yard was seemingly
painted with thick blue shadows, deepest in the corners. There
were the concierges' little huts, like so many hives. Their husbands
peed at night against the dustbins, and that made a noise like
thunder in the court.

Washing tried to dry, strung up from one window to another.

After supper the talk in the evening was mostly of horses
and racing when there was no brutality going on. But often
these discussions on sport also ended pretty badly and there were
brawls, and always behind at least one of the windows, for one
reason or for another, blows were come to in the end.

In summer too everything smelt strongly. There was no air left
in the back yard, only smells. The smell of cauliflower has it,
easily, over all other smells. One cauliflower equals ten water-
closets, even if they're running over. Every one knows that.
The ones on the second floor were often out of order. Madame
Cezanne, the concierge from Number 8, would come along then
with her forked stick. I used to watch her, battling away. That's
how we eventually got into conversation. "Personally," she advised
me, "if I were in your place, I'd get pregnant women out of
their difficulties. ... On the quiet like. There are some women
in this neighbourhood who live--you've no idea what a life
they live! And there is nothing they'd like better than to give
you work. ... It's a fact. There's more to that than attending
to tuppenny-ha'penny little clerks with varicose veins.... Es-
pecially as it means good pay."

Old Cezanne had a tremendous aristocratic scorn, though I
don't know where she had got it from, for people who worked.
"Tenants are never happy; you'd think they were prisoners in
gaol the way they make things difficult for everybody! ...
Either it's their lavatories are stopped up.... Or they've a
gas escape somewhere. ... Or somebody's been opening their
letters.... There's always some complaint! Always making a
damn nuisance of themselves! The other day one of them actually
spat into his rent envelope! What do you think of that?"
She even had to give up trying to clear the lavatories sometimes,
it was so difficult. "I don't know what they can have put
down them, but they might at least not wait till it's dry. ... I
know them! They always let you know when it's too late. They
do it on purpose, of course. Where I was before once they had to
crack open a drainpipe it was so hard. ... I don't know what they
eat! Cement, I'd say."





NOBODY WILL GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD THAT IT WAS CHIEFLY
DUE to Robinson if things were getting me down again. At first I
didn't take much notice of this uneasy feeling. I was jogging
along more or less all right from one sick bed to the next, but I
had grown more restless now than I was before, increasingly so,
like in New York, and I had begun to sleep less well than usual,
too.

The idea of meeting Robinson again had come to me with
a shock; it was like a sort of illness getting hold of me again.
With that whining, worried mug of his, it was as if he was
bringing back some kind of bad dream to me, one I hadn't
managed to shake off through too many years already. It was
putting me right off my stroke.

He had landed back there in front of me. I should never see
the end of him. I was sure he must have been looking out for
me hereabouts. I certainly hadn't been going out of my way to
find him.... And he'd be along here for sure, and I would have
to get all mixed up in his affairs again. As it was, everything
now brought his dirty presence back into my mind. Even the
people I could see through my window, who looked so ordinary
walking about in the street like that, even they made me think
of him, standing there in doorways talking, cuddling each
other.... Oh, I knew perfectly well what they were after, what
they were hiding under that nothing-in-particular look of theirs.
To kill others and to kill themselves, that's what they wanted;
not right off, of course, but bit by bit, like Robinson, with
anything that came to hand,--old sorrows, fresh griefs, still
nameless hatreds.... Unless there is a war on, a war in full
blast, and then the job takes only half the time.

I did not even dare to go out for fear of meeting him.

They had to call me two or three times over before I could
make up my mind to go and see patients. So most often when I
got there they had already fetched in some one else. My wits were
a jumble, like Life itself. The Rue Saint-Vincent I had only been
in once before when they called for me to go and see the people
on the third floor at Number I2. They even brought a cab round
for me. I recognized the old grandfather at once. He spoke in a
whisper and spent a long time wiping his feet on my doormat.
A furtive old creature, grey and bent; he wanted me to hurry
because his little grandson was ill.

I also remembered his daughter quite well; another fine lassie,
now fallen off in looks, yet solid and silent, who had come home
more than once to be aborted. Nobody blamed her for it. They
only wished to heaven she'd go and get married and have done
with it. Especially as she already had a little boy of two who
lived at home with his grandparents.

Any little thing made this child ill and when that happened his
grandmother, his grandfather and his mother all blubbered
together copiously, in chorus, chiefly because he hadn't a real
father. It is at such moments that family lapses are most felt.
The old people believed, though they did not altogether admit it,
that natural-born children are more delicate and more often ill
than other children.

In any case the father, the fellow who it was supposed was the
father, that is, had gone away, disappeared for good and all.
He'd heard such a lot of talk about marriage, this young man,
that in the end he had got bored. He must have been quite a way
off by now, if he was still running. Nobody had been able to
make out why he had deserted her like that, particularly not the
girl herself. After all, he had always seemed to get a great
deal of fun out of sleeping with her.

So now that the bird had flown, they all three stood round
and gazed at the infant and wept. And there you were. She had
given herself to this man, she said, "body and soul." It was
bound to happen, and according to her, that explained everything.
The baby had been born from her body suddenly, leaving it
wrinkled and old. The spirit will put up with phrases, but the
body is different; it's not so easy to please, it must have muscle.
A body is always something that is true; that is why it's nearly
always sad and repulsive to look at. It's true also that I have
seldom seen any maternity remove so much youth at one stroke.
All that this mother had left, you might say, were her feelings
and the breath in her body. Nobody had any further use for her.

Before the arrival of this illegitimate child, the family had
lived in a most respectable, church-going quarter of the town;
had been living there for years. They didn't all go into exile at
Raney for the fun of it, but to hide away, to disappear in a bunch,
to be forgotten. As soon as it was no longer possible to keep the
pregnancy a secret from their neighbours, they decided to quit
their part of Paris and avoid "talk." Transplantation for the
sake of Honour.

At Raney it did not matter what your neighbours thought;
in the first place, they weren't known there and, besides, the
local council held the most abominable political beliefs; down-
right anarchists they were as a matter of fact, the talk of all
France, a positive disgrace to the country. In this rapscallion
milieu, other people's judgments wouldn't count.

The family had spontaneously punished itself, breaking away
from all its relations and its old friends. A thoroughgoing drama,
if ever there was one. They had nothing further to lose, they
said. They had already lost caste. When you want to lower yourself
in your own estimation, you turn to the People.

They didn't complain. They merely tried to comprehend, in
fits and starts of weak revolt, what Providence could conceivably
have drunk the day it played such a lousy trick on them--of
all people.

For the daughter there was only one consolation about life
in Raney--but it was a very great consolation: that of being
able to talk freely now to all and sundry about her "new
responsibilities." Her lover's desertion of her had awakened a
certain longing in a breast aching to be heroic and different.
Once assured for the rest of her days of never having exactly the
same fate as other women of her class and standing, and with the
romance of a life devastated by a first love to fall back on, she
accepted with delight the great sorrow which had been meted out
to her, and the ravages of Fate became, as a matter of fact, a
dramatic godsend to her. She squirmed with unmarried motherhood.

When her father and I entered the dining room, you could
barely catch sight of their faces in the dim, economical light;
so many splodges reiterating remarks which hung about in
shadows heavy with that ancient cruet smell which all old family
furniture gives off.

The child in the middle of the table, on its back among its swad-
dling clothes, let itself be felt. I pressed, to start with, on the
wall of its stomach, very carefully and gradually, from the navel
downwards, and then, still very gravely, I proceeded to auscultate.
Its heart beat like a kitten's, sharp and fast. Then, suddenly,
the child had enough of my fiddling and probing and began to
yell, as only one can at that age, incredibly. It was too much.
Since Robinson's reappearance, I had been feeling very strange
in mind and body, and the screams of this little innocent made a
ghastly impression on me. What screams, my God, what screams!
I couldn't bear it another second.

No doubt something else too made me behave in that stupid
way. I was so furious I couldn't help expressing, out loud, the
rancour and the disgust I had been feeling, too long, inside myself.
"Hey," I said to this little screamer, "don't you be in such a
hurry, you little fool! There'll be plenty of time yet for you
to yell. There'll be time, don't you worry, you little donkey! Pull
yourself together. There'll be unhappiness enough later on to
make you cry your eyes out and weep yourself silly, if you
don't look out!"

"What do you say, Doctor?" the grandmother asked, with a
start. I simply answered, "There'll be plenty!"

"What? Plenty of what?" she enquired in a horrified tone.

"You should understand," I told her. "You really should!
You're always having things explained to you. Far too often.
That's just what's wrong. Try to understand. Make an effort!"

"There'll be plenty of what left? What's he saying?" they all
three asked each other, and the young woman of the "responsi-
bilities" pulled a devilishly odd face, and then she set to herself
and let off a series of stupendous howls. She'd lighted on the most
marvellous possible opportunity for a breakdown. And she wasn't
letting it slip. What pandemonium! What a havoc and hullabaloo!
What shudderings, and squintings, and chokings! Marvellous!
I'd certainly torn it.

"He's mad, Mamma," she spluttered and sobbed. "The Doctor's
gone mad! Take my little one from him, Mamma!" She was
Saving Her Child.

I cannot think why, but she was so overcome she began to
speak with a Basque accent. "He's saying frightful things,
Mother! Mother, he's mad!"

The child was snatched from my hands exactly as if it were
being snatched from the flames. Grandpapa, who had been so
timid only a moment before, now took down from the wall an
enormous mahogony barometer, like a mace, and accompanied me
to the door, which he slammed behind me, kicking it to with his
foot.

Of course, they took this as an excuse not to pay me my fee.
When I got back into the street, I wasn't very proud of what
had happened to me. Not so much on account of my reputation
in the neighbourhood, which couldn't very well be worse than
people had already made it--quite of their own accord, mark you,
without my having to give them any help--but still because of
Robinson, whom I had hoped to shake off with an orgy of
plain speaking, finding enough resolution in a wilfully created
scene never to have anything more to do with him, by staging
some sort of fierce altercation with myself.

This is how I had figured it out: I'll discover by way of exper-
iment, just how much of a flare-up you can start with yourself
if you try. But the thing is you're never through with a to-do
and an excitement; you never know quite how far you'll have
to go if you start being really outspoken. Or what people are
still hiding from you. ... Or what they'll show you yet ... if
you live long enough, if you look far enough into their silli-
nesses. It all had to be begun all over again.

I was in a hurry to go off and hide myself for the time being.
I set off towards home down the Impasse Gibet at first, and then
I went along the Rue des Valentines. It's a goodish way. You've
time to change your mind. I was going in the direction of the
sky signs. On the Place Transitoire I met old Peridon, the lamp-
lighter. We exchanged a few commonplace remarks. "You going
to the cinema, Doctor?" he asked. He put the idea into my head.
It seemed a good one.

The bus took me there quicker than the Metro would have.
After that shameful incident, I should certainly have left Raney
for good, if I'd been able to.

As you stay on in a given place, things and people go to pieces
round you; they rot and start to stink for your own special bene-
fit.





ALL THE SAME, I DID WELL TO GO BACK TO RANCY NEXT DAY, BE-
CAUSE of Bebert, who fell ill at just that very time. Colleague Frolichon
was away on holiday; Bebert's aunt hesitated for a while and then
she asked me to take charge of the patient, I suppose because I was
the least expensive of the doctors she knew.

It happened after Easter. The weather was improving. The first
southern breezes were coming to Raney and wafting factory soot
onto our windowpanes.

Bebert's illness lasted for weeks. I used to go to see him twice
a day. The people round would wait for me by the lodge, without
seeming to be waiting, and all the neighbours came out on to
their doorsteps. It gave them something to do. People came from
quite a way to find out whether he was any better or not. The
sunlight, threading its way through too many things, reached the
street only as an autumnal glow, clouded and regretful.

I was given plenty of advice with regard to Bebert. As a matter
of fact, the whole neighbourhood took an interest in his case. A
great deal was said first in favour of, and then against my intel-
ligence. When I entered the lodge, a critical and somewhat hostile
silence fell, a ponderously stupid silence chiefly. The lodge
was always full of old cronies, friends of the aunts, so it smelt
strongly of petticoats and rabbit's pee. Every one had his own
favourite doctor, who was cleverer and more able than any one
else. Indeed there was only one thing to be said in my favour and
that, of course, was the one thing for which you are not easily
forgiven: I was dirt cheap. Which looks bad for the patient and
the patient's family, however poor they may be.

Bebert wasn't delirious yet, he merely had not the least desire
to move. He began to lose weight daily. A little yellow, flabby
flesh still clung to his bones and shook each time his heart beat.
His heart seemed to be everywhere in his body, he'd got so thin in
just over a month's illness. He smiled at me pleasantly when I came
to see him. And in this gentle way his temperature rose to over
100° and then 102°, and there he stayed for days and weeks, looking
thoughtful.

Bebert's aunt had finally shut up and left us alone. She had
said all she knew, whereupon she went and wept, disconsolate, in
all the corners of the lodge, one after another. Misery had come
to her, in fact, when her words came to an end; she seemed not
to know what to do with it; she tried to wipe it away with her
handkerchief, but it came back into her throat, and tears came
too, and she began all over again. She dropped tears all over her-
self and so came to look a little more dirty than usual, and she
was astonished by it all. "Oh, dear; oh, dear," she kept saying.
But that's all. She had cried herself to the end of her resources,
her arms fell limp by her side and she stood there facing me, com-
pletely overcome.

And then even so her misery would come back to her with a
jolt and she'd make up her mind again and go off sobbing. This
went on for weeks, these comings and goings in her unhappiness.
It couldn't help looking as if this illness was going to turn out
badly. It was a sort of malignant typhoid, against which nothing
that I tried was any good--baths, serums, dry diet, injections.
... Nothing was any use. Do what I might, my efforts were in
vain. Bebert was slipping, being taken irresistibly away, smil-
ing. There he was, way up in his fever, in equipoise, with me
scrabbling about below. Of course almost everybody urgently
advised the aunt to send me packing there and then and get in
another better and more experienced doctor at once.

The incident of the girl with the "responsibilities" had made
its mark in the neighbourhood and been tremendously commented
on. You could almost hear them gargling with it.

But as the other doctors were aware of the nature of Bebert's
case and dodged away, in the end I stayed. Seeing that he'd fallen
to my lot, I might as well carry on; that was the way my colleagues
looked at it, as a matter of fact.

There was nothing more I could think to do, except go round
to the bistrot and telephone now and again to one or two medical
men I knew more or less well, in various hospitals up in Paris,
asking them, who were so wise and so well-known, what they
would do if faced with a case of typhoid like the one that was
bothering me. They all of them gave me excellent advice, excellent
advice that wasn't any use, but all the same I liked hearing them
take trouble like that, and for nothing too, on behalf of the little
unknown boy I had taken charge of. In the end, you are pleased by
quite a little thing, by the slender consolations life's good e-
nough to leave you.

While I was subtilizing my feelings like this, Bebert's aunt dis-
solved into floods of tears among her chairs and staircases: she
only emerged from her bewilderment to eat her meals. It's true
that she never forgot a single mealtime. She wouldn't have been
allowed to forget them in any case. Her neighbours watched over
her. They stuffed her up between sobs. "You've got to keep your
strength up," they said. She even began to put on weight.

The smell of Brussels sprouts, when Bebert was at his worst, was
absolutely rampant in the lodge. It was the season for them and
every one sent her presents of Brussels sprouts, already cooked
and beautifully hot. "They keep me going, you know," she readily
admitted. "And they have such an excellent effect on the bowels!"

Before nightfall, on account of the ringing of the bell, so as to
sleep lightly and hear the first ring, she filled herself up with
coffee; then people didn't wake Bebert up, trying to get in and
ringing two or three times. When I passed by the house in the
evening, I used to go in to see if it wasn't all over at last. "Don't
you think it may have been the camomile tea and rum he would
drink at the fruiterer's that day of the bicycle races which has
made him ill?" That idea had worried her from the start. Fool!

"Camomile!" Bebert murmured feebly, like an echo, far away
in his fever. Why bother to argue with her? Once more I would
go through the two or three little professional gestures which were
expected of me and off I went into the night, not at all proud
of myself, because like my mother I never felt quite innocent of
any misfortunes which came along.

After more than a fortnight of this, though, I decided I had bet-
ter go along to the Bioduret Joseph Institute and see what they
thought of a case of typhoid like this, and ask them at the same
time if they couldn't give me a little advice and perhaps let me
have some vaccine or other to try. If I did that, I should have
done and tried everything I could, even the most out-of-the-way
things; and if after all Bebert died, well, perhaps I wouldn't be
to blame for it. I got to the Institute, yonder at the other end of
Paris, behind the Villete, around eleven one morning. They let me
wander through laboratory after laboratory, first of all, looking
for a wise man. There wasn't anybody in these laboratories yet,
either wise or not. Just a litter of things in no sort of order,
carcasses of little animals cut open, cigarette ends, twisted gas
brackets, boxes and glass jars with mice inside quietly suffocating,
retorts, a jumble of kidneys, broken stools, books and dust, still
more cigarette ends--they were everywhere--and the smell of
them, and of latrines, predominating. As I was in such good time,
I thought while I was there I would go along to the tomb of that
great savant Bioduret Joseph, which was down in the basement
amid all the golds and marbles. A bourgeois-Byzantine fantasia
of the purest inspiration. You paid on your way out, and the
keeper was grumbling because some one had slipped him a Belgian
coin. It is due to this Bioduret that numbers of young men in
the last fifty years have decided to take up science. As many duds
have been turned out in this way as ever was produced by the
Conservatoire. They all become very much alike too, after a
certain number of years of not being a success. In the general
rout, an M.D. is as good as a "Prix de Rome." A question of catching
the bus at a slightly different time. That's all.

I had a long time still to wait in the gardens of the Institute, a
mixture of prison yard and public square, with flower beds carefully
aligned along walls adorned with malice aforethought.

At last some of the young men on the staff came along. They
were the first to arrive, and several already carried bags full of
provisions from the near-by market, and looked very down at
heel. Then the sages themselves appeared, mooching in through
the gates more slowly and more reserved than their humble assist-
ants, in little, unshaven, whispering groups. They branched off
up the different corridors, scraping the paint off the walls. Old,
grey-haired schoolboys coming into school, carrying umbrellas,
weighed down by the pettiness of the routine and the desperate
tedium of their experiments, vowed, for a paltry salary and in
middle age, to these little microbe kitchens where they spent their
days warming up endless concoctions of vegetables, asphyxiated
guinea pigs and other nameless messes.

When all is said and done, they themselves were nothing more
than old servants, ruminating and overcoated and absurd. Greatness
in our day is to the rich alone, whether they be wise or not.
These underlings of the Research Institute could only count as a
means of livelihood on their own fear of losing their allotted
places in this stuffy, famous, departmental dustbin. It was their
titles of official pundits that they clung to above all else. Thanks
to which title the chemists in town accorded a certain confidence
still to their analyses (of course meagrely paid) of clients' urine
and phlegm. Pangloss' unsavoury perquisite.

As soon as he got there, each methodical expert performed the
rite of gazing for a while at the rotting, bilious entrails of
last week's rabbit, which was stuck up on show in a corner of the
room, an obscene little altar to science. When the smell of it
became absolutely unbearable, another rabbit was offered up in
sacrifice, but not before, because of the economy being practiced
at that time with fanatical zeal by Professor Jaunisset, Secretary
to the Institute.

In this way certain decaying carcasses underwent, for economy's
sake, the most incredible permutations and protractions. It's all
a question of getting used to things. Some of the more hardened
laboratory boys could very easily have cooked their meals in
a coffin crawling with life, they had got so used to the stench
of decomposing flesh. In fact, these humble collaborators in the
great enterprise of science sometimes surpassed even Jaunisset
himself in thriftiness, beating him at his own game in spite of
his almost incredible meanness, and making use of the Institute's
gas to cook themselves stews and many other dubious, leisurely
concoctions.

When the pedants had finished dully examining the entrails of
the ritual rabbit or guinea pig, they had gently come to the
second act of their scientific daily lives: the lighting of a cig-
arette. An attempt to neutralize the prevailing stench and boredom
with tobacco smoke. And so from stub to stub, at last these wise men
came to the end of their day around five o'clock. Then the various
putrefactions were quietly put back to warm in the dilapidated
stove. Octave, the lab. boy, concealed his boiled beans in a news-
paper, so as to get them safely past the concierge; deceitful lit-
tle beast, he was taking his supper home to the suburbs already
cooked. His master was just writing a little line of something or
other in some corner of his experiment notebook, timidly, doubt-
fully, with a view to that bore of a report he would have to
make up his mind to prepare one of these days, to justify his
presence at the Institute--and the meagre emoluments that entail-
ed--before some infinitely impartial and disinterested Body
of Academicians.

A real pedagogue will be twenty years on an average making the
one great discovery, which consists in realizing the fact that
one man's folly is very far from being another man's pleasure,
and that every one here below finds his neighbour's vagaries
distressing.

The madness of the scientist, which is wiser and more reasonable
than any other, is even so the most intolerable of all. But when
one has learnt the knack of living in a given spot, with the help
of certain gestures, even though it may not be very comfortably,
obviously one has got to carry on in the same way or resign one-
self to a guinea pig's death. Habits are acquired quicker than
courage, and especially the habit of having something to eat.

And so I went on looking for my old friend Parapine throughout
the Institute, because that is just what I had come all the
way from Raney for. I must persevere in my attempt to find him.
It wasn't awfully easy. I wandered around a long time, hesitating
among so many passages and doors.

This old boy Parapine never breakfasted at all, and only had
supper at most two or three times a week, but when he did, he
ate prodigiously, after the fashion of Russian students, all of
whose fantastic habits he still retained.

In his own particular subject, Parapine was considered to be
a foremost authority. He knew everything there was to know
about typhoid, either in animals or in human beings. His repu-
tation had first been established some twenty years before this,
when certain German authors once claimed to have isolated
Eberthian bacteria in the vaginal excretions of an eighteen-
months-old baby girl. That caused a tremendous rumpus in the
realms of Truth. Parapine delightedly retorted, with as little
delay as possible, and in the name of the National Institute in-
stantly surpassed this presumptuous Teuton by himself cultivat-
ing the same germ, only in its purest form, in the sperm of an
old invalid of seventy-two. Famous at once, all he had to do
to keep himself to the fore in the world of science, was to fill
a few unreadable columns every so often in various professional
monthlies. And this he did, with ease, from that bold and lucky
day till his death.

Everybody now who had a serious interest in science accepted
and believed in him. Which means that nobody seriously interested
in science needed to bother to read him. If this public were
to become critical all of a sudden, further advance in medicine
would be impossible. A year would be wasted over every printed
page.

When I reached the door of his little cell, Serge Parapine was
busy spitting fluently and continuously into all four corners of
his laboratory, with an expression of such deep disgust on his
face that it gave one pause. Parapine shaved from time to time
but there was always enough hair on his lopsided cheeks to make
him look like an escaped convict. He shivered without stopping,
or at any rate seemed to be shivering, though he never removed
his overcoat, an overcoat which consisted chiefly of a variety
of stains and a mass of scurf which he neatly picked off and
flicked away all round him, while a lock dangled down over his
forehead to his pink and greenish nose.

While I was studying the practical part of my course at the
Faculty, Parapine had given me a few microscope lessons and
had on several occasions shown me genuine kindness. I hoped he
would not have entirely forgotten me since those now distant
days and that he would be able perhaps to give me some extremely
valuable piece of medical advice in the matter of Bebert's
illness, which was really upsetting me very much indeed.
I was actually finding myself much more keen on preventing
Bebert from dying than I should have been on saving an adult.
One never minds very much if an adult goes; that's always one
sod less in the world, one thinks to oneself, whereas in the case of
a child, the thing's not quite so certain. There's always the future,
there's some chance ...

When Parapine learned my difficulties, he asked nothing better
than to help me and put me on the right track in my treatment
of Bebert, but he had learnt so many things in twenty years,
so many different and often contradictory facts about typhoid,
that it had become very difficult for him now--one might almost
say impossible for him--to make any definite or concrete pro-
nouncement on the subject of this very ordinary malady and its
cure.

"In the first place, do you, my dear colleague, do you yourself
believe in serums?" he asked me for a start. "Eh? What do
you think about them? And what about vaccines? Indeed, what is
your impression? Many excellent brains nowadays have no use
for vaccines at all. It's a bold line to take, of course ... I
think so too. But after all? Eh? Why not? Don't you feel there
is a great deal to be said for this negative viewpoint? What do
you think yourself?"

His sentences bounded one after another from his mouth in
awe-inspiring leaps, amid an avalanche of enormous R's.
While he was roaming and roaring like a lion among these
forlorn and passionate theories of his, the famous Jaunisset,
Secretary to the Institute, who at that time was still alive,
passed by beneath our window, intent and haughty.

Parapine at the sight of him turned paler, if that were possible,
than he was already, and nervously changed the conversation
in his eagerness to tell me at once how much it disgusted
him to have to see the universally admired Jaunisset every day
of his life. In a second or two he had described that famous
man to me as a trickster and a most dangerous type of maniac,
and had charged him with more monstrous, unheard-of, secret
crimes than would have sufficed to fill a penal settlement for
a century.

I could not prevent him from giving me a hundred and one
hateful details of the grotesque calling which he was obliged
to follow in order to feed himself: a hatred more exact, more
scientific indeed, than that of other men similarly placed in
offices and shops.

He talked about all this in a very loud voice and I was amazed
at his outspokenness. His lab. boy could overhear what was being
said. He had done his own little bit of cooking and now, for the
sake of form, was still fussing about among the Bunsen burners
and test tubes; but he had grown so accustomed to hearing Para-
pine deliver his almost daily tirade that, however extravagant his
remarks might be, they now seemed to him entirely academic
and insignificant. Certain small private experiments, which he
very gravely conducted himself in one corner of the laboratory,
struck him, by contrast to Parapine's outbursts, as marvellously
instructive and exciting. Parapine's observations did not distract
his attention in the least. Before leaving, he shut the door of the
stove on his own personal microbes, carefully and religiously, as
if it were a tabernacle.

"Did you notice that lab. boy, my friend? Did you notice that
old imbecile?" Parapine asked me, as soon as he had left. "Well,
for nearly thirty years now, clearing up my messes after me,
he's heard nothing but scientific talk all round him, and plenty
of it and thoroughgoing scientific talk at that.... Yet far from
being put off by it, he, and he alone, is now the only person in
this place who believes in that stuff! He's mucked about with
my experiments until he's come to think them marvellous. He's
thrilled to death about them! My smallest piece of scientific
foolery enchants him. But isn't that always the way with all
religions? Hasn't the parson long ago given up thinking about
his Maker and doesn't the layman believe in him still? Heart
and soul? Really, it's enough to make one vomit. Isn't my idiot
of a lab. boy ridiculous enough to ape the great Bioduret Joseph
in everything, down to his way of dressing and his goatee beard?
Did you notice that? Between ourselves, the great Bioduret was
not so very different from my lab. boy, except that he had a
world-wide reputation and his whims were more intense....
He's always seemed to me monstrously vulgar, that immense
analytic genius, with his mania for rinsing out bottles with
meticulous care and observing from a fantastically close range
the birth and growth of moths.... Take away from the great
Bioduret a little of his prodigious domestic niggardliness and
what that is admirable remains, may I ask? I beg you, tell me.
A crafty, scowling, disagreeable old concierge--nothing more.
Besides, he showed very clearly at the Academy what a horrible
old creature he really was during those twenty years he spent
there, loathed by almost everybody, quarrelling with damn
nearly every soul in the place, quarrelling the whole confounded
time. ... An ingenious megalomaniac. That's all he was."

Parapine in his turn was gently preparing to leave. I helped
him to wind a sort of scarf round his neck and over all that
invariable scurf, a kind of mantilla. Then it suddenly occurred to
him that I had called to see him on a definite and very urgent
matter. "There now," he said, "boring you with my own little
affairs, I was forgetting about your patient! Forgive me, my
friend; let us lose no time in returning to the real subject of
our conversation. But what can I tell you, after all, that you
don't know already? Amid so many unstable theories, so much
contradictory data, the reasonable thing, when it comes down
to it, is to make no definite choice. Do the best you can, my
friend! Since you have got to do something, do what you can!
As far as I am concerned, I may as well tell you, speaking
between ourselves, that the typhoid germ has come to disgust
me beyond words, beyond all belief, in fact! When as a young
man I first took up typhoid, there were only a few of us engaged
in this field of research; I mean to say, we knew exactly
how many of us there were at the game, we could each of us
help to establish the other man's reputation.... Whereas nowadays,
it's a very different thing. They're pouring in from Lapland,
my good sir, from Peru! More and more turn up every
day! There are droves of investigators! Japan produces them in
tens at a time! In the course of the last few years I've watched
the world become absolutely flooded with preposterous specialist
publications on this same monotonously recurrent topic. In order
to stand my ground and hold down my job as best I may, I have
to produce and reproduce my same little article from one inter-
national congress, from one review, to the next, just simply at
the end of each season making a few nice, insignificant, purely
marginal alterations to it.... But all the same, believe me, my
friend, typhoid these days is as outworn as banjo or mandolin
playing. It's a terrible mess, I can assure you. Every one has
his own little tune to play and his own way of playing it. No,
I may as well confess to you that I don't feel up to bothering
my head about it any longer; what I want for the end of my
days is to find some quiet little corner in research work, where
I sha'n't have any enemies or disciples but just that unexciting
distinction without jealousies, which is all I wish for and which
I badly need. Among other trifling topics, I have thought of
studying the comparative influence of central heating on haemor-
rhoids in northern and southern countries. What do you think?
Hygiene? Diet? It's the sort of bunk that's in fashion, surely?
An investigation of that sort, properly conducted and drawn
out, I'm sure would put me in the Academy's good books, as
most of the Academicians are old men to whom these problems of
heating and haemorrhoids must prove of the keenest interest.
Think what they've done against cancer, which so closely con-
cerns them! Then, if the Academy were to honour me with one
of its Hygiene medals ... Um? Ten thousand francs? Why not?
Why, that would pay for a trip to Venice.... Oh, yes, you
know, I went to Venice once when I was young.... Yes, indeed.
You can die of starvation there just as well as you can
anywhere else, my dear Bardamu.... But you inhale the most
sumptuous smell of death there, which you're never likely to
forget."

When we got into the street we had to hurry back to fetch
his goloshes, which he'd forgotten. That made us late. Then we
rushed along as fast as we could to some place, he didn't say
where.

We went the whole way up the Rue Vaugirard, with its litter
of vegetables and rubble, and came to the edge of a square full
of chestnut trees and policemen. We sneaked into the back
parlour of a little cafe where Parapine perched himself behind
a screen opposite the window.

"Too late!" he fretfully remarked. "They've left already!"

"Who have?"

"The little girls from the Lycee.... Some of them are so
sweet. ... I know their legs by heart, my friend. That's all
I ask at the end of the day.... Let's go. It'll have to be some
other time...."

We parted the best of friends.





I SHOULD HAVE BEEN GLAD NEVER TO HAVE HAD TO GO BACK
TO Raney. Ever since that morning when I left the place, I had
almost forgotten my ordinary cares; they were so deeply rooted
there that they hadn't followed me around. Perhaps they might
have died of neglect, like Bebert, if I hadn't gone back. They
were suburban cares. Still, when I got to the Rue Bonaparte, I
began to ponder again, unhappily. Yet it's a street you would
say would please the passer-by, normally speaking. Few streets
are as benign and graceful as the Rue Bonaparte. Nevertheless,
as I got down towards the river, I began to feel frightened. I
wandered up and down. I couldn't make up my mind to cross
the Seine. We're not all of us Caesars! Over there on the other
bank was where my worries began. I decided to wait on this left
side until nightfall. At any rate, that's a few hours of sunlight
saved, I told myself.

The water lapped against the side where there were some
fellows fishing and I sat down to watch them at it. I wasn't in
any hurry, either, as a matter of fact; just like them. I felt
rather as if I had reached the point, the age, I suppose, when
one knows what one is losing with every hour that slips by.
But one hasn't yet grown strong enough in wisdom to be able
to stop oneself short on the road of time, and anyway, if one
stopped, one wouldn't know what to do either, without that mad
desire to rush forward which one has had since youth and so
admired. You are already rather less proud of this youth of
yours, you don't yet dare to announce in public that perhaps
that is all youth is--a hurry to grow old.

The whole of one's ridiculous past is actually so choked with
absurdities and false values and gullibility, that one might be
quite pleased to stop being young all of a sudden, to wait and
let youth slip away from you, standing back and watching it
outdistance you and run on and be lost, seeing how utterly vain
it is, passing a hand through its emptiness, taking one last look
at it and then pushing off on one's own, sure of its really having
disappeared, and calmly walking round by oneself to the other
side of Time, to get a glimpse of what people and things really
are like.

The men fishing on the edge of the embankment did not seem
to have caught anything. They didn't even look really as if they
particularly wanted to catch anything. The fish probably knew
all about them. They were all just pretending. The last delightful
rays of the sunlight were still making it pleasant and warm
where we were. Reflections of gold and blue bobbed on the surface
of the water. There was a wind, a nice fresh wind from the other
side, coming through the trees, in smiling gusts coming through
the branches. It was very pleasant. We stayed there two full
hours, taking nothing, not doing anything. And then the Seine
had darkened and a corner of the bridge went all red with the
sunset. People going along by the river had forgotten all about
us as we sat there between the city and the water.

Night came up out of the arches and climbed up across the
whole of the Louvre, taking the facade and all the windows one
after the other as they flamed out against the gathering dusk.
Finally the windows too went out.

Once more the time had come to be leaving.

The second-hand booksellers along by the river were shutting
up for the night. "Are you coming?" a woman called across the
parapet to her husband by me, who was gathering up his tackle,
his camp stool and the worms. He grumbled, and all the other
fishermen grumbled after him, and we went up, me too, all of
us grumbling, up above to where the people were walking. I spoke
to his wife, just to say something pleasant to her before night
came completely. She immediately tried to sell me a book. It
was one she had forgotten to shut up in the box with the others,
she said. "So I'd let you have it cheaper, almost for nothing...
A little old Montaigne, a real genuine one for a franc. I was
quite ready to make the woman happy so inexpensively. I took
the Montaigne.

The waters under the bridge looked thick now. I hadn't the
least wish to go on. On the boulevards I had some coffee and
opened the old book she had sold me. I opened it just at the page
where Montaigne is writing a letter to his wife on the occasion
of the death of a son of theirs. The passage interested me at once,
probably because I immediately connected it in my mind with
Bebert. "Ah!" Montaigne was saying to his wife, more or less
like this, "don't be upset, my dear. Console yourself. You must
get over it.... It'll be all right, you'll find. Why, only yesterday,"
he went on, "among some old papers of a friend of mine I came
across a letter Plutarch wrote to his wife in circumstances
exactly similar to ours.... And I thought his letter so excellent
and so right, that I'm sending it along to you. It's a lovely letter.
I wanted you to have it right away, I want you not to be unhappy
any more, dear wife. I'm sending you this fine letter. It
hits the nail on the head pretty well, this letter of Plutarch's,
doesn't it, my love? You won't have got the most out of it at
once. No, you must read it very carefully. Delve into it. Show
it to other people. And reread it. I feel much better now; I'm
sure it will put you all right again.... Your loving husband,
Michael." There's a real work of art for you, I told myself.
His wife must have been proud to have a cheerful husband like
her Michael. Well, of course, that was their own affair. Perhaps
one always makes mistakes when it's a question of judging other
people's feelings. May they not have been genuinely unhappy
perhaps? Unhappy in the style of the period?

But as far as Bebert was concerned, I was having a rotten day
of it. I hadn't any luck with Bebert, alive or dead. It seemed to
me there wasn't anything for Bebert to find in life, even in
Montaigne. Perhaps it's always the same thing anyway for ever-
ybody, if you begin to get down to it--nothing at all. There
it was, I'd been away from Raney all day, I had to be getting
back now, and I hadn't anything to show for it. I had absolutely
nothing to offer, either to him or his aunt.

I took a little stroll round the Place Blanche before going back.
I saw a lot of people in the Rue Lepic, more people than usual.
So I went up too, to see what was happening. There was a crowd
outside a butcher's shop. You had to squeeze your way into the
circle to see what was going on. It was a pig, a large, an enor-
mous pig. He was grunting away in the middle of the circle like
a man who's been disturbed, grunting like hell. He was being
damnably treated all the time. People were tweaking his ears to
make him squeal. He twisted and turned, trying to escape, tugging
at the rope which held him; other people teased him and he
squealed all the louder in pain. And every one laughed all the
more.

The fat old beast didn't know how to hide himself in the little
straw he'd been given and, grunting and snorting, he kept scatter-
ing it all the time. He didn't know how to get away from these
humans. He realized that. He piddled at the same time as much
as he could, but that didn't do any good, either. Grunting and
squealing did no good. There was no way out. Every one laughed
a lot. The butcher behind in his shop made signs and jokes to
his customers and waved a great knife in the air.

He was as pleased as Punch, himself. He had bought the pig
and tied it up out there as an advertisement. He couldn't have
enjoyed himself more at his daughter's wedding.

More and more people kept arriving in front of the shop to
see the pig wallowing in great pink folds of flesh each time he
tried to get away. But that wasn't enough. They put a small,
excitable little dog on his back and made it skip about and snap
at the pig's exuberant mound of flesh. That was so extremely
funny that now you couldn't get through the crowd. The police
arrived and moved people on.

When at that time of the evening you come out on to the
Pont Caulaincourt you can see the first lights of Raney beyond
the great lake of night which covers the cemetery. Raney's on the
other side. You have to go all the way round to get there. It's
the devil of a long way. You'd say you were walking all round
night itself, it takes such a time, and so much walking round
the cemetery, to reach the outer walls of the town.

And then when you get to the gates, you pass by the damp toll
office where the little green official sits. Then you're quite
close. The dogs of the neighbourhood are all at their posts, bark-
ing. There are some flowers in the gaslight though, on the stall
of a flower seller who is always sitting there, waiting for the
dead to come by from day to day, from hour to hour. The ceme-
tery, another cemetery, comes next and then the Boulevard de
la Revolte. It goes off broad and straight into the night with
all its lamps. You keep up it on the left. That was my street.
You never met any one in it. All the same, I should have liked to
be somewhere else, a long way off. I should also have liked to
have had felt soles, so that nobody would hear me at all getting
in. There was no point in my being there anyway, if Bebert
didn't get any better. I had done my best. I hadn't anything to
reproach myself for. It wasn't my fault if there wasn't anything
one could do in cases like that. I reached his door, I thought
without having been seen. And then, when I had gone upstairs,
I looked through the slits of the shutters to see if there were
still people talking round Bebert's bed. Some visitors to the house
were still leaving but they didn't look the same as they had looked
yesterday. One, a charwoman of the district whom I knew well,
was crying as she went out. "It looks quite definitely as if there's
been a turn for the worse," I said to myself. "In any case, things
certainly aren't going any better.... Perhaps the end has come
already," I said to myself, "since already there is somebody crying
there." The day was over.

I wondered really whether I counted at all in all this. It was
cold and silent in my place, like a small night on its own in
one corner of the greater night, for me alone.

From time to time echoes and the sound of footsteps came up
into my room, growing louder and louder, humming and fading
away again.... Silence. I looked again to see if anything was
happening outside, across the way. It was only inside me that
things were happening, as I went on and on asking myself the
same question.

I fell asleep in the end on that same question, in my own
private night like a coffin; I was so tired from walking so far
and finding nothing.





ONE MIGHT AS WELL MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT, HUMAN BEINGS
have nothing to say to each other; they only tell each other their
own personal troubles and that's a fact. Each for himself, the
world for all men. They try to shift their own unhappiness off
onto somebody else when they make love, but it doesn't come
off and, do what they will, they have to stick to the whole lot
themselves; so then they begin again and try to palm it off once
more. "You're a very pretty girl," they say. And life takes a
hold on them again, until the next time they try the same little
trick. "You're such a pretty girl ..."

And between whiles you boast of having managed to be rid of
your unhappiness, but every one knows, don't they, that you've
not done any such thing but are just as miserable as you well
can be. As you grow uglier and uglier and more repulsive, playing
this game as you grow old, you can't even conceal your unhap-
piness any longer, your failure; and in the end your face has
become only an ugly expression which takes twenty, thirty or
more years to come up from your stomach onto your face. That
is what a man will achieve, that and that alone,--an ugly ex-
pression which he has spent a lifetime making and often even
then hasn't managed to finish off properly, because of how dif-
ficult and complicated an expression it would have to be to
reflect his real soul without missing anything out.

At the time, I was engaged in delicately moulding mine with
the bills I wasn't able to pay, though they weren't big, my
rent which was out of the question, my much too light overcoat,
considering the weather, and the grocer who grinned to himself
when he saw me counting my coppers, hesitating in front of his
Brie cheese and blushing when grapes went out of season and
up in price. And then my patients helped too, always making a
fuss about something or other. Bebert's having died didn't do me
any good in the neighbourhood either. Still, his aunt hadn't
changed towards me. One certainly could not say that she had
behaved badly on this occasion. No, it was rather from the
Henrouille quarter and that little house of theirs, that suddenly
a whole heap of worries began to come my way and give me cause
for alarm.

One day old Mother Henrouille, out of the blue, left her shack
at the end of the garden, her son and her daughter-in-law, and
came to call on me. She knew what she was doing. And then after
that she often came to see me, to ask if I really did believe she
was mad. It was a sort of amusement for the old lady to come
over especially to ask me questions. She used to wait for me in
what I called my waiting room: three chairs and a little three-
legged table.

That evening, when I got back, I found her in the waiting room,
consoling Bebert's aunt by telling her all the relations she,
the old Henrouille, had lost by the way in the course of a long
life: nieces by the dozen, an uncle here and an uncle there, a
father way back in the past, halfway through the last century, a
whole lot of aunts and daughters of theirs, who had disappeared
here, there and everywhere, she didn't really remember quite
where or how; her own daughters who had become so vague, so
indistinct that she almost had to make them up in her mind now,
with the greatest difficulty, if she wanted to talk to anybody
about them. They weren't really even memories any longer, these
children of hers. A whole procession of little, ancient deaths
trailed in the wake of her old carcass, shadows long since silent,
imperceptible sorrows which she was trying, with great difficulty,
to stir alive again in any case for the consolation, when I ar-
rived, of Bebert's aunt.

Then, in his turn, Robinson came to see me. Every one was
introduced: and made friends.

It was from that time on, as I have remembered since, that
Robinson took to meeting old Mother Henrouille, always in my
waiting room. They used to talk together. On the day before
Bebert was to be buried, the aunt was asking every one she met,
"Are you going? I should so like it if you did."

"Certainly I shall go," the old lady said. "It's nice to have
people about one on occasions like that." You couldn't keep her
in her hutch nowadays. She'd become quite a gadabout.

"Oh, that's very nice then, if you say you'll come," the aunt
thanked her. "And what about you, Monsieur; will you come too?"
she asked Robinson.

"Madam, I'm afraid of funerals; you mustn't take it wrongly,"
he said, wishing to get out of it.

Whereupon each of them went on to talk for quite a time--on
their own, of course--almost fiercely; and even the old, old
Henrouille joined in the conversation. They talked much too loud,
all of them, like mad people do.

So then I fetched the old woman and took her into my consulting
room next door.

I hadn't much to say to her. It was she who asked me things.
I promised not to keep on with the certificate business. We went
back into the other room and sat down with Robinson and the
aunt, and we all talked for a full hour about the case of the
unfortunate Bebert. Every one in the neighbourhood agreed that I
had gone to a lot of trouble to try and save little Bebert, that
it was just something that was fated to happen, that altogether
I hadn't behaved too badly, and that was rather a surprise to e-
very one. When Mother Henrouille was told the child's age, seven
years, she seemed to feel better and altogether relieved. The
death of such a very young child struck her as an absolute
accident merely, not like an ordinary death which might give
her something to think about.

And Robinson once again started to tell us how the acids he
had to handle burnt the inside of his stomach and lungs, stifl-
ed him and made him spit up quite black phlegm. But old Mrs.
Henrouille didn't have to spit, she didn't work in acids, so what
Robinson had to say on that subject didn't interest her in the
least. She had only come to make up her mind exactly about
me. She watched me out of the corner of her eye as I talked, a
quick little vivacious blue eye; and Robinson did not miss one
jot of all this latent uneasiness existing between us. It was dark
in my waiting room, the large house across the street was going
pale all over before succumbing to the night. After that, there
was nothing but our voices between us and everything that voices
always seem just about to say and never do.

As soon as I was alone with Robinson, I tried to make him
understand that I did not at all want to see him again, but he
came back just the same towards the end of the month and then
he came every evening. It's true he wasn't very well; he had
chest trouble.

"Mr. Robinson asked for you again, to-day," my concierge, who
took an interest in him, would tell me. "Will he get over it,
d' you think?" she went on. "He was coughing quite badly still
when he came...." She knew perfectly well that it annoyed
me to have her talk to me about him.

It's true that he coughed a lot. "It's no good," he himself said,
"I'll never get rid of it...

"You wait till next summer! Have patience. You'll see. It'll
go away on its own...."

The things one does say in such cases, in fact. I couldn't cure
him myself while he was in this acid trade. But I tried to cheer
him up all the same.

"I shall get all right all by myself, shall I?" he said then.
"Listen to the man! You'd think it was easy to breathe the way
I do. ... I'd like to see you have a bloody thing like I've got
on your chest. ... You pass right out with a thing like I've got
on my chest. ... I'm telling you...."

"You're depressed, you're not having too good a time of it at
the moment ... But when you begin to feel better, even just a
bit better, you'll see ..."

"Just a bit better? I'll be stiff by the time I'm a bit bet-
ter! I should have done much better to have passed out in
the war, that's what really would have been much better! It's
all right for you to have come back, you've nothing to complain
of!"

A man sticks to his own dirty memories, to all his own misfor-
tunes, and you can't get him to see different. It's something to
keep his soul busy over. He revenges himself on the injustice
of the present by smearing filth over the future in his innermost
heart. Exacting and cowardly at bottom. It's the nature of the
beast.

I didn't answer him. And he was angry with me. "You see?
You obviously think the same as I do."

For the sake of peace I went and fetched him some medicine
or other for his cough. His neighbours complained, apparently,
of not being able to get to sleep, he coughed so continuously.
While I filled up the bottle for him, he wondered where he could
have caught this chronic cough. At the same time, he was asking
me to give him injections: gold-leaf injections.

"If I died of them, you know, it wouldn't signify...."

But naturally I refused to undertake any sort of heroic method.
I just wanted him to go away more than anything.

I myself had become thoroughly depressed, just seeing him
around my place. I already had all the difficulty in the world
not to let my own dejection overcome me completely, not to
succumb to my desire to close down once and for all; and twenty
times a day I asked myself, "What's the good?" So that to listen
to his lamentations as well was really more than I could bear.
"You've no guts, Robinson," I told him finally. "You ought to
get married; that might give you an interest in life." If he had
taken a wife, he'd have let me alone more. That finally annoyed
him and he left. He didn't like the advice I gave him, particular-
ly hot that advice. He didn't even answer me on this question of
marriage. It was of course, it's true, a very absurd piece of ad-
vice to give him.

One Sunday when I wasn't on duty we went out together. We
sat on the Boulevard Magnanime and had a little glass of cassis
each. We didn't talk much, we hadn't anything much to say to each
other. What is the use of words anyway, when one knows just
where one stands? Only to slang one another. Not many buses
pass on Sunday. It's almost a pleasure from the cafe terrace to
see the boulevard empty and quite quiet in front of one. There
was the gramophone of the place going on behind.

"Do you hear that?" said Robinson. "It's playing American tunes.
I recognize those tunes; they're the ones they used to play
at Molly's, in Detroit...

During the two years he had spent over there he hadn't got
very far into American ways; still, he'd been rather charmed by
their attempt at music, whereby they too try to ease themselves
of accustomed burdens and the crushing sadness of having always
to do the same thing every day; it helps them to shuffle around
with a world that has no meaning, while it's playing. Lumbering
bears there, the same as here.

He left his cassis untouched while he thought about all that.
A little dust whirled up everywhere. Grubby pot-bellied children
were playing round the plane trees, also attracted by the gramo-
phone. Nobody is proof against music, really. There isn't anything
else to do with one's heart, one willingly surrenders it. Behind
all music one ought to try and catch that noiseless tune that's
made for us, the_melody of death.

Some shops were open on Sunday out of obstinacy; the old woman
who sells slippers goes out for a walk and parades all her kilos
of varicose veins from one shop front to the next, gossiping
hard.

On a kiosk the morning's papers hang idiotically, looking already
a little yellow, like a great artichoke of news that's beginning
to go bad. A little dog pees on them quick, the vendor's
asleep.

An empty bus rushes up towards where we're sitting. Ideas
have their Sunday too in the long run; one's more than usually
stunned. One sits there, empty, agape. Quite happy. There isn't
anything to say, because after all nothing is happening to you
any more, you're too feeble; perhaps one has disgusted Fate?
That would be quite a reasonable supposition.

"Can't you think of any way for me to get out of this job
that's killing me?"

He had reached the outcome of his train of thought.

"What I want is to break out of my job, see? I'm through with
doing myself in, working like a mule. ... I too want to get
around a bit. ... You don't know any one who needs a chauffeur,
do you, by any chance? You know a lot of people though, don't
you?"

They were Sunday ideas taking hold of him, gentlemanly ideas.
I didn't dare to dissuade him, to hint that with a beggarly,
murderous mug like his no one would ever think of entrusting
their motor car to him, that he'd always have too queer a look,
in livery or out of it.

"You're not very encouraging, are you, in fact?" he concluded.
"So you think I'll never get out of this show then, do you? And
it's not even worth my while to try? In America I was too slow,
you said. In Africa the heat was too much for me.... Here I'm
not intelligent enough. ... So there's always something everywhere
I've too much or too little of. But I realize all that's just
so much blah. Ah, if only I had some money! Then everybody
would like me so much here, there--everywhere. Even in America.
Isn't it true what I'm saying? And what about you? What we
need is to own a house with half a dozen good, paying tenants
in it...

"That's perfectly true," I replied.

He couldn't get over having come to this major conclusion all
on his own. And he looked at me in the most extraordinary way,
as if he'd suddenly discovered something unsuspectedly caddish
about me.

"You're all right, when I come to think of it; you're in clover.
You sell your nonsense to a lot of croaking invalids, and that's
all you care. ... You aren't under any one's orders, or anything.
You come and go as you please, you're absolutely free....
You look a decent sort of cove, but you're really a pretty good
swine underneath!"

"That's unfair, Robinson!"

"Well, find something for me to do then, man!"

He was dead set on this idea of giving up his work in the acids
trade for others to do.

We went back down little side streets. Towards evening you'd
take Raney for a village still. The great farmlike house gates
are half open. The courtyard is empty. And the dog's kennel is
empty too. On some such evening as this, a long time ago now,
the peasants left their homes, chased away by the great city
approaching from Paris. One or two properties of that time re-
main, unsaleable and damp, a prey already to the limp creepers
drooping down over brightly postered walls. The harrow hanging
up between two gutter spouts has rusted almost right away. Here
is a past which no one tampers with any longer. It is passing away
on its own. The present inhabitants are far too tired to do any-
thing about the outside of the house when they come home in
the evening. They just flop by families into what remains of the
common rooms, and drink. The ceiling is still marked with rings
of smoke from the swaying oil lamps of that period. The whole
district shakes to the unceasing rumble of the new works, but
doesn't complain. Mossy tiles crash down on to cobblestones
such as now only exist at Versailles and in ancient prisons.

Robinson accompanied me as far as the little municipal park,
surrounded by warehouses, where on the scrubby grass between
the workhouse, a slap and tickle and the sand heap, all the
flotsam of the neighbourhood comes out to play and pee.

We drifted back to one thing and another. "You know, what I'd
like is to be able to stand taking a drink." That's what he said
to me. "When I drink, I get the most frightful cramps in the
stomach, it's unbearable. It's more than that!" And he immedi-
ately proved to me that he'd not been able to stand even the
little drop of cassis we'd taken that afternoon, by bringing it
up there and then. "You see? That's what I mean."

At his door he left me. "The Palace of Draughts," he remarked,
and disappeared from my sight. I didn't think I should see him
again so soon.

My affairs looked as if they might be picking up a bit, that
same night, it seemed.

There were two different urgent calls for me from the house
where Police Headquarters were. On Sunday sighs are freer,
feelings stronger, impatience greater. Pride is at the helm on
that day, and has had a drop or two to drink. After a whole
twelve hours of alcoholic freedom, there is a certain stirring
among the slaves; it's not so easy to keep them quiet; they
scuffle, and scrape the dirt off themselves, and clank their
chains.

Two dramas were in full swing at the same time in the house
where Police Headquarters were. On the first floor a man was
dying of cancer, while on the third floor there was a miscar-
riage which the midwife wasn't being able to cope with. The good
woman was saying a whole lot of absurd things to every one
round while she washed out napkins, one after the other. Then
she'd put in an injection upstairs and slip off to give the patient
downstairs another injection--at ten francs the phial of cam-
phorated oil, if you please. It was quite a big day for her.

All the inmates of the house had spent the day in their dressing
gowns and shirt sleeves, facing up to everything that was going
on, and well sustained with spicy food. The smell of garlic
and other odder smells hung about the corridors and stairs. Dogs
romped about on the staircase right up to the sixth floor. The
concierge was busy looking after everything and everybody. She
drank only white wine herself, because she found red wine so
lowering.

The vast blousy midwife was acting as producer to both dramas,
on the first floor and on the third floor, rushing about, pour-
ing with sweat, overjoyed and vindictive. She was fed up by my
arrival on the scene. The audience had been hers all day; it was
her limelight.

Try as I might to manage her, to make myself as small as poss-
ible, to approve of everything (although really she had accomp-
lished nothing but a series of damnable mistakes), my coming
and what I had to say, instantly infuriated her. And that was
that. A midwife one has to keep an eye on is about as amiable
as a cobra. You don't know where to put her so that she shall
do you as little harm as possible. Each lot of tenants overflowed
from the kitchen on to the landing, mixing with all the sick
people's relations. And, my, what a lot of relations they had!
Some fat, some skinny, they hung about in somnolent groups
in the gaslight. It was getting late, and some of them had come
up from the country, where bedtime's earlier than it is in Paris,
and they were fed up. Everything I said to those connected with
the drama downstairs and also to those connected with the drama
upstairs, was ill received.

Death came soon on the first floor. So much the better and so
much the worse. Just as the patient's last breath was rattling in
his throat, his own doctor, Doctor Omanon, came along to see if
he had died, and more or less started cursing me for being there.
So I explained to Omanon that I was on Sunday duty, and that
therefore my presence was only to be expected--and betook myself,
with some dignity, upstairs.

The woman on the third floor was still bleeding profusely. For
two pins she'd be dying too, before very long. I gave her an
injection and went straight down again to Omanon's creature. That
was all over and done with. Omanon had left. But he'd pocketed
my twenty francs before he went, damn him. I'd drawn another
blank. I didn't want to lose the job I'd got upstairs. So I dashed
back there again.

I explained one or two things to the family while the bleeding
went on. The midwife evidently did not agree with me. You'd
almost have thought she earned her pay contradicting me. But
there I was, worse luck; who gave a damn whether she liked it
or not? There was going to be no nonsense. At least a hundred
francs would be coming my way, if I could dig myself in and
stay put! Just a little patience, and some science, for God's sake.
It's hard work standing up to remarks and questions reeking of
white wine, which mercilessly batter at your innocent head; it's
no joke.

The family speaks its mind amid sighs and hiccups. The midwife
stands by, waiting for me to put my foot in it, clear off,
and leave her the hundred francs. But the midwife can go to hell!
What about my rent? Who's going to pay that? These labour
pains have been going on all day, I know that. There's a lot of
blood, I know that too; but it's not over yet; one must hang on.

Now that the other fellow, the cancer case, had died downstairs,
his deathbed audience slunk up to the third floor. While you're
having a thoroughly bad night of it anyway, and have given
up all idea of sleep, you may as well make the best of whatever
there is to look at. The downstairs family had come to see if this
business up here was going to end as badly as theirs had. Two
deaths the same night, in the same house, why, that really would
be the excitement of a lifetime! I should say so indeed! All the
dogs of the place could be heard scampering up and down the
staircase; careering around with bells on their collars. They came
along too, to watch. People who had come from a long way off
crowded in, whispering. Young girls suddenly "found out about
life," as their mothers put it: and adopted a tender, knowing
expression in the face of tragedy. That's the consoling instinct
of the female. A cousin of theirs, who had been eying them all
day, is tremendously fetched by it. He doesn't leave their side
from that moment on. Tired as he is, it's a revelation to him.
Everybody is worn out. The cousin will marry one or the other
of them, but he'd like to have a look at their legs too, while
he's about it, so as to be able to choose better.

Delivery of the foetus makes no headway: the passage must be
dry; it won't come away, it just bleeds. This would have been
her sixth child. Where is the husband? I ask for him.

The husband had to be found, if I was going to be able to send
the woman to the hospital. One of her relations had suggested
that she should be sent to the hospital. A mother of a family she
was, who wanted to get off to bed, on account of the children.
But now, when the hospital was put up for discussion, no two
of them would agree. Some were in favour of this step being
taken, others were against it because it wasn't respectable. They
didn't want it even mentioned. It got to such a pitch that some
hard words were exchanged between relations which would never
afterwards be forgotten; they would have passed into the family.
The midwife despised everybody. But it was the husband I person-
ally wanted to find, so as to be able to consult him, so that
the thing should be finally decided one way or the other. He
came forward at last out of a group of relations, looking vaguer
than any of the others. Still, it was up to him to decide. Was it
to be the hospital? Or not the hospital? What did he want done?
He didn't know. He just wanted to look. So he looked. I showed
him his wife's anatomy, her blood seeping, gushing, his whole
wife bleeding away entirely before his eyes. She moaned, too,
like a large dog that's been run over by a car. He didn't really
know what he wanted done. They gave him a glass of white wine
to steady him. He sat down.

Even so, no solution occurred to him. He is a man who works
hard all day. He is well known on the market place and at the
station, where he has carried sacks of vegetables, not small loads
either, great big sacks of vegetables, for the last fifteen years.
Everybody knows him. He wears vast, vague trousers, and his
shirt is like that too. They remain on him but he doesn't seem to
bother that much about his shirt and these pants of his. He seems
only to be considering the ground and how to stand upright on
it on his own two feet, set apart, as if at any moment the earth
might start to quake under him. Pierre, his name is. We wait for
him to speak.

"What do you yourself think, Pierre?" every one stands round
in a circle and asks. Pierre scratches himself and goes and sits
by the head of the bed, as if he found it difficult to recognize
this woman who is always bringing sorrow into the world, and
then he sheds some sort of a tear and stands up. I have started
to write out a note of admission into the hospital. "Think, Pierre,
man!" every one exhorts him. "Think a little!" He's trying all
right, but he makes a sign to say it won't come. He gets up and
goes off unsteadily into the kitchen, taking his glass with him.
Why wait any longer for him? His conjugal indecision may last
all night, everybody round realises that. One might just as well
be moving on.

There was a hundred francs I'd lost, that's all. But I should
have had trouble with this midwife in any case.... The whole
thing was a foregone conclusion. Besides which, I wasn't going
to try my hand operating at all, in front of all these people and
feeling as tired as I was. "Well, there it is," I said to myself.
"Let's go. Better luck next time, maybe. Accept the thing as it;
is--let Nature alone, the bitch."

I'd hardly got on to the landing before they all wanted me back,
and he came running out after me. "Hey, Doctor," he called.
"Don't go, Doctor!"

"What do you expect me to do?" I asked him.

"Wait a moment, I'll come with you, Doctor. D' you mind, sir?"

"All right," I said, and I let him come down with me. When
we got down to the first floor though, I went in and said good-bye
to the dead man's family. Pierre went in with me, and we came
out again at once. In the street he fell into step with me. It was
fresh out of doors. We came across a little dog who was learning
to answer the other dogs of the neighbourhood with long howls.
He was obstinate and very plaintive. He already knew how to
howl properly. Soon he would be a real grown-up dog.

"Why, if it isn't 'Yolk,' the laundryman's dog!" the husband
remarked, delighted to have recognized him and to change the
conversation. "His daughters fed him as a puppy with a baby's
bottle. Do you know the laundryman's daughters? They live in
the Rue des Gonesses."

I told him I did.

While we walked he began to tell me how, if you wanted to,
you could bring a dog up on milk without its coming out too
expensive. But all the time behind these remarks he was
searching for an idea about his wife.

There was an estaminet still open near the gates.

"Coming in, Doctor? Let me stand you a drink...."

I wasn't going to upset him. "Come on, then," I said. "Two
coffees." I took the opportunity to bring up the subject of his
wife again. He listened very seriously to all I had to say, but
yet I couldn't get him to make up his mind. There was a great
bouquet of flowers on the counter. It was the Matrodin's birthday,
apparently. "The children gave it me," he informed us. So we
stood him a vermouth and drank his health. There was the Intox-
icants Act still hanging above the counter and a framed Board
School Certificate. As soon as he saw it, the husband insisted on
Martrodin's reciting the Subprefectures of Loir-et-Cher to him,
because he himself had had to learn them once and knew them
still. Then he claimed that it wasn't the cafe-keeper's name that
appeared on the certificate, but some quite different name, and
they both got annoyed, and he came back and sat down by me.
His dilemma had taken a complete hold on him again. He didn't
even see me leave; it worried him so.

I never saw him again. All the things that had happened that
Sunday had depressed me a lot and tired me out as well.

I hadn't gone another hundred yards before I met Robinson
coming my way, loaded with all sorts of planks, large and small.
I recognized him in spite of the dark. He was very annoyed to
see me, and tried to walk on, but I stopped him.

"How is it you aren't in bed?" I asked him.

"Not so loud!" he answered. "I've been working ..."

"What are you going to do with all that wood? Is that work too?
Building a coffin or something? You've stolen it, I suppose?"

"No, it's a rabbit hutch."

"You breeding rabbits now?"

"No, it's for the Henrouilles."

"The Henrouilles? Do they keep rabbits?"

"Yes, they've got three of them, and they're going to keep them
in the yard, you know, where the old woman lives...."

"So you're going to build a hutch at this time of night, are
you? It's an odd time to choose...."

"It's Madame Henrouille's idea...."

"A very extraordinary idea! What does she think she's going
to do with the rabbits? Sell them? Top hats?"

"You can ask her when you see her; she is going to pay me
a hundred francs, and that's all I know...

All the same, this business of a rabbit hutch struck me as very
odd, and at night like that. ... I kept on about it.

With that he altered the conversation.

"But how did you come to know them?" I went on. "You
usen't to know the Henrouilles, used you?"

"The old woman took me to see them, I tell you, that day I
met her at your place.... She's a talkative old thing sometimes.
... You've no idea. You can't stop her talking.... She sort of
made friends with me and they did too.... Some people like
me, you know!"

"You'd never told me anything about all that.... Still, if you go
to their house, you probably know whether they're going
to get the old girl into an asylum or not?"

"No, they tell me they haven't been able to...."

The whole conversation displeased him, I saw that; he didn't
know how to shake me off. But the more he avoided me, the more
I kept on....

"Life's hard, though, isn't it? You've got to use your wits,
eh?" he murmured vaguely. But I dragged him back to the
point. I was determined to find out more about it....

"People say the Henrouilles have more money than you'd think.
Would you say that was true, now that you go to see them?"

"Yes, maybe they have.... But in any case, they'd be very
pleased to get rid of the old woman...."

He'd never been much good at deception, friend Robinson.

"They'd like to get her off their hands because the cost of
living's going up so. They told me you wouldn't certify her
mad. Is that true?"

And, leaving it at that, he asked me with some interest which
way I was going.

"Been seeing a patient, have you?"

I told him something of my experiences with the husband I'd
just lost by the way. That made him laugh a lot--but at the
same time it made him cough too.

He huddled himself up so much as he coughed, that I could
hardly see him standing next to me in the darkness; I could only
vaguely see his hands clutching at his mouth like some pale flower
fluttering in the dark. He went on and on. "It's the draughts," he
gasped at last, when he'd finished coughing, just as we had come
to the door of his house.

"God, there are a lot of draughts where I live--and fleas too!
Have you got fleas at your place?"

I had. "Sure," I told him. "I catch them off my patients."

"Sick people smell of piss, don't you find?" he asked me.

"Yes, and of sweat too."

"All the same," he slowly remarked, after a moment's careful
thought, "I should like to have been a hospital assistant."

"Why?"

"Because, you know, when people are well, there's no getting
away from it, they're rather frightening.... Especially since the
war. ... I know what they're thinking.... They don't always
realise it themselves. But I know. When they can stand up, they're
thinking of killing you. Whereas when they're ill, there's no doubt
about it, they're less dangerous. You've got to be prepared for
them to do any damned thing while they're well--isn't that so?"

"It's very true," I had to admit.

"What about you; isn't that why you became a doctor?" he
asked me.

I wondered, and then I realised that perhaps Robinson was
right. But he began at once to cough again, like mad.

"You've gone and got your feet wet. You'll die of pleurisy going
for strolls like this at night.... Go indoors," I advised him.
"Go to bed!"

Coughing like that, bout after bout, wore him out.

"Old Mother H. is the one who's going to catch her death of
cold!" he wheezed and chuckled into my ear.

"How's that?"

"You'll see," he told me.

"What's this they've thought out?"

"I can't tell you any more. You'll see ..."

"Tell me about it, Robinson. Come on, you old sod, you know
I never repeat anything I hear...."

And now, suddenly, the wish came to him to tell me all about
it; perhaps partly to show me that he wasn't to be taken for the
resigned, dejected fool he looked.

"Go ahead," I urged him, almost in a whisper. "You know perfectly
well I never talk...."

That was the excuse he needed, to confide in me.

"Yes, that's right enough, you do keep your mouth decently shut,"
he admitted. And without another murmur he weighed straight into
it. We were quite alone at that hour of night, on the Boulevard
Coutumance.

"Do you remember the story of the carrot merchant?" he began.

But at first I didn't remember any story about a carrot merchant.

"You know. Surely you do? It was you who told it me...

"Oh, yes." I did remember it all of a sudden. "That railwayman
chap who lived in the Rue Brumaire? Who had a bomb go off in
his parts when he was trying to steal some rabbits?"

"Yes, that's right, at the grocer's on the Quai d'Argenteuil ..."

"Of course, yes. Now I know," I said. "What then?" Because I
still didn't see the connection between this old story and Mme.
Henrouille, Senior.

He proceeded at once to put me wise.

"Don't you see?"

"No," I said.... And very soon after that I didn't dare see.

"Well, damn it, you're pretty slow...."

"You seem to me to have got rather off the track. You're not
really going to start murdering the old Henrouille just to please
her daughter-in-law, are you?"

"Oh, all I'm doing is I'm making them the hutch they've asked
me for.... The bomb's their business--if they see fit...

"How much are they giving you for all this?"

"A hundred francs for the wood, and two hundred and fifty for
making it, and one thousand just for the story itself. ... You
see? And that's only a beginning. ... It's a story, if one's any
good at telling it, that's worth a regular fortune.... Eh, my
boy; now do you realise?"

I realised, and I wasn't very surprised. Just rather more sad
than before, that's all. Anything that one can say to try and
dissuade people in a case like that amounts to very little. It's
not as if life treats them well, is it, now? For whom and for
what should they be sorry? Why try? Do unto others ...--Has any
one ever been known to go down into hell and take somebody
else's place there? Never. You see him send other people down
there, that's all.

The impulse to murder which had suddenly come over Robinson
seems to me to be more in some way an improvement on what
I'd noticed till then, in other people, who were always half hating,
half kindly, always irritating, in the indecisiveness of their at-
titude. Decidedly, through having followed Robinson in the dark
as far as this, I had learned a number of things. ...

But there was one danger: the Law. "The Law is dangerous, you
know," I pointed out. "If you're caught you wouldn't escape with
your health.... You wouldn't ever come out again alive. Being
in prison would do you in...."

"Well then, let it," he said. "I'm fed up with the ordinary
business of living like everybody else does. One's old, one keeps
on waiting for one's time to come to have some fun, and when
it does.... You've been damned patient waiting for it if it
does.... You've been dead and buried long before that. What
they call honest toil is a mug's game.... You know that as well
as I do...."

"Possibly. But every one would try their hand at the other thing,
the risky business, if it weren't for the fact that it is dangerous.
... And the police aren't fools, you know.... There are pros and
cons." We examined his position.

"I don't say you're not right," he said, "but you can understand
that working as I work, in the condition I 'm in, not sleeping,
coughing, doing jobs that would be too hard on a horse, there
couldn't be anything worse for me now. That's my opinion.
Nothing could be worse...

I didn't like to tell him that really and truly he was right, be-
cause afterwards he might have blamed me for it if this scheme
didn't come off.

He tried to cheer me up by giving me several good reasons for
not bothering about the old woman, who hadn't much longer to
live anyway, whatever happened; she was much too old as it was.
He'd just be arranging for her departure in fact, and that's all.
All the same, as dirty businesses go, it really was a very dirty
business. Everything had already been arranged between him and
the Henrouille couple. Now that the old girl had started going out
again recently, one fine evening they'd send her to feed the
rabbits. The bomb would be there ready. ... It would go off
slap in her face when she touched the door of the hutch.... The
very same thing as had happened at the grocer's. She was looked
upon as mad in the neighbourhood already. The accident would
surprise no one.... The Henrouilles would say she'd been told
over and over again never to go near the rabbits.... She had
disobeyed orders. And at her age she'd certainly not survive an
explosion like the one they were going to let her have.... Slap
in the middle of the face like that....

There were no two ways about it, that was the hell of a story
I'd gone and told Robinson.





AND MUSIC CAME BACK WITH THE FAIR, MUSIC WHICH YOU HEAR
AS far back as you can remember, in the days when you were small,
the kind which goes on all the time here and there, in odd corners
of the town, in little country places, wherever poor people go at
the end of the week to sit down and wonder what they have become.
"Paradise," they're told: and music is played for them, now here,
now there, tinkling, pounding out the strains to which the rich
danced the year before. Mechanical music which is the accom-
paniment to wooden horses and motor cars which aren't really
motor cars and not at all scenic railways; it's heard in the
Strong Man's tent (who hasn't any biceps and doesn't come from
Marseilles); and where there's a woman who isn't bearded at all,
a magician who's a cuckold, an organ that isn't even gilt, behind
a shooting alley whose eggs are only shells. It's the fair for
duping people over the week-end.

So we go along and drink that beer with no head on it. But
as for the man who serves the beer, his breath genuinely reeks.
And the change he gives you has some very strange coins in it,
so strange that one goes on looking at them for weeks afterwards
and gets rid of them again with enormous difficulty, and by giv-
ing them to a beggar. Dammit, it's the Fair. You've got to get
your laughs while you can, midway between hunger and gaol;
you must take things the way they come. You've something to
sit on, so don't go complaining. That's always something. I've
seen that International Stand again, the same one, the one Lola
found that time many years ago now, in the park at Saint-Cloud.
You come across everything once again at fairs; fairs are the
bringing up of past pleasures. The main avenue at Saint-Cloud
must long ago have filled again with strolling people. Parading
up and down. The war was over long ago. And does the same fellow
still run the shooting gallery, I wonder--if he came back from
the war? All that interests us. I recognized the targets, but now
you shoot at aeroplanes. That's something new. An improvement.
The latest thing. The wedding party's still there, and the soldiers
and the Town Hall with its flag. All of it, in fact. Plus even more
things to shoot at than there were before.

But people get much more fun out of electric cars, a recent
invention, because of the pseudo-accidents you keep having in
them and the terrific jolts they give your head and your insides.
More yelling cretins came pouring up every minute to crash into
each other and be flung about, making mincemeat of their kidneys.
Nothing would stop them. They never gave in, never seemed to
have been happy enough.... Some of them actually raved. They
had to be dragged away from this destruction. You could have
thrown death in as well for their franc, they'd have hurled
themselves on this thing just the same. At four the Municipal
Band was to give a concert in the middle of the fair ground.
Collecting the band together was the very devil, because of the
drinking places round about which absorbed all the musicians in
turn. There was always a last one missing. They waited for him.
They went to look for him. While waiting, and before everybody
was back, there was time to get thirsty again and two more would
disappear.... Then you had to begin all over again.

On the stalls spice bread made in the shape of pigs went bad
with dust, and began to look like reliquaries in a church and
endowed people who'd won prizes with a frightful thirst.

Families wait for the fireworks before going off home to bed.
Waiting's part of the fun too. Under the tables a thousand empties
clink in the shadows. Feet slide to signify consent or refusal. One
hardly hears the music, one knows the tunes so well, nor the motors
in motion behind the booths, making things work which you have
to go and pay two francs to see. Your own heart, when you're
a little tipsy with fatigue, taps away in your temples. It makes a
thudding noise against the sort of velvet drawn tight round your
head and inside your ears. That's the way_one day it will come
to burst. Let it! One day when the inner rhythm rejoins the outside
one and all your ideas spill out and run away at last to play
with the stars.

There was a lot of crying going on all over the fair ground
because of all the children who kept getting crushed by mistake
between chairs and the ones who were being taught to overcome
their own desires and forego such immense petty pleasures as an-
other ride on the merry-go-round. The fair must be used to help
build character. It's never too soon to start. The little dears don't
yet know that everything has to be paid for. They think it's out
of kindness that the grown-ups behind these brightly lit counters
urge people to take a look at the marvellous things they collect,
control, and harbour with their shouts and smiles. They don't yet
know the nature of things, these children. Their parents will
slap them and teach them, and protect them against Pleasure.
There's no real fair except for those whose business it is, and
with them it's deep and secret. It's in the evening that these
people rejoice, when all the fool fair-goers, profitable animals,
have gone away, silence has come back to the lines of tents, and
the coconut stall has suffered the last little dog's last drop of
pee. Then accounts can start. It's the time to make a census of
the fair's attractions and its victims.

On the Sunday evening, the last day of the fair, Martrodin's
barmaid sliced her hand rather badly, cutting sausage. Towards
the end of that same evening everything round me became pretty
clear, as if things had been indistinct long enough and now were
all about to fall into place and speak clearly to me. But you
mustn't trust people and things at such moments. You think
they're going to speak, and then they say nothing at all, and are
swallowed up again in darkness without your being able to tell
what it was they had to impart to you. That, at any rate, has
been my experience.

Anyway, what happened was that I saw Robinson again that eve-
ning at Martrodin's place, when I was going to start bandaging
the barmaid's hand. I remember exactly how it was. Next to us
some Arabs sat dozing, huddled together on a bench, half asleep.
They seemed to take not the slightest interest in what was hap-
pening around them. In my conversation with Robinson I avoided
touching again on the subject of that talk we'd had the other
evening, when I discovered him carrying those planks. The bar
maid's wound was difficultI to stitch, and I couldn't see very well
at the back of the shop. That prevented me from talking, having
to pay attention to what I was doing. When I'd finished, Robinson
called me over into a corner, and let me know himself that the
affair was all set, and going to come off soon. I was annoyed at
being taken into his confidence in this way; I had no wish to be
told about it.

"Coming off soon? What's coming off soon?"

"Why, you know ..."

"What, that thing still?"

"Guess how much they're going to give me now?" I didn't wish
to guess.

"Ten thousand! Just so as I keep my mouth shut!"

"It's a lot of money."

'Why, yes, it's the very thing," he added. "It's those ten
thousand francs I've been needing all this time. The first ten
thousand francs, eh? You get me? I've never really had a job,
but now, with ten thousand francs ..."

He must have started squeezing them already.

He let me go ahead and reckon up all the things he would
undertake and do with ten thousand francs. ... He gave me
time to think about it, lolling back against the wall, in the
shadow. A new world. Ten thousand francs!

All the same, thinking about this business of his, I wondered
whether I wasn't running some personal risk, if I hadn't drifted
into some kind of complicity by not seeming to show immediate
disapproval of what he was doing. I ought even to have denounced
him to the police. I don't care a hoot about human morality my-
self,--just like every one else. What can I do about it? But
there are all the dirty little stories, those dirty snippets Justice
unearths when a crime has been committed, just to titivate the
taxpayer, vicious brute. It's difficult to get away then. I'd seen
it happen. Misery for misery, I preferred the noiseless kind to
the sort that's all spread out in the newspapers.

I was, in fact, intrigued and sickened at the same time. Having
got as far as this, once again I hadn't the courage to get really
to the bottom of things. Now that it was a question of opening
one's eyes in the dark, I was almost just as glad to keep them
shut. But Robinson seemed determined that I should open them,
that I should realize.

By way of a change, I turned the conversation on to the subject
of women. Robinson didn't care for women much.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I can get along all right with-
out women--with their fat thighs, their Cupid's-bow lips and
those stomachs of theirs which always have something growing
in them, either a baby or a disease.... Their smiles won't pay
your rent for you. Will they? Even me in my attic, if I had
a wife, it wouldn't be much good my showing the landlord her
buttocks on the fifteenth of the month; that wouldn't make him
reduce the rent!"

Independence was Robinson's one wish in the world. He told me
so himself. But Martrodin, the owner, had had enough of our
little asides and plottings in corners.

"Robinson, Good God, the glasses!" he shouted. "D'you want
me to wash them up for you?" Robinson sprang to his feet.
"I do a little extra work here, you see," he explained to me.
It was the fair, I expect. Martrodin was finding it extremely
difficult to reckon up the takings; that annoyed him; the Arabs
had left, except for two who were still dozing by the door.

"What are those fellows waiting for?"

"The barmaid," Martrodin informed me.

"How's trade?" I asked, for something to say.

"So-so ... But it isn't easy. You see, Doctor, I bought this
property for sixty banknotes down before the depression. I've got
to get at least two hundred out of it.... See what I mean? It's
true I get plenty of custom but a good many of them are Arabs.
And they don't drink. They haven't got into the way of it yet.
What I need is Poles. ... Now Poles, Doctor, Poles drink like
the devil. Where I was before in the Ardennes I used to have
Poles from the enamel furnaces. That warmed them up, that did
--them furnaces! And that's what we need: thirst! On Saturday
they blew the whole lot.... Christ! There was something doing
in those days.... Their whole week's pay--bang! But these
here bicots, they ain't interested in drink; what they fancy is
something far worse.... Drinking isn't allowed in their religion
apparently, whereas this other thing is."

Martrodin had no use for them at all."They're dirty hounds,
damn it. It seems they treat my barmaid the same way....
Madmen, eh, don't you agree? It's a pretty awful set of ideas to
have, Doctor, wouldn't you say? I mean, I ask you!"

The cafe keeper pressed his stubby fingers on the pouches under
his eyes. "How go the kidneys?" I asked him, seeing him do this.
I attended him for his kidney trouble. "You have at least given
up the salt, I suppose?"

"Traces of albumen still, Doctor. The chemist analysed it for
me the day before yesterday. Oh, I don't much mind if I die,"
he added, "either from albumen or from anything else--what
gets me is having to work as hard as I do for such small profits."

The girl had finished with the crockery but her bandage had got
so soiled with the bits left on the plates that it had to be done
again. She offered me a five-franc note. I didn't want to take her
five francs but she insisted on giving them to me. Severine was her
name.

"You've cut your hair, haven't you, Severine?" I asked her.

"Oh, yes, I had to. It's the fashion," she told me. "Besides,
long hair in this place collects all the smells of the kitchen."

"There's another part of you that smells far worse!" Martrodin
broke in, disturbed in his accounts by our chatter.

"Yes, but that's not at all the same thing," Severine retorted,
very much incensed. "There are smells and smells. And as for
you, Mr. Martrodin, shall I tell you how you smell? Not just
one part of you--but all over!"

She was really very angry. But Martrodin wouldn't listen to
any more. He growled and went on with his damned accounts.
Severine couldn't manage to get her slippers off and put her
walking shoes on, her feet had swollen so after a whole day's
work in the bar.

"Well, then, I'll sleep with them on!" she exclaimed in the
end, rather loudly.

"Come on now, run and put the light out at the back," Martrodin
told her. "Any one can see you don't pay my electric-light bill."

"I can sleep all right in them," Severine groaned, getting up.
Martrodin wasn't ever going to be through with those accounts
of his. He had taken off first his apron and then his waistcoat so
as to count better. He was having the devil of a tussle with them.
From somewhere at the back of the bar came the clink of glasses:
Robinson and the other washer-up at work. Martrodin drew large
childish numbers with a blue pencil which he held crushed in his
great assassin's paw. The barmaid was sprawling on a chair in
front of us, half asleep. From time to time she started out of her
somnolence. "Oh, oh, my feet!" she cried and then went on
dozing.

But Martrodin woke her up with a yell. "Hey, there, Severine!
Take your Arabs out of here. I'm sick of the sight of them. Get
out, all of you. It's time you went."

The Arabs, as a matter of fact, seemed to be in no hurry,
although it was so late. Severine woke herself up at last. "Yes,
it really is time I went," she agreed. "Thank you, Mr. Martrodin."
She took the two Arabs off with her. They had joined forces so
as to be able to afford her.

"I'm coping with both of them to-night," she explained to me,
as she went out. "Because I can't next Sunday, as I'm going to
Acheres to see my kid. You see next Saturday is his nurse's day
off."

The Arabs got up to follow her. They didn't look at all vicious.
Severine regarded them rather coldly however; she was very tired.
"Personally I don't at all agree with the owner, I prefer these
Arabs myself. They're not as brutal as Poles are, but they're
degenerate. There's no denying that, they certainly are degenerate.
... Well, they can do whatever they damn well please, I don't
suppose that'll stop me getting to sleep. Come along," she called
to them. "Off we go, boys!"

And all three of them went off together, Severine a little in
advance of the others. They could be seen crossing the cold
square littered with the debris of the fair; the gas lamp at the end
lit their little group; for a second they showed white and then the
darkness swallowed them. You could still hear their voices vaguely,
and after that nothing at all. They had gone.

I left the cafe myself after that without speaking again to
Robinson. Martrodin wished me a pleasant good night. A policeman
was pacing along the boulevard. We stirred the silence as we
passed each other. It made one jump occasionally to see a trades-
man here and there poring aggressively over his figures like a
dog gnawing a bone. A family on the spree was strung across the
street at the corner of the Place Jean-Jaures, yelling. They
weren't making any headway, they were hesitating at the entrance
of a side street like a fishing fleet in a gale. The father swayed
across from one pavement to the other, peeing continously.
The night had come into her own.





THERE IS ANOTHER EVENING I REMEMBER, ABOUT THAT TIME,
because of what happened. First of all, soon after supper time
I heard a tremendous rattling of dustpans being shifted by
somebody. People often clanked dustpans about on my staircase.
Then a woman started to moan and cry out. I opened my door
onto the landing slightly, but stayed where I was.

If I'd gone out on my own when there was an accident, I should
probably have been regarded simply as a neighbour and my med-
ical aid would have been taken free. If I was needed, all they
had to do was to ask for me in the ordinary way and that would
mean twenty francs. Poverty takes the most merciless and
cunning advantage of the altruism of others and the kindest
impulses of the heart are ruthlessly punished. So I waited for
whoever it was to ring my bell, but no one came. Money saved,
no doubt.

Anyway, I had almost finished waiting, when a little girl stop-
ped in front of my door, trying to read the names on the dif-
ferent bells. It turned out it was me she was looking for. Madame
Henrouille had sent her.

"Who is ill at their house?" I asked her.

"There's a gentleman hurt himself there."

"A gentleman?" I immediately thought of Henrouille himself.

"The master of the house? M. Henrouille?"

"No, they want you for a friend who is there."

"Do you know who he is?"

"No." She had never seen this friend of theirs.

It was cold outside, the child trotted along, I walked fast.

"How did it happen?"

"I don't know."

We walked past a little park. Once upon a time it had been a
corner of a wood, now it was railed in and the slow, soft mists of
winter met at night amid its trees. Then a series of little streets.
Soon we came to their house. The little girl said good-bye. She
was afraid to go any nearer. The younger Mrs. Henrouille was
standing out on the doorstep, waiting for me. Her oil lamp
flickered in the wind.

"This way, Doctor," she cried, "this way!"

I asked at once, "Is it your husband who's hurt?"

"Come on in!" she said rather roughly, without even giving me
time to think. And I ran straight into the old mother-in-law in
the passage, who rushed at me and began to bellow. It was hell.

"Ah, the dirty swine! The blackguards! Doctor, they tried to
kill me!"

So it had gone wrong then.

"Kill you?" said I, as if greatly surprised. "Why should they
try to do that?"

"Because I wouldn't die off quickly enough, confound you!
That's why. God in Heaven! I'm damned if I'll die...."

"Mother, my dear mother!" the daughter-in-law broke in.
"You're out of your mind; you're saying the most awful things,
Mother!"

"I'm saying awful things, am I? Well, really you've a frantic
nerve, you slut! Out of my mind, eh? I'm still sane enough to
get you all hanged, let me tell you!"

"But who's hurt? Where is he?"

"Oh, you'll see," the old girl said. "He's upstairs in bed, the
murderer! And he's made a pretty good mess of the bed; hasn't
he, you slut, you? He's messed up your dirty mattress with his
rotten blood--and not with mine! His blood must be the filth-
iest muck--you'll never get that mattress clean again! It'll
stink for many a long day, that murderer's blood, d' you
hear? Ah, some people go to a theatre for excitement--but this
is where they'd find it! This is where the melodrama is. It's
upstairs! Real, genuine melodrama! Not just a sham. Don't lose
your seat for the show. Hurry on up. The dirty sod may have
died by the time you get there--and you won't have seen anything!"

The daughter-in-law was afraid she might be heard in the street
and told her to shut up. In spite of what had happened, the
daughter-in-law didn't seem to be particularly disconcerted,
merely very annoyed that things had gone all wrong; but she
stuck to her idea. She seemed quite certain that she'd been right.
"Listen to her, Doctor! Isn't it terrible to hear her talk like
that? When actually I have always tried to make life pleasanter
for her. You know that, don't you? I was always urging her to
go and live with the Sisters...."

It was too much for the old lady to hear her mention the
Sisters again.

"Paradise--that's where you all wanted to send me, you
bitch! Yes, you harridan! And that's why you and that husband
of yours got that cutthroat upstairs to come here! To kill me,
and not to send me to the Sisters! He messed it, you can be sure
of that--it was damn badly worked out! Go on, Doctor, go and
see the state that bastard's in up there--and he did it himself!
Let's only hope he dies as a result of it. Go on, Doctor; go and
see him while there's still time."

If the daughter-in-law did not seem to be in despair after what
had happened, the old woman was even less so. She had had a very
narrow escape, but she wasn't really as outraged as she made out.
It was put on. This unsuccessful attempt on her life had really
rather thrilled her, brought her out of the dim tomb she had been
shut up in all these years at the end of that damp garden. At
her age, now an exciting sense of vitality had returned and taken
possession of her. She gloated over her victory and with joy at
having a means of going for her beastly daughter-in-law as long
as she lived. She'd got that now. She wanted me to be told every
detail of this abortive attempt at murder and of how it had all
taken place.

"And another thing, Doctor," she went on in the same excited
tone, speaking to me, "it was at your house I met the murderer.
It was in your consulting room, Doctor. ... I didn't trust him,
you know! Oh, no, I didn't trust him at all. ... Do you know
what he first suggested to me? That he should bump off my
daughter-in-law. Yes, you, my dear daughter! And for quite a
moderate fee too, I assure you. He suggests the same thing to
everybody, of course; we all know that. So you see, my dear, I
know what your man does for a living! I know all about it!
Robinson his name is! Isn't that his name? Tell me it isn't his
name. As soon as I saw him come nosing around here, I smelt a
rat at once.... And I was quite right! If I hadn't been so
suspicious, where should I be now?"

The old woman went on and on, telling me how it had all
taken place. A rabbit had moved while he was fixing the bomb
behind the hutch door. She herself had been watching him all
this time from her hovel--"from a front row of the stalls", as
she put it. And the thing had gone off in his face while he was
fixing the trap. Right into his eyes. "One's a bit nervous when
engaged on a murder. Naturally," she concluded.

In fact, the whole thing had been very clumsily mishandled and
mismanaged.

"That's what men are like nowadays. That's exactly it. They
get into the habit," the old lady went on. "They have to kill to
eat these days! It's no longer enough for them just to steal their
daily bread. And to kill old women too! That's never been heard
of before. Never! I don't know what the world's coming to....
There's nothing but wickedness in their minds. But all of you
are mixed up in this deviltry now! And now the fellow's blind.
You'll have him on your hands for always. What about that? You
haven't begun to know all the harm he can do."

The daughter-in-law breathed not a word, but she must have
worked out her plan of salvation. She was a hard-headed villain.
While we stood and thought about it all, the old woman started
to look for her son in each of the different rooms.

"And, you know, Doctor, I've got a son somewhere! Where has
he got to? What can he be up to still?"

She staggered up the passage, laughing uproariously.

For an old person to laugh as much as that is something that
doesn't happen outside an asylum. You wonder what's up when
you hear a thing like that. But she was determined to find her
son. He had slipped out into the street. "Never mind then; let
him hide and let him live a long time more! I don't suppose he
would have chosen to have to live with that other fellow who's
upstairs, who will never see again, the two of them together!
Looking after him, feeding him! The bomb went off in his face.
I saw it. I saw it all. Bang! Just like that. I saw it. And it
wasn't a rabbit, I promise you. Hell and damnation! Where is my
son, Doctor; where has he got to? Haven't you seen him? He was a
dirty swine too, who has always been even more of a rogue than
that other one--but now this devilish business has brought him
out of himself, which is a good thing! Oh, it takes a long time
to be brought out of so foul a nature as his is. But when it does
happen, you're rotten through and through. There's no denying,
Doctor, it's a good thing. It mustn't be spoilt!" She was enjoying
herself enormously. She wished to astonish me by her superiority
to what had happened, to confound the whole lot of us, to
humiliate us, in fact.

She had seized on a profitable role which she found extremely
exciting. That's a thing we're always pleased about. One is never
quite happy while there's still a part left to play. The bitter
grumbling of the old, all that she had had to be content with for
the past twenty years, wasn't enough for the old Henrouille any
longer. The virulent, unexpected new role that had come her way
was going to be hers now forever. To be old is to have no ardent
part to play, to slip into an insipid retirement and wait only
for death. The wish to live came back to her old carcass, quite
suddenly, together with an exciting role of revenge. She didn't want
to die now, she didn't ever want to die. She radiated this eagerness
to survive, this reaffirmation of herself. She'd found warmth,
colour and excitement in the drama.

She was kindled by it, she didn't want ever to give up this new
fire, or let us go. For some time she had ceased to believe in it.
She had got to the point of not knowing what she could do not
just to go on and let death come at the end of her mouldy garden,
and then here suddenly was a flood of hard, revivifying facts.

"My death!" she yelled now. "I'd like to see me dying! D' you
hear? I've eyes to see it, d' you hear? I've still got the use of my
eyes. I want to see it clearly!"

She wasn't going to let herself die, ever. That was definite. She
no longer believed she would die.





ONE KNOWS THAT THESE THINGS ARE ALWAYS DIFFICULT TO GLOSS
over and that glossing them over costs money. No one knew what
to do with Robinson, to start with. Send him to a hospital? That
would obviously be likely to start a lot of talk and tittle-tattle.
Send him back home? That wasn't to be considered, with his face
in the state it was. So whether they wanted to or not, the Henrouilles
were obliged to let him stay where he was.

He lay in their bed upstairs in an abject state of mind. He was
overcome with an absolute terror of being kicked out and prosecut-
ed. It was understandable. Really it was the sort of story that
has to be kept very quiet. They kept the shutters in his room
well closed but neighbours and people began to walk past the
house more often than usual, just to look up at the shut win-
dows and to ask how he was. They were told how he was, they
were told all sorts of stories. But how could you stop them from
wondering and talking? They added a good deal to the story.
How could you prevent them from jumping to conclusions? For-
tunately, the law hadn't yet become definitely suspicious. That
at least was something. As far as his face was concerned, I was
managing about that. Infection did not set in, in spite of the
fact that a lot of damage had been done and the wound had been
extremely dirty. For a long time I expected his eyes, even the
cornea of his eyes, to have been so badly gashed that the light
would only just manage to filter through them, if it ever did
enter them again.

We would find some way of fixing up his eyesight for him, to
some extent, if there was anything left to fix. For the moment,
what we had to do was to patch up the wound as best we could
and see to it that the old woman didn't compromise us all with her
damned blabbing to the neighbours and any inquisitive person who
might come along. It was all very well her being thought mad;
that isn't always an adequate explanation.

If the police actually started to look into the matter, it was
going to be the devil of a business dealing with them. It was
already a delicate game preventing the old lady from making
an obstreperous nuisance of herself in her little courtyard. Each
of us, one after the other, would try to calm her down. You
had to be careful not to cross her at all roughly but gentleness
didn't always work either. She was feeling vindictive at the
moment; she had got us on the run, and that's all there was to it.
I went round to see Robinson at least twice a day. He lay there
all bandaged up and started groaning as soon as he heard my step
on the stairs. He was in great pain, it's true, but not in quite as
much pain as he tried to make me think. He would have reason
enough to moan, and moan a damn sight more, I reckoned, when
he found out exactly what had happened to his eyes. ... I avoided
making any forecasts for the future. His eyelids stung badly. He
thought it was this stinging which prevented his seeing anything.
The Henrouilles had set themselves to look after him very care-
fully, according to my instructions. No difficulties in that
direction.

The attempt was never spoken of now. The future wasn't men-
tioned either. When I was leaving in the evening, we all stood
and looked at each other every time so insistently that we
always seemed to me to be on the verge of doing away with one
another, once and for all. Such a conclusion to our thoughts struck
me as both logical and sensible. It's difficult to imagine what
the nights in that house were like. Still, I would meet them a-
gain in the morning and we would together take up with people
and things again as we had left them the night before. Madame
Henrouille and I would wash the wound with permanganate and
bandage it afresh and open the shutters a little, by way of a
test. It was never any good. Robinson didn't even realize that
the shutters had been opened a bit....

That's the way the world goes, spinning in a night of peril
and silence.

The son met me every morning with some little remark about
the weather. "Ah, there you are, Doctor. ... A bit frostier to-
day," he'd say, looking up at the sky above his doorstep. As if
it mattered what the weather was like! His wife went off to parley
with the old lady through her barricaded door but only managed
to increase her fury.

While in his bandaged state, Robinson told me about his early
life. He had started in a shop. His parents had made him an
apprentice to a high-class milliner. One day when he was delivering
some goods, a lady-customer invited him to taste of a pleasure
he had previously experienced only in the imagination. He had
never gone back to his employer, he was so dreadfully ashamed
of what he had done. To go to bed with a customer was certainly
still in those days an unpardonable thing. The lady's crepe-
dechine chemise had had an extraordinary effect on him. Twenty
years later he could still remember that chemise exactly. The
rosy scented limbs of that frolicsome young woman in an apartment
full of cushions and fringed curtains had provided Robinson
with grounds for endless depressing comparisons for the rest of
his life.

Many things had happened since, though. He had been all over
the world, he had gone through whole wars, but he never properly
got over this vision. It amused him to think back on it, to tell
me about this sort of youthful moment he had shared with the
lady-customer. "Having your eyes shut like this makes you
think better," he remarked. "Things slip by.... It's as if you
had a cinema inside your block." I still didn't dare tell him that
he'd have plenty of time to get bored with that little cinema of
his. All ideas lead the way to death and the time would come when
he wouldn't see anything but that and his own image in his
cinema.

Next door to the Henrouilles' house now there was an engine
working in a little factory. Their house shook with it from morning
till night. And then there were other works further off, thumping
away without pause, never stopping, even at night. "When the
roof falls in, we sha'n't be here," Henrouille would say as a joke,
but he was a little bit anxious all the same. "It's bound to come
down sometime." Certainly little particles were already falling
from the ceiling onto the floor. It was no good for an architect to
tell them it was all right; as soon as you stopped and listened to
the outside world you felt their house as if you were on board a
ship, some kind of ship that was sailing from one fear to the
next. We were passengers shut up in the hold, spending our time
making plans that were sadder than life itself and trying to save
money and distrusting the light as well as the darkness.

Henrouille went up to the bedroom after lunch to read to
Robinson for a little while, as I had suggested he should. The
days went by. He told the story of that marvellous young woman
he had slept with when he was an apprentice to Henrouille as
well. The story became a household joke in the end. That is
what becomes of one's intimate secrets when they are brought
into the open and made public. There is nothing frightful in us
and on earth and perhaps in heaven above except what has not
yet been said. We shall never be at peace until everything has
been said, once and for all time; then there will be silence and
one will no longer be afraid of being silent. It will be all right
then.

During the weeks that his eyelids took to heal, I was able
to feed him awful lies about his eyes and what was going to hap-
pen. Sometimes we pretended that the window was shut when really
it was wide open; at others that it was very dark and gloomy out-
side.

However, one day when my back was turned, he went over to the
window himself to make certain on his own and before I could
stop him, he had removed the strips of cloth from his eyes. He
stood there hesitating a good while. He felt the window posts
to the right and left; he wouldn't believe it at first and then
all the same he had to believe it. There was nothing else for
it; he had to.

"Bardamu!" he shouted behind me, "Bardamu! It's open! The
window's wide open, I tell you!" I didn't know what to answer;
I stood there like a fool. He had his arms sticking straight out of
the window, into the open air. He could not see anything, of course,
but he smelt the fresh air. Then he stretched out his arms farther
into the darkness, as far as he could, as if to touch the other
side of it. He didn't want to believe it was true. His own private
darkness. I pushed him back into bed and I said a lot of things
to try and console him, but now he wouldn't believe what I said.
He was crying. He himself had come to the end of things. There
wasn't anything you could tell him now. There is a moment when
you are all alone by yourself and have come to the end of all that
can happen to you. It's the end of the world. Unhappiness itself,
your own misery, won't answer you now and you have to go back,
among men, no matter where. One isn't difficult at moments like
that, for even to weep you've got to get back to where everything
starts, to where the others are.

"And what will you do with him when he's better?" I asked the
daughter-in-law at lunch after this scene. They had invited me
to stay to lunch with them in the kitchen. At bottom, neither of
them really knew how to get out of the situation they were in.
The cost of supporting him terrified them both, especially her
who was better informed than he was as regards the expense of
arrangements for invalids. She had already gone so far as to see
what she could do in the way of getting assistance from public
bodies. But I wasn't told anything about these steps.

One evening after my second visit Robinson tried as hard as
he could to get me to stay by him a little while longer. He went
on and on reminiscing about all that he could remember of places
we'd been and the things we'd done together, even things we had
never tried to recall before. In his retirement, what we had seen
of the world seemed to come back to him with all the cries, the
kindnesses, the things one had worn, and the friends one had left
behind, an absolute bazaar of outgrown feelings which he set up
in his sightless head.

"I shall kill myself!" he warned me, when his suffering seemed
to him too great to bear. But then he would manage to stagger on
under it a little further, as under some burden that was far too
heavy for him, an infinitely pointless suffering which he could
find no one to talk to about on the road, it was so vast and
many-sided. He wouldn't have been able to explain to me what he
was feeling; it was beyond his powers of comprehension and
expression.

He was a coward, by nature, as I knew, and he did too, always
hoping that he would be saved from the truth. But on the other
hand, I was beginning to wonder whether true cowards really do
exist anywhere. ... It would seem that you can always find for
any single man one set of things on whose behalf he is prepared
to die and to die at once and to die quite happily. Only the
chance of dying prettily, as he would like, doesn't always come
along; he doesn't care for the chance he gets. So he goes off
somewhere to die as best he may.... The man sticks around on earth
and every one takes him for a scullion and a coward, but really he
is simply not convinced. It only looks as if he were a coward.

Robinson was not prepared to die, now the chance was being giv-
en him to die. Perhaps if it had come to him some other way, he
would have liked to quite a lot.

Death in fact is a little bit like marriage.

This particular death he didn't like at all, so there it was. No get-
ting round that.

He would therefore have to resign himself to accept inertia and
suffering. But for the time being he was still frantically busy
plastering his soul, in the most disgusting way, with his misery
and his distress. Later on, he would be putting some order into
his unhappiness and then a real new life could begin. It would
have to.

"You may not believe it," he said to me that evening, stirring
up tag-ends of memories after dinner, "but although I'm really
not at all good at languages, I got to know enough English towards
the end of my time at Detroit to be able to carry on some sort of
little conversation. ... Yet now I've forgotten almost all of it
except one phrase....Just two words.... They're often come back
to me since I've had this thing wrong with my eyes: 'Gentlemen
First!" It's almost the only thing I can say in English now,
I don't know why. Of course, it's an easy thing to remember--
Gentlemen First!" And so, to try and keep his mind off things, we
amused ourselves by talking English again together. We went
on saying Gentlemen First!; we said it on every and any occasion
like a couple of idiots. It was our private little joke. Finally, when
Henrouille came up to see how we were getting on, we taught
him how to say it too.

As we stirred up old memories, one wondered what could possi-
bly still exist of all that, of the things we had both known.
One wondered what could have happened to Molly, our sweet
Molly.... Lola I wasn't eager to remember, but still I should
have liked to have had news of them all, even of little Musyne,
come to that.... She couldn't be very far away these days, living
somewhere in Paris. Next door, in fact. But it would really have
been a sort of expedition trying to get news of her again....
There were so many people whose names, habits and addresses
I had forgotten, whose pleasant ways, whose smiles, after so many
years of worrying and feeling hungry, would have gone stale
like an old cheese and turned into the saddest of grimaces.
Memories themselves are young at one time. ... As soon as
they are allowed to go a little mouldy, they turn into the most
repulsive ghosts, oozing selfishness, vanity and lies. They rot
like apples. We were talking of our youth, tasting it and re-
tasting it. We didn't entirely trust it. By the same token I
haven't gone to see my mother either for a long time. Going
to see her did my nerves no good.... She was worse than I was
as far as being unhappy was concerned. She always seemed to have
been gathering round her in her little shop as many disappoint-
ments as possible throughout the years. When I went to see her,
she would say, "Did you know that Aunt Hortense died two months
ago at Coutances? Could you have gone to the funeral? And little
Clementin, you remember Clementin? The floor polisher who used
to play with you when you were small? Well, he was picked up
dead in the Rue Aboukir the day before yesterday. ... He
hadn't eaten for three days."

Robinson's own childhood was something he couldn't bear to
bring himself to think about, it had been so very far from en-
joyable. After the business of the lady-customer he could remem-
ber nothing, even in odd corners of it, that didn't dishearten
and sicken him, like a house full of smelly horrible things, old
brooms, old washtubs, fussing women, and clouts over the head.
Henrouille had nothing to tell us about his childhood up to the
time of his military service, when he had had his photograph taken
in full gala uniform; and this photograph was still to be seen
hanging above the chest of drawers.

When Henrouille had gone back downstairs, Robinson unbosomed
himself to me about how he was very much afraid he would now
never see anything of the ten thousand francs that had been
promised him. "No, I shouldn't count on them too much," I
myself advised him. I thought it best to prepare him for this
further disappointment.

Little lead pellets, what remained of the exploded bomb, were
working their way to the edges of his wound. I removed them bit
by bit, abstracting several every day. It used to hurt him a great
deal when I probed just above the conjunctiva.

It was no good our being terribly careful, people in the neigh-
bourhood had begun to talk just the same, making out all sorts
of things. Robinson did not know about this, fortunately; it
would have made him much worse if he had. There's no two ways
about it, we were surrounded by suspicion. Madame Henrouille
made less and less noise moving about the house in her bedroom
slippers. You weren't expecting her and there she'd be by your
side.

Right among the reefs as we were, the slightest hesitation would
wreck the lot of us. Everything would split asunder, crack, be
shattered, sink and be washed ashore. Robinson, the old lady,
the bomb, the rabbits, his eyes, the incredible son, the cutthroat
daughter-in-law, we would all be washed up there amid all our
wickedness and our secrets under the gaze of thrilled, inquisitive
people. Not that I had committed any actual crime. I hadn't.
But I felt myself to be guilty, nevertheless. I was guilty, at any
rate, of being willing in my heart of hearts that this should go
on. And of not now seeing any reason why we shouldn't all go
wandering off together, deeper and depper into the night.
In any case, there wasn't any need to want the thing; it was
moving along on its own. And it was moving damned fast.




THE RICH DON'T NEED TO KILL TO EAT. THEY GIVE EMPLOYMENT
to people, as the saying goes. They don't do the hurt themselves.
They just fork out. Everything is done to please them and every
one's perfectly happy. Whereas their women are beautiful, the
poor man's wife is a sight. It's the result of centuries--quite
apart from their dressing well. Beautiful creatures, well-fed,
well-washed. Life has been going on a long time and that is all
it's arrived at.

It's no good the rest of us striving: we slip, stumble, over-
balance into the alcohol which preserves both the living and
the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. And that after
centuries of watching our domestic animals being born, struggling
and dying before our eyes without anything of any moment having
happened to them, either, but just picking up the same miserable
thread of life where other animals had left it. We really might
have cottoned on to what was happening. Endless waves of
trifling human beings come drifting down from the beginning of
the ages to die all the time under our very noses and yet we
persist in hoping for certain things. One isn't even capable
of understanding death.

The wives of the rich, fed and flattered and rested, become
pretty. That is true. After all, maybe that in itself is suffi-
cient. You can't tell. It would at any rate be a reason for ex-
isting.

"Don't you think the women in America were better-looking than
the ones over here?" That's the sort of thing Robinson would
say to me now that he had started recalling his travels. His
mind had taken an inquiring turn; he had even begun to talk
about women.

I was going to see him a little less often these days because
it was about that time that I was appointed to take charge of a
small dispensing clinic for tubercular cases in the neighbourhood.
One may as well give things their right names: it brought me in
eight hundred francs a month. The patients I had were people of
the locality, of this semi-village never quite freed of its mud,
sunk in refuse and bordered by lanes of palings, where overde-
veloped, morbid little girls, playing truant from school, picked
up from some old beast a couple of francs, potato chips and
gonorrhea. A highbrow film setting, with dirty linen poisoning
the trees and cabbage patches stinking of piss on Saturday
evenings. I did not, in my own domain, accomplish any great
miracle during those several months of specialized doctoring.
But my patients did not want me to accomplish miracles; on the
contrary, they were counting on their t.b. to remove them from
the state of absolute penury they had always lived in to the
merely relative poverty of life on a minute government pension.
They had carried their more or less positive disease around, from
one clinic to the next, since the war. They grew thin due to fever
kept up by eating very little, vomiting a lot, drinking a great
deal of wine and working too at the same time--one day out of
three, as a matter of fact.

Their hope of a government pension possessed them body and
soul. Like grace, their pension would come to them one day if
they had the strength to wait a while before dying outright.
You do not know what coming back and waiting for a thing is,
until you have seen how completely the poor in hope of a gov-
ernment grant can hang about and wait. They spent whole after-
noons and weeks, while outside the rain came down, waiting on
the threshold and in the entrance to my wretched dispensary,
working out hoped-for percentages, longing for the definite,
tested presence of bacilla in their sputum, for real hundred-
per-cent tubercular spittle. Relief from their illness lagged
far behind the government pension in their hopes: it is true,
of course, that they did hope to be cured--but they only just
hoped for it, whereas their desire for a regular income, how-
ever tiny, dazzled them completely. There was no room in them
for anything except little secondary ambitions, aside from
this relentless, ultimate craving, and even dying for them be-
came by comparison a fairly marginal fact, at most a sporting
risk. After all, death is only a matter of a few hours, per-
haps a few minutes even--whereas an income, like poverty,
lasts a lifetime. The rich are inebriate in another way and
cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security.
To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forget-
fulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget.

I eventually got over my bad habit of promising health to my
patients. It could not be much pleasure to them to be given the
prospect of getting well. After all, to be well is only better
than nothing at all. You're able to work when you're well, but
what after that? Whereas a state pension, however infinitesimal,
is simply and absolutely something divine.

When you've no money to offer the poor, you might as well shut
up. If you start talking to them about anything else besides
money, you are almost invariably tricking them, lying to them.
The rich can be easily amused--mirrors, for instance, in which
they can see themselves, will do, for there is nothing better
to look at in the world than the rich. Every ten years to keep
them happy the rich can be hitched up one pip in the Legion of
Honour--like a sagging breast--and they're all right after that
for another ten years. That's all. My charges, on the other hand,
were poor and self-seeking; they were materialists entirely cooped
up in their lousy plans to retire on the strength of having spat
blood really positively. Nothing else concerned them in the least
and for them it did not matter whether it was spring, summer,
autumn or winter; they didn't notice anything like that; all
they cared about was whatever had to do with coughing and ill
health--for instance, that one catches cold much more frequently
in winter than in summer, but that on the other hand it is easy
to spit blood in the spring, and that in the very hot weather
you can lose as much as three kilos a week.... Sometimes I
would overhear them talking among themselves when they did
not know I was there, as they sat awaiting their turn. They
said the most awful things about me and told lies about me that
absolutely made one gasp. It obviously braced them up a lot
to go for me in this way; it gave them some mysterious courage
which they needed so as to be really pitiless and tough and
swinish, so as to keep going, and last out. Yet I had done my best
to make myself pleasant to them in every way; I espoused their
cause, I tried to help them; I gave them plenty of iodine to try
and make them expectorate their filthy infections--and yet none
of all this sufficed to neutralise their animosity.

They stood there smiling like servants when I spoke to them,
but they hadn't any use for me at all; in the first place be-
cause I did them good, and secondly because I wasn't well off
myself, and being treated by me meant being treated almost for
nothing, which is never very flattering to a sick person, even
while waiting for a government allowance. There wasn't any
low-down story they would not have spread about me behind my
back. Like most of the doctors in the district I hadn't a car,
and it also seemed to them a weakness on my part that I should
have to walk. Once you got them going--and my colleagues never
missed a chance--you'd have said they revenged themselves
for all my kindness, for my being so helpful and devoted to
them. All of which is perfectly usual. And time slipped by
just the same.

One evening, when my waiting room was almost empty, a priest
came in to talk to me. I didn't know the fellow by sight and
was on the point of showing him out. I didn't like priests,
I had my reasons for disliking them, especially after that
trick that was played on me by shipping me off from Santa Tapeta.
But I attempted in vain to place this particular one, so as to
be able to curse him with some degree of accuracy--I had never
set eyes on the man before. Still, he must have been about at
night in Raney like myself, since hereabouts was where he lived.
Perhaps he had avoided meeting me when he went out? I wondered.
No doubt they had told him I didn't like clergymen. It seemed
like it from the greasy way he embarked on his discourse. It
was odd now that we hadn't come across each other by the same
sick beds. He had officiated at a church just next door for the
last twenty years, he told me. Plenty of people attended his
church but very few of them did he get any money out of. He was
something of a beggar himself, in fact. We had that much in com-
mon. The soutane he wore struck me as an extremely inconvenient
garment for wandering about this suburban slush in. I pointed this
out to him. In fact, I laid great stress on the weird unsuitability
of such an attire.

"One gets used to it," he informed me.

The impertinence of my remark did not choke him off, he was
even more amiable still. There was obviously something he wanted
of me. His voice never rose above a certain confidential monotony,
which derived--at least, so I suspected--from his calling. While
he talked on in cautious preamble, I tried to imagine to myself
all the things that this priest had to accomplish on his daily
round so as to provide himself with nourishment; a heap of gri-
maces and promises much like my own.... And then I pictured him,
for fun, naked before his altar.... That is the way you have to
get used to: transposing from the very outset the people who
come to call; you understand them much more rapidly after that,
you glimpse at once, in no matter what personality, the underly-
ing great hungry worm it really is. An excellent gambit of the
imagination. Their nasty prestige weakens, evaporates. Entirely
naked, all you have in front of you is really only a wretched,
pretentious beggar swollen with conceit, with difficulty getting out
its inane babble in one style or another. Nothing stands up to this
test. You are on your feet again that way in an instant. Ideas are
all that's left and ideas never alarm. Everything's safe with them,
it all works out all right. Whereas occasionally it is difficult to
bear the authoritative manner of a man in his clothes. Damnable
smells and mysteries he retains in his clothes.

He had shocking bad teeth, this Abbe--decayed, dirty teeth,
incrusted with greenish tartar, a fine alveolar pyorrhea, in fact.
I was going to talk to him about his pyorrhea, but he was far too
busy telling me things. The things he was telling me never stopped
pouring out against the stumps of his teeth under the impulse of
a tongue whose every movement I discerned. The bleeding edges of
his tongue were cut at a number of little places.

It was a habit and, as a matter of fact, a pleasure of mine to
observe small intimate details like this. When you consider, for
instance, the way in which words are formed and uttered, human
speech fails to stand up to the test of all these appalling trap-
pings of spittle. The mechanical effort we make in speaking is
more complicated and arduous than defecation. The mouth, that
corolla of puffed flesh, which convulses when it whistles; sucks in
breath, and labours, and ejects all sorts of viscous sounds past
a barrier of dental decay--what a punishment it is! Yet this is
what we are urged to consider ideal. It isn't easy. Since we are
nothing but packages of warm and rotten tripes, weshal£ always
have difficulty with sentiment. To love is nothing, it's hanging
together that's so hard. Muck, on the other hand, makes no attempt
either to endure or to increase. In this particular matter we are
far more wretched than filth itself, with our frantic desire
to last out as we are which constitutes such infinite torture.

Decidedly we worship nothing more divine than our own efflu-
vium. All our unhappiness is due to having to remain Tom,
Dick and Harry, cost what it may, throughout a whole series of
years. The bodies we possess, a fancy dress of twitching, trivial
molecules, revolt unceasingly against this frightful farce of man-
aging to last. They want to be off, these molecules of ours, and
lose themselves, as quick as they can, in the universe at large:
little beauties! They hate just being "us", mere cuckolds of the
Infinite! We'd burst to smithereens if we'd the guts, from one day
to the next we only just fail to. Our darling agony is there,
in atoms, enclosed within our hides, along with our pride.

As I was silent, appalled by my realization of biological
ignominy, the Abbe thought he had got me and indeed began to
take up a very friendly, even familiar, attitude towards me.
Clearly he had found out all about me beforehand. With infinite
precautions he broached the delicate subject of my medical repu-
tation in the district. It might have been rather better than it was,
he would have me understand, if I had borne myself very different-
ly at the outset, in the first few months of my practice at
Raney.

"The sick, my dear Doctor, we ought not to lose sight of the
fact, are conservative in outlook.... One can well understand
that they are fearful lest Heaven and earth should fail them...
So that, according to him, I ought from the start to have turned
toward the Church. That was the conclusion he came to--on
spiritual as well as on practical grounds. Not a bad idea. I was
careful not to interrupt him, but I was waiting, patiently, for
him to come to the point of his visit.

For gloomy, confidential weather you couldn't have done better
than the weather outside. You would have thought, so foul was
it and so icily, insistently foul, that when you went out you
would never see the rest of the world again, it would all have
melted away in disgust.

My nurse had at last managed to put her files in order, all of
them, right up to the very last one. She now had no conceivable
excuse for staying behind to overhear us. So she departed, angrily,
and slamming the door behind her, through a savage gust of rain.






IN THE COURSE OF THIS CONVERSATION THE PRIEST TOLD ME
HIS name. The Abbe Protiste, he was called. He informed me in an
exceedingly roundabout way that he and Madame Henrouille had
for some time been trying to see if they could get the old woman
and Robinson, both of them together, into some not too expensive
religious institution. They were still looking round for one.
Looking at him carefully, the Abbe Protiste might have passed
for a window dresser; he looked as most of them look; perhaps
even for the head salesman of a department, sallow, dapper and
dried up. He was truly plebeian in the meekness of his insinuations.
And in his breath too. I never mistake a person's breath. This
man ate too fast and drank white wine.

Madame Henrouille, Junior, he told me to start with, had looked
him up at the presbytery itself, soon after the attempt on
the old lady's life, to see if he could get them out of the dirty
mess they had run themselves into. He seemed in telling me this
to be trying to find some excuse, some explanation; he was some-
how ashamed of being involved in this way. There was really no
need, where I was concerned, to stand on ceremony like that.
One understands how things are. He had come to join us in the
dark, that's all. So much the worse for him then. A nasty kind
of audacity had come over him too, bit by bit, as money changed
hands. But that was his lookout. As a deep silence reigned in
my dispensary and night had settled on the neighbourhood, he
lowered his voice to a whisper, so as to confide in me alone.
But it wasn't any good his murmuring like that; what he was
telling me struck me as overbearing and intolerable, no doubt
because of the quiet around us, which seemed to be full of echoes.
Perhaps they were only inside my own head. "Sssh!" I wanted to
say to him all the time, whenever his voice was silent for a
moment. Even my lips were trembling a little with fear, and be-
tween sentences one stopped thinking altogether.

Now that he was joining us in our difficulties, this priest, he
didn't properly know what to do to follow after us four in the
darkness. We were a little band. He wanted to know how many
of us were already involved. And where were we heading for? So
that he too could hold hands with his new friends and advance
towards the goal we should all of us have to reach together or not
reach at all. We were all going the same way now. He would learn
how to get along in the dark, he said, like the rest of us. He still
wasn't very certain of his ground. He wanted to know how to
avoid tripping up. Well, he didn't have to come if he was scared.
... We'd all get somewhere together in the end and then we'd find
out what it was we'd been looking for in this whole business. That
is what life boils down to, a light going out in the darkness.
And besides, perhaps we never should know after all; we might
not find anything. Then we should have found death.

The thing at the moment was to creep ahead very cautiously.
We had started anyway, we couldn't go back. We hadn't any
choice. Their damnable Justice was there, with the law lurking
around every corner. Madame Henrouille, Junior, was holding
the old lady's hand, and her son and I held hers, and Robinson
held mine. All of us linked up together. That was how it was.
I explained all this to the Abbe at once. And he understood.

Whether we liked it or not, as I explained to this priest, it
would be a very bad thing, placed as we were at present, to let
ourselves be caught and exposed by any passer-by, and I laid
great emphasis on this. If we met any one, the thing was to
behave quite casually and pretend we were just out taking a walk.
That was the idea. Be as natural as possible. So now the priest
knew it all, understood it all. He shook me hard by the hand.
He was very frightened himself too, naturally. He was only just
starting. He hesitated and floundered about like a tyro. There
was no track and no guiding light where we were, just a certain
caution which we communicated to each other but didn't really
very much believe in ourselves. The words you say to reassure
each other on occasions like that get nowhere. No echo replies,
one has left human society behind. Fear says neither yes nor no.
It absorbs everything you say, everything you are afraid of, the
whole thing.

It's no good straining your eyes to see in the dark, either. The
horror of being lost is all there is. It has swallowed up the night
itself and your attempts to see through it. It empties you out.
You've got to hang on though to the other fellow's hand, or down
you'll go. The people who are out in the daylight can't understand
you now. You are shut off from them by fear, which goes on
crushing you until this thing comes to an end one way or another
and you can join all the other rogues either in this world or the
next.

All the Abbe had to do was to help us at the moment, and set
to and learn his part; that was his job. Besides, that's all he
had come to do, sweat away to find some home for the old lady to
start with, and as soon as ever he could, and for Robinson too at
the same time, at some convent place or other in the country. It
seemed to him a possible scheme this, and to me too, of course.
Only we'd have to wait several months for there to be room, and
we couldn't wait. That was no good.

The daughter-in-law was right; the sooner the thing was
arranged the better. Get them away. Get rid of them. Father
Protiste had another scheme in mind. Rather an amazing scheme,
I had to admit. Besides, he had an idea we ought both to get a
commission on it, him and me. It ought to be put into execution
straight away and I was to play my small part too. My part
was to persuade Robinson to go south; I was to give him this
advice in an ordinary, friendly way, of course, but at the same
time I was strongly to urge him to go.

Not really knowing what was at the bottom of or behind this
scheme of the Abbe's I ought perhaps to have made certain con-
ditions or asked for some sort of guarantee on my friend's be-
half maybe.... Because really, when you came to think of it, it
was an extraordinary scheme this Abbe Protiste was proposing.
But we were all so harassed by circumstances that the essential
thing at the moment was that no time should be lost. I promis-
ed whatever was asked of me, to help and to keep my mouth
shut. Old Protiste seemed to be quite accustomed to delicate
dealings of this kind and I felt that he was going to make a
number of things much easier for me.

How should we start? A discreet departure for the South of
France had to be organized. What would Robinson say to that?
And then going with the old lady too, whom he'd so nearly blown
up! I'd be insistent. Yes, there wasn't anything else for it....
It was necessary that he should agree--for all sorts of reasons,
not all of them good,--but powerful, every one of them.

As strange jobs go, it was a really remarkable one they'd found
for Robinson and the old lady down South. At Toulouse it was.
It's a fine place, Toulouse. We should, of course, see the town.
We would go down to see them there. It was understood that I
should go down to Toulouse when they were safely installed in
their house and settled into the job and all.

And when I thought about it, it rather annoyed me that Robin-
son should be going away so soon and then at the same time
it pleased me a lot, especially as for once I was to get a real
little something out of it. They'd give me a thousand francs. That
was agreed upon too. I only had to incline Robinson towards the
idea of going south, assuring him that it was the best possible
climate for eye wounds, that he'd be perfectly well off down there,
in fact, that he was very lucky to have things turn out like this.
That was the way to get him to fall in with the scheme.

After five minutes' thought along these lines, I was full of
conviction myself and quite ready for a decisive interview. Strike
while the iron is hot, that's what I say. After all, he'd be no worse
off there than here. Protiste's idea, when one thought it over once
more, seemed really eminently sensible. These priests know how
to cover up the nastiest scandals for you, one must admit.

Robinson and the old woman were being offered a business
which, after all, was as good as any other. A vault with mummies
in it was what it was, if I wasn't mistaken. It was under a church
and people came to see it and paid a fee. Tourists. A lucrative
business, Protiste assured me. I almost believed him and felt
slightly envious. You can't often make any profit by employing
dead men.

I locked up the dispensary and we started out for the Henrou-
illes' together, the Abbe and I, through the slush, with our
minds entirely made up. This was something new indeed. A
thousand francs to look forward to! I'd changed my mind about
old Protiste. When we got to the Henrouilles, we found them both
with Robinson in the bedroom on the second floor. But what
a state Robinson was in!

"There you are!" he called out excitedly, as he heard me coming
up the stairs. 'Tm sure something's up.... It is, isn't it?" he
asked me breathlessly.

And he started wailing again before I could get a word in. The
other two, the Henrouilles, made signs while he called out to me
to help him. "What a hell of a mess!" I thought. "They've been
in much too much of a hurry. Damn fools! D' you mean to say
they've gone and broken the thing to him already, flat out?
Without working up to it? Without waiting for me?"

Fortunately, I was able to get the whole thing going right, as
you might say, by using other tactics. Robinson, after all, wanted
nothing better than to be given another view of the same situation.
That was sufficient. The Abbe was outside, not daring to come
in. He lurked anxiously in the corridor.

"Come on in!" Madame Henrouille urged him at last. "Don't
stay out there! You're not the least in the way, Monsieur l'Abbe.
... Here you have us, a family stricken with grief, that is all ...
Doctor and priest! Is it not always thus in moments of misfortune?"
She was waxing devilish eloquent. The hope of extricating herself
from this shady mess at last was making the old bitch lyrical
after her own filthy fashion.

The helpless priest had lost his head and stood there bleating
some yards from the sick man's bed. His nervous babbling set
Robinson off again: "They're tricking me! You're all of you
tricking me!" he yelled.

Fuss and nonsense, confound it, there wasn't any sense in all
this. Getting all worked up. The same old thing. But it put me
on my mettle; it started me going. I took the Henrouille woman
into a corner and I put the thing to her clearly, because it was
obvious to me that the only person present capable of handling
this business was yours truly, come to that. "Let's get this
settled," I said to her. "You'd better fix up with me right away!"
When you've no trust left in a person, there's no offence to be
taken, as they say. She got my point and shoved a thousand-franc
note into my hand and added another, just to make quite sure.
I had been firm about it. Whereupon I got down to making up
Robinson's mind for him while I was on the job. We simply had
to get him to decide to go south.

It's easy enough to say I was double-crossing. Even so, it's a
question of when and how. Double-crossing is like opening a
window in a prison. Every one wants to, but it isn't often you get
the chance.





ONCE ROBINSON HAD LEFT RANCY, I REALLY THOUGHT LIFE
WOULD get a move on and there'd be a few more sick people may-
be. But there weren't. In the first place, a slump occurred in the
neighbourhood and a lot of people were thrown out of work,
which is always very bad. And then, although it was winter,
the weather turned dry and mild, when it's the wet and the
cold that our profession needs. There were no epidemics ei-
ther--in fact, it was a wretched season and quite useless.

I even saw certain of my colleagues going to visit their patients
on foot, which just shows; smiling as they walked along, though
really they found it most provoking and were only trying to
economise by not using their cars. Personally, I only had a mack-
intosh to go out in. Was that why I caught such a dreadful cold?
Or was it because I had got into the way of eating really much too
little? God knows. Perhaps it was my old friend, the fever, getting
a hold on me again. Anyway, the fact remains that one cold spell
just before the spring I started to cough all the time and felt
extremely ill. It was damned annoying. Then one morning I simply
couldn't get out of bed. Bebert's aunt was passing my door at
that moment. I called out to her. She came in. I sent her off at
once to collect a small bill I was still owed in the neighbourhood.
My last and only one. I got half of it, which kept me going for
ten days,--ten days in bed.

You've time to think, lying on your back that long. As soon
as I was better, I would go away from Raney, that's what I
decided. Rent two months in arrears. ... So farewell, my four
sticks of furniture! Without saying a word to any one, of course,
I'd slip quietly away and never be seen more in Garenne-Raney.
I'd depart, leaving no trace and no address. When the stinking
demon of poverty's after you, why argue? To say not a word
and be getting along is the wiser part.

With my certificate, of course, I could set up wherever I liked
in practice. But anywhere else it would be no pleasanter, no
worse. A little better at first, obviously, because a certain time
is needed for people to get to know you and get going and find
out the way to do you some harm. While they're still searching
for the spot where it's easiest to hurt you, you get some peace;
but as soon as they have found that joint, it becomes much the
same thing in every place. In fact, it's during the little interval
when you aren't known in a new place that life's most bearable.
After that, the same old bloody-mindedness begins all over again.
They're like that. The thing is not to wait too long and let them
all cotton on to your weak points. A bedbug has to be squashed
before it gets back to its crack. Aren't I right?

As to the sick, the patients, I was under no illusions as far as
they were concerned. They'd be no less mean or obstinate or
craven in any other quarter of town than they were here. Just
the same booze, movies, sports talk, the same happy acquiescence
to natural needs, at either end, making up as here the same cloddish,
dung-smeared, credulous crowd, always blathering, bargaining,
malevolent and, between one panic and the next, aggressive.

But just as the sick man is allowed to roll over in bed and in
life, so have we a perfect right to flop over, too, onto the other
side: it's the only thing one can do and the only defence that's
been found against Destiny. It's no good expecting to drop one's
misfortune anywhere en route. It's as if one's misfortune were
some ghastly-looking female, and somehow one had married her.
Maybe it's better to end up by loving her a little than to wear
oneself out beating her all one's life. Since you're not going to
be able to suppress her anyway.

Well, I did slip quietly away from my second-floor flat in Ran-
ey. They were sitting round a bottle of wine and chestnuts in
my concierge's lodge when I walked past it for the last time.
No one saw me or noticed me. She was scratching herself and he,
leaning over the stove, bemused by the heat, had already drunk
enough red wine not to be able to keep his eyes open.

Where those people were concerned I was sliding into the un-
known as into a great tunnel with no end to it. It makes you feel
fine that,--three fewer people to spy on you and harm you, three
people who won't even know what has become of you. Fine!
Three, because I count the daughter in too, their child Therese,
who broke out in running sores, she was so badly bitten by fleas
and bugs and couldn't leave the bites alone. It's a fact that one
was so bitten at the concierge's that entering their lodge was like
walking into a hairbrush.

The light of the naked and screeching gas jet in the hall fell
on people passing by along the pavement and turned them at once
into haggard, solid ghosts framed darkly in the doorway. They
passed on, these people, and collected to themselves a little colour
here and there at other windows and street lamps and then lost
themselves, like me, in the night, black soft shadows.

There wasn't any need to recognize these passers-by. Still, it
would have pleased me to stop them on their aimless stroll for
just one second, just long enough to tell them, definitely, that
I was getting the hell out of here, going away, a long way away,
and I didn't give a tinker's damn for any of them and they
couldn't do anything to me now, it wasn't any use their trying.
When I got to the Boulevard de la Liberte, the vegetable carts
were rumbling up towards town. I went along with them. In fact,
I was now almost out of Raney altogether. It wasn't warm, either.
So, wanting to get warm, I went round out of my way a bit to
Bebert's aunt's place. Her lamp was a speck of light at the end
of the corridor. "So as to end off properly," I said to myself,
must go and say 'au revoir' to his aunt."

She was sitting there as usual amid all the smells of the lodge,
and there was the little stove warming it all up, and that old
face of hers always on the verge of tears, now that Bebert was
dead; and on the wall above her workbasket a large schoolboy
photograph of Bebert in a school suit and a beret and holding a
cross. It was an enlargement paid for with the coffee firm's
coupons. I woke her up.

"Good morning, Doctor!" She gave a jump. I remember quite
well what she said.

"You don't look at all well!" she exclaimed. "Sit down, won't
you? I'm not feeling too well myself...."

"I've just been out for a little walk," I said, by way of explanation.

"It's very late to be going out for little walks," she answered,
"especially if you're going in the Place Clichy direction.... It's
bitter on the avenue at this time."

She got up and tottered around, making me a warm drink, talking
all the time about everything and about the Henrouilles and a-
bout Bebert, of course.

There was no way of stopping her talking about Bebert and yet
it hurt her and wasn't good for her to talk about him, and she
knew that too. I sat and listened to her without saying a word;
I was sort of dazed. She was trying to recall all Bebert's good
qualities and she made a kind of window display of them--with
a great deal of difficulty; yet she mustn't forget a single one of
them, and she'd start all over again; and then it was all right and
she had told me all the details of his being fed out of a bottle as
an infant; but then she'd find yet another little quality of Bebert's
which had to go with the others, whereupon she would begin the
whole story again at the beginning and she'd forget a bit just
the same, and in the end she was reduced to weeping a little out
of sheer impotence. Her mind wandered, she was so tired. She
fell asleep between sobs. It was a long time now since she had been
able to recall to mind the memory of little Bebert, whom she had
been very fond of. Limbo was near her now and rather hovered
over her these days. A drop of grog and feeling tired and there
it was; she'd fall asleep snoring like a little aeroplane flying far
away amid the clouds. She had nobody now in the world.

While she sat there in this collapse, amid the various smells,
I reflected that I was going away and that I should no doubt never
see Bebert's aunt again, that he, Bebert, had gone too, quietly
and for good, and that she herself would be following after him
before very long. Her heart was weak and old. Blood it pumped as
best it could into her arteries; it had to struggle its way into
her veins. She would be going off to the large cemetery round the
corner, where the dead are like a waiting crowd. That is where
she used to take Bebert to play before he fell ill, to that cemetery.
And then it would all be over. They'd come and lay a fresh coat
of paint on her lodge and then we should all have been picked
up and put away, like balls which topple on the edge of a hole
and take their time to drop in and have done with it.

They fly off, swish, at great speed, but they don't really ever get
anywhere. Neither do we, and the purpose of the world is to collect
them all again at the end. And the end wasn't far now for Bebert's
aunt; she hadn't much driving force left. You cannot find yourself
while you are in the midst of life. There are too many colours dis-
tracting your attention and too many people moving about round
you. You only find yourself in silence, when it is too late, like
dead men. There was I, still having to move around and go on
somewhere else. It was no good my doing anything, no good my
realizing ... I couldn't stay on there with the boy's aunt any
longer.

My degree made a bulge in my pocket, a bigger bulge than my money
or my passport and my papers. Outside the police station the con-
stable on duty was waiting to be relieved at midnight and spat
the while as hard as he could. We said good night to each other.

Beyond the oil pumps on the corner of the boulevard was the
toll gate with its two officials in their glass cage. The trams
had stopped. It was just the moment to talk to these officials
about life--which is always becoming harder and more expensive.
They were a young and an old man, with scurf on their shoulders,
bending over enormous ledgers. Through the glass you could see
the great shadowy fortifications of the town advancing like break-
waters high in the night, waiting for ships from so far away, and
such fine ships that no one would ever see ships like that. But I
know I'm right. They're expected sometime.

We chatted for a while, the officials and I, and even had a cup
of the coffee that was warming on the range. They asked me if I
wasn't going off on my holidays, trying to be funny, me with my
little bundle under my arm in the dark like that. "You're quite
right," I replied. No good talking to these fellows about anything
that wasn't entirely ordinary. They couldn't help me to understand.
I was a little annoyed by their remark and felt I wanted to say
something interesting, surprise them a bit, in fact. So I started
in right away to talk about the smaller details of the campaign
of 1816, in which the Cossacks, in pursuit of the great
Napoleon, reached the very spot where we were standing--the
fortifications of Paris.

I expounded all this to them with some brilliance, of course,
and not a little ease. Having in a few words convinced them of
my superior culture and startling erudition, I started off again
up the avenue towards the Place Clichy, feeling much better.
You will have noticed that there are always two prostitutes
waiting at the corner of the Rue des Dames. Theirs are the empty
hours between the middle of the night and early dawn. It is
thanks to them that life spans this gap of darkness. They serve
as its liaison officers, with their handbags full of prescriptions,
handkerchiefs that can be used for any purpose, and snapshots of
kids in the country. When you go up to them in the dark, look
out, because they hardly exist at all, these women, they're so
specialised, just sufficiently alive to reply to the two or three
queries which sum up all that you can get out of them. They're
bugs in button boots.

Say nothing to them, don't go too near them. They're dangerous.
I had plenty of room. I started to run along the tramway lines.
And it's a very long street.

Right at the end is Marshal Moncey's statue. He's been defending
the Place Clichy since 1816 against remembrance and forgetfulness,
against nothing at all, decked with a coronet of pretty cheap
pearls. I came along abreast of him one hundred and twelve years
too late, running up the very empty avenue. There weren't any
Russians now or any battles or Cossacks or soldiers or anything
at all in the square, except a ledge of the pedestal one could
sit on under the coronet. And a little workman's fire, round which
three fellows sat shivering, with its filthy smoke making them
squint. It didn't look too comfortable.

An occasional motor car dashed across and out of the square
as fast as it could.

In a case of need you remember the main boulevards as being
not so cold as other places. My brain only worked when I forced
it to, because I was feeling so ill. With the aunt's grog inside
me I chased down there before the wind, which isn't so cold when
you get it in the back. An old dame in a bonnet by the Saint-
Georges Metro station was weeping for her little granddaughter,
who was ill in a hospital, with meningitis, she told me. She beg-
ged from me with that excuse. She was out of luck.

I let her have a few words instead. I, in my turn, talked to
her; I told her about young Bebert and about a little girl I'd
attended in town once, when I was a student, who'd also died of
meningitis. She had taken three weeks to die, as a matter of fact,
and her mother in a bed by her side couldn't sleep it was so
frightful; so she masturbated all the time, all those three weeks,
and then afterwards, when it was all over, she went on doing it
and they couldn't stop her.

Which proves that one can't live even for a moment without plea-
sures and that it's extremely difficult to be really miserable.
Life is like that.

The old lady and I parted in front of the Galeries. She had to go
and unload carrots in the Halles. She'd been following the vegetable
route, the same as me.

But the Tarapout attracted me. It's a cinema situated there
on the boulevard like a great, glowing cake. And from all sides
people come scurrying to it like mites. They come out of the
surrounding night with eyes staring wide, ready to fill them with
visions of light. The ecstasy goes on all the time. They're the
same people who crowd into the Metro in the morning. But here
in front of the Tarapout they are happy; as in New York, they
burrow down into their clothes and grub out a little money and
then with minds made up, they rush joyfully into the glare of
the entrances. The light almost undressed you, pouring down as it
did on each person and movement and every thing, all the garlands
of lamps. You couldn't have discussed any private matter in
that hall, it was the exact opposite of the night outside.

I was pretty dazzled myself, so I went and sat down in a little
near-by cafe. At the next table, I looked, and there was my old
friend Professor Parapine having a beer, and as scurfy as ever.
An unexpected meeting. Delightful. Great changes had come about
in his life, he told me. No sort of joke. Professor Jaunisset of
the Institute had become so unpleasant, had treated him so badly,
that Parapine had had to leave, resign and give up his laboratory;
besides, there'd been the mothers of the little girls at the
Lycee who had come and waited for him at the gates of the
Institute and set upon him. A great to-do. Enquiries. Trouble.

At the last moment, through an ambiguous advertisement in
a medical journal, he had managed to scrape hold of another small
means of livelihood. Nothing much, of course, but still not too
tiring a game and quite within his scope. It concerned the intell-
igent putting into practice of Professor Baryton's recent theories
on the development of cretin children by cinematic processes. A
tremendous step forward in the realm of subconscious. Everybody
in town was talking about it. It was absolutely the up-todate
thing.

Parapine accompanied these special charges of his to the up-to-
date Tarapout. He went and collected them at Baryton's up-to-
date nursing home in the suburbs and took them back after the
show, mowing, bloated with the visions they had seen, happy,
and released, and much more up-to-date than before. That's all.
As soon as they'd been set down in front of the screen there
wasn't any more need to bother about them. A marvellous audi-
ence.They were delighted; the same film shown ten times over
enchanted them. They had no memory. They were continually joyful-
ly surprised. Their families couldn't have been more pleased.
Nor could Parapine. Nor I either. We laughed at our ease and
drank bock after bock to celebrate this reinstitution of Parapine
on up-to-date lines. We would stay still two in the morning, after
the last performance at the Tarapout, we agreed, and then collect
his cretins and rush them back by car to Doctor Baryton's place
at Vigny-sur-Seine. Great fun.

As we were both so pleased to see each other again, we began
to talk about all sorts of things and to tell about the travels
we'd been on and finally we spoke of Napoleon, who came into
the conversation via Marshal Moncey and the Place Clichy. Every-
thing's a pleasure when one's only object is to get on nicely
and have a good time with some one, because then you really feel
you are free. You forget about ordinary life, that is to say, about
money.

Passing on from one thing to another, we even found a few
humorous remarks to make about Napoleon. Parapine knew the
story of Napoleon well. He had been extremely interested in it,
he told me, in the old days in Poland when he was a student.
He had been well educated, Parapine, unlike me.

So it was that talking about these things, he told me of how
Napoleon's generals, during the retreat from Moscow, had had
the hell of a time trying to prevent him from going to Warsaw
to have a last supreme fling with the Polish mistress of his heart.
That's what you have Napoleon up to, even in the midst of his
greatest reverses and misfortunes. Really, it was a bit too much.
He, the Eagle, the Emperor, with his Josephine at home and all!
When you feel frisky that way, there's nothing'll stop you. It's
no use once you're set on making whoopee--and we all are. That
is what is so depressing. It's all one thinks about--in one's cradle,
at the cafe, on a throne, in the W.C., every damned where!
Cock-a-doodle-ooo! Napoleon or any one else! Wise man and fool
alike! Fun first and foremost! To hell with the four thousand
hoodwinked heroes in scarlet and gold (thought Genius in defeat)
--so long as old Boney gets his slap and tickle! What a scamp the
fellow was! Well, damn it all ... that's life. That's the way it
all ends. Just too bad. The tyrant tires of the part he's playing
long before the spectators. He rushes off to bed with some one as
soon as he stops storing up his excitements in the public service.
It's all up with him then! Destiny drops him cold in the twinkle
of an eye. Wholesale massacre is not what his fans object to.
Oh, no. That's nothing. Rather not. But to have become a bore
all of a sudden--that is what they won't forgive him. Tolerance
of any reasonable action is all bluff. Epidemics come to an end
only when the microbes are bored with their own toxins. Robespi-
erre was guillotined because he kept repeating the same thing
over and over again, and as far as Napoleon was concerned, he
failed to survive two years of an inflation of Legions of Honour.
It was the tragedy of this madman that he was obliged to furnish
half sedentary Europe with a longing for adventure. An impossible
task. It killed him.

Whereas the cinema, that new little clerk of our dreams, can
be bought, hired for an hour or two, like a whore.

Besides, artistes are stuck about everywhere these days, as a
safety measure, with a view to our not being too bored. You have
them all over every building now, overflowing with thrills, their
passionate revelations trickling from floor to floor. Every door
a peephole. Which of them can wriggle most, and be more blatant,
more soulful, more intensely abandoned than his neighbour?
Nowadays public lavatories go in for decor, and so does the
slaughterhouse and the pawnshop too--just to keep you amused
and distract you, and let you forget your fate.

Living, just by itself--what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom
and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you;
whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy
all the time doing something that's terribly exciting--or he'll come
along and nibble your brain. A day that is nothing but a mere
round of the twenty-four hours isn't to be borne. It has to be one
long, almost unbearable thrill, a twenty-four-hour copulation,
willy-nilly.

You get the most deplorable ideas of this sort when you're
needy and dazed and when every second of your life a desire
for a thousand other places and things is crushed within you.
Robinson was another fellow who was, in his own way, harassed
by infinite longings--or had been, before his accident
happened to him; but now his account was settled. At least,
I imagined so.

Seeing that now we were peacefully seated at a cafe, I in my
turn told Parapine all that had happened to me since last we met.
He understood things, you know; he understood about me, and
I confessed to him that I had just wrecked my medical career
by decamping from Raney in the most unheard-of fashion. That's
the way you put these things. Really, it was no joke. I couldn't
dream of going back there, in the circumstances. Parapine quite
agreed.

While we were pleasantly conversing in this way, and I was
unburdening myself to him, there was an interval at the Tarapout
and the musicians of the cinema orchestra came over en bloc
for a drink. We all had one together. Parapine knew these musician
fellows well.

One thing leading to another, I learnt from them that as a
matter of fact a pasha was wanted for the stage show. A silent
role. The previous "Pasha" had gone off, without a word. It was
a well-paid part though, in an act between films. Nothing stren-
uous. Surrounded furthermore, it shouldn't be forgotten, by a
magnificent flight of English dancing girls--thousands of rippling,
attractive muscles. Just my cup o' tea and one I badly needed.

I made myself pleasant at once and angled for an offer of the
part from the manager. I put myself forward, in fact. As it was
late, and they hadn't time to go and fetch somebody else for it
as far as the Porte Saint-Martin, the manager was quite pleased
to take me on. It saved him trouble. Me too. He barely looked
me over. I'd do, in fact, straight away. I was engaged. So long
as I didn't limp, that was all that mattered.

I made my way into the beautiful, upholstered underground
precincts of the Tarapout movie palace: an absolute scented hive
of little dressing rooms where the English girls, waiting for the
show to start, pranced curiously about and swore. Overjoyed at
having lighted on my bread and butter again, I instantly made
the acquaintance of these care-free young colleagues of mine.
They welcomed me into their circle really most charmingly.
Angelic they were. Discreetly angelic. It's pleasing, too, not
to be catechised or despised: England all over.

There was a lot on at the Tarapout. In the wings it was all
luxury, ease, thighs, lights, soap, sandwiches. The scene of the
divertissement in which we appeared was laid, I believe, in
Turkestan. It was an excuse for choreographic convolutions and
musical wrigglings and volleys of tambourine delights.

My role was essential, though summary. Loaded with raiment of
silver and gold, I experienced some difficulty at first in in-
stalling myself amid so many properties and flimsy-looking lamps,
but I got the hang of it and once I was set, beautifully in evi-
dence, all I had to do was to sit there day-dreaming under the
opaline spotlights.

For a good quarter of an hour twenty Cockney odalisques flung
themselves melodiously about in bacchanalian frenzy, apparently
in an attempt to convince me of the reality of their charms. They
could have spared themselves the trouble: and I reflected that
really to repeat all this five times a day was a lot for a woman
to do, as they did, untiringly, time and time again, waggling buttocks
unceasingly with that rather tiresome energy of their race,
that pitiless obstinacy of ocean-bound tramp steamers endlessly
ploughing away across inflnite high seas.





THERE IS NO POINT IN STRUGGLING; WAITING IS ENOUGH, SINCE
everything in the end will have to turn out into the street. It's
the street which counts in the long run. There's no escape. It lies
in wait for us. We will have to make up our minds, we will have
to pass out into the street, not one or two or a few of us, but
everybody. We hover about on the brink and make a great fuss,
but it will come to that.

Everything is rotten indoors. As soon as a door closes behind a
man he begins to smell at once, and everything that is his smells
with him. He becomes outworn in body and soul. He goes bad.
And if mankind stinks in this way, it's meant for us to notice. We
ought to take steps about it. We ought to dig people out, expel
them, expose them. All the nasty little human tricks are indoors,
putting on finery, but they stink just the same.

Talking about people en masse, I know a chemist on the Avenue
Saint-Ouen who has a lovely notice in his window: Three Francs
the Bottle--a Dose for the Whole Family. The very thing. A com-
munal rumble. The family takes its medicine like a man--like one
man. Every one hates every one else like hell, that's the real family
circle, but nobody complains because anyway it's cheaper than
going to live at an hotel.

The hotel, now, an hotel is more alive and restless; it's not as
smug as an apartment; you don't feel so guilty at an hotel. The
human race is never at peace and obviously at an hotel one's
readier for the last judgment, which will take place in the open
street. As soon as the trumpeting angels come around, we shall be
the first to get there, running down and out from the hotel.

You try not to attract too much attention to yourself at an
hotel. But it's no good. As soon as you raise your voice too loud
or squabble too often, dammit, you're discovered. In the end you
don't dare use the jerry in your room, everything's so audible from
one room to the next. Eventually you acquire perfect manners, as
if you were in the navy. The world can rock from floor to ceiling
at any moment; you are ready, you don't mind, you're so used
to "forgiving" everybody twenty times a day, through just meeting
them in the corridor, at an hotel.

You might as well learn to recognize each stable companion's
smell when you go to the lavatory; it's a useful talent. Reality is
pretty stark at a boarding house. Guests aren't cocky. They travel,
softly through life from day to day, not thrusting themselves
forward, like passengers on some rather rotten old ship which is
full of holes ,and they know it.

The one I went and stayed at was mostly full of students from
the provinces. It smelt of cigarette ends and breakfast coffee from
right down at the bottom of the staircase. You were guided back
to it at night by the dim light over the doorway and the gilt
letters strung across the balcony like a set of ancient, enormous
false teeth. A monster of a lodging house made abject by questionable
goings-on.

One paid visits to one's neighbours from room to room. After
years of grubbing about in the world of practical things, of living
my life, as the saying goes, I now came up against undergraduates
again.

Their desires were still the same, raw and clear-cut, no more
and no less futile than before, when I had known them in the
old days. The boys were different but the ideas were the same.
They all went, now as always, at more or less regular times, to
nibble a little medicine, bits of chemistry, hunks of law, and a
mass of zoology, yonder at the University. The war had swept
over their kind without altering anything at all about them, and
when you mixed yourself up in their dreams, out of sympathy,
they took you straight along with them to their own age of forty
years. They gave themselves twenty years ahead, two hundred and
forty months of carefully counted pence in which to achieve
happiness in life.

A vision of the narrow path was their idea of happiness, their
model of success, but it was all to be very gradual and accord-
ing to plan. They pictured themselves, when they had "won
through", surrounded by a small but quite entrancing family.
Yet they would never, so to speak, have taken a good look at
that family of theirs. Why bother? A family's fine but you don't
need really to consider what it's like. Why, it's a father's joy
and privilege to kiss his family without taking any real notice
of it; it's his dream come true.

By way of adventure, they would have gone to Nice with their
bride and her dowry, and maybe have taken to a cheque book in
dealings with the bank. In the matter of wild oats, no doubt
they'd have taken that same wife to some moderately low haunt
one night. Nothing more than that.- Everything else you find
shut away in the daily papers and in charge of the police.

Staying at this lousy hotel made my young friends rather shame-
faced and easily irritated. The bourgeois youth as an undergrad-
uate at an hotel, considers himself in purgatory and, as it is
understood that he cannot yet be saving money, he is determined
to be Bohemian by way of relief, damned Bohemian: desperation
in terms of cafe creme.

About the beginning of the month we went through a short but
violent phase of erotic fever; the whole hotel fairly hummed
with it. Feet were washed. An amourous expedition was got up.
The arrival of money orders from the country made our minds
up definitely. I could probably have provided myself with the
same enjoyments on my own at the Tarapout with my English
dancing ladies--and for nothing too--but, thinking it over, I
renounced such easy conquests because of the talk there might
be and the wretched, envious, pimpish little friends who always
hang around the wings with an eye on dancers.

As we read a lot of dirty papers in our hotel, we knew plenty
of tricks and addresses for having a good time in Paris. One
must admit addresses are rather fun. You let yourself get inter-
ested, even when, like me, you've gone the round of Beresinas
alley and travelled a good bit and learnt all sorts of odd gambits at
that game; the attraction of hearing all about it from some one
never seems entirely to fail. There is always a little bit of extra
curiosity left in you somewhere for anything to do with smut. You
think to yourself that you have nothing more to learn along that
line, that you really can't waste any more time over it, and then
all the same you begin again, just once more, just to make quite
certain that you've lost all interest in that sort of thing; and
damned if you don't find out something new and that is enough
to start you off feeling optimistic again.

You wake up, you think more clearly than you did before, and
you begin to hope for things you had entirely given up hoping
for: inevitably turning back to look for the same old kick. In-
deed, the female animal teaches you something at every stage of
life. So (to get on with the story) one afternoon three of us
from the hotel set off on a quest for inexpensive dalliance. It
was easily come by, thanks to the good offices of Pomone, who
ran an agency, and could fix you up any conceivable kind of carnal
affair or transaction over there in his part of the world, Les
Batignolles. Pomone's books were full of offers at all prices; he
carried on his functions, this providential little man, at the bottom
of a courtyard, with no days off, in a ill-lit cubbyhole in which
you had to tread as delicately and cautiously as in an unfamiliar,
pitch-dark public lavatory. You had to push nervously past several
hangings before you reached the pander himself, invariably seated
in dim confessional atmosphere.

Due to this gloom I never, truth to tell, really properly saw
Pomone, and although we frequently conversed at length together
and even collaborated at one time, and he has often suggested
things to me and dangerously confided in me, I should
certainly not be able to recognize him now if I met him in hell.

All I remember is that the furtive applicants who sat in his
anteroom awaiting their turn to be interviewed, were always beau-
tifully behaved and didn't speak to each other but showed great
reserve, as if on a visit to some dentist who intensely disliked
any noise--and wasn't much fond of light, either.

It was through a medical student that I got to know Pomone.
He used to see a lot of him and earn himself a little easy pocket
money, as he could boast, the lucky devil, of a fantastic muscular
development. He used to be summoned to make little intimate
parties go, in the suburbs, with an exhibition of Nature's gift.
Ladies particularly, who wouldn't have believed it could be "as
big as that", used to make a tremendous fuss over him. He was
great fun for these arrested flappers. He appeared in the police
records, this student of ours, under the awe-inspiring nickname
of John Thomas!

Waiting clients very seldom struck up a conversation. Sorrow
seeks a listener, whereas joy and the urgent impulses of nature
are shamefaced.

It's a sin, whatever you may say, to be lecherous and poor.
When Pomone learned about me and heard that I had been a
doctor, he immediately unbosomed himself to me about the tor-
ment of his life. A vice was wearing him away. I believe too his
lower bowels were constantly inflamed by a wicked fever in his
lungs. Anyway, tuberculosis carried him off a few years later. He
was also worn out, in a different way, by the unceasing chatter of
conceited lady clients always making up all sorts of absurd non-
sense, spinning incredible tales about nothing on earth or about
their intimate charms, the like of which, to hear them talk, you'd
think couldn't be found under any other mortal skirt in the world.

For the men, what you mostly had to find was amenable and
admiring partners to fit in with their salacious whims. There
were as many of these idiosyncrasies as there were men seeking
love for hire, the same as at Madame Herote's. A morning's mail
at Pomone's office brought in enough unsatisfied love to stop all
the wars in the world for ever. Yet all this flood of sentiment
never went beyond certain definite portions of the human anatomy.
That was the pity of it.

His desk was snowed under with this disgusting cartload of
commonplace passions. I wished to know about all this and decid-
ed to assist for a time in classifying this mass of sulphurous
writings. You went about it, he explained to me, grouping them
in various types, like ties or diseases, the quite mad ones on one
side, masochists and fetichists on another, then flagellants and
the domineering sort somewhere else--and so on throughout the
lot. Pleasure pretty soon becomes hard work. There's no doubt
about our having been turned out of Eden, that's certain. Pomone
thought so too, with his sweating hands and interminable weakness
which caused him both pleasure and remorse. After a month
or two, I knew enough about him and his trade. I gave up going
to see him so often.

At the Tarapout I was still considered a reserved, respectable
and punctual performer but after a few weeks of this regular
life, misfortune descended on me once more from an unsuspected
quarter and I was forced brusquely again to give up my stage
job and take to the dirty road once more.

When I look back on them now, those days at the Tarapout were
in point of fact only a sort of crafty and unseemly hiatus.
I was always finely dressed during those four months, I will say;
sometimes a prince, twice a Roman centurion, an aviator after
that, and always well and regularly paid. I ate enough at the
Tarapout to last me for years. A capitalist's existence without
capital. Treachery! Disaster! One evening they altered our number
for I don't know what reason. The scene of our new act was
the Embankment in London. I felt a bit doubtful at once; our
little Britishers were going to sing on these false banks of the
Thames, at night, and I was to be a policeman. An entirely silent
role, I trod up and down by the river. All of a sudden, when I
had given up thinking about it, their song became louder than
life itself and inclined everything towards misfortune. And as
they sang, I could no longer think of anything but all the sad-
ness of the world and my own; damn them, their song turned my
heart sour within me. I had imagined I had digested and outlived
the worst of it! But this was the worst of all--it was a gay song,
theirs, which wasn't gay. And there they were, these girls, swaying
as they sang, trying to make it come off. My God, really I must
say it was awful; it was as if we were spreading ourselves in
unhappiness and sadness.... That's it. Roaming around in the
fog in lamentation. It quivered in their wailing song, they made
one older every minute. It seemed to trickle from the scene it-
self: in panic. Yet they went on and on, my little companions.
They did not appear to understand what an awful evil effect their
song was having on us all.... They mourned their whole life,
twirling away there, grinning, beautifully in time.... When the
thing comes to you like that, so distinctly, from such a distance,
you can't be making a mistake, you can't resist.

Unhappiness was everywhere, in spite of the comfort of the
stalls; it was on us, on the blackcloth; it was drenching the whole
world round us. They were artists, oh, yes, they were complete
artists. An utterly sordid misery surged up from their song and
dance without their wishing to prevent it or even understand it.
Only their eyes were sad. Eyes are not enough. They were singing
the defeat of life and they didn't see it. They thought it was
only love, nothing but love; they hadn't been taught the rest
of it, little dears. ... A little bit of the blues was what they
were meant to be singing! That's what they thought it was! When
you are young and don't know, you think it's all only unhappiness
in love....

　　　　　　　　　Where I go, where I look ...
　　　　　　　　　Ifs only for you ... ou ...
　　　　　　　　　Only for you ... ou ...

That's what they sang.

It's the mania of the young to think of all humanity in terms
of one body, the only one, a hallowed dream, a frenzy of love.
They would find out later, maybe, where the end of all that was,
when they were rosy no longer, when the pitiless grime of their
own foul country had enveloped them all again, all sixteen of
them, with their great horsey thighs, their little bobbing breasts.
... The sordidness already had them by the neck, the little darl-
ings; it was twined round their waists, they wouldn't escape. It
had them already by the guts, by the breath in their throats, by
every note of their shrill false voices too.

It was within. No costume, no painted scene, no lights, no smile
to deceive, to impress this thing of misery; it knows its own;
wherever they may hide, it roots them out; it merely takes its
pleasures, allowing them to sing till their turn comes, allowing
them all the absurdities of hope. Unhappiness is whetted, soothed,
excited that way.

Our real misery, the ultimate misery, entertains us thus.
So much the worse, then, for who sings songs of love! Love is
that same thing and nothing else, unhappiness again, now lying
in our teeth, villainously--and that is all. It's everywhere, brute
beast, don't wake it--even in bluff, out of bravado. It doesn't
work, it doesn't stand for it. Yet, nevertheless, my English girls
went through with this thing three times a day, with that Embank-
ment scene and accordion music. It was bound of course to turn
out very badly.

I let them carry on, but I may say I saw it coming.

First one of the little creatures fell ill. Death to little dears
who irritate Misfortune! May they die and so much the better!
By the same token one should be careful not to linger at street
corners behind an accordion--that's often where the harm is
done, where Truth will catch you. So a Polish girl came to take
the invalid's place in their little rout. The Pole coughed badly
too, between whiles. A tall, pallid, well-built girl she was. We
made friends at once. In a couple of hours I knew all about her
soul; I waited a bit longer, where her body was concerned. This
Pole's form of madness was to mutilate her nervous system with
impossible longings. Naturally she slipped straight into the English
girls' filthy little song like a knife into butter, mournfulness
and all. It began, their song, very prettily, in that guileless way
dance tunes do, and then after a while your heart sagged within
you as you listened to it, you felt so sad; and you felt that hearing
it you were going to lose all your joy in life because it really
is so true that everything comes to an end, youth and everything;
and you were doubled up as they sang the words and after the
words had gone by and the melody had drifted far away into
the distance to its home, its real and only one, a bed in earth
when all is at an end. Twice round the chorus came and by then
you almost longed for that dear land of death, for a country of
gentleness and sudden forgetfulness like a fog. Their voices were
just like that, voices heard in a fog.

Every one came in on the chorus, joining in that plaintive
burden of reproach against all those who are still wandering
about in life, waiting on the quay sides, on all the embankments
of the world, for life to have passed by at last, and all the time
mucking about, selling things, oranges and false coins and junk,
to the other phantoms; and all the police, the degenerates, the
sorrows and the yarns they spin in that endless fog through which
they grub in patience, day after day....

Tania was the name of my new Polish friend. At the moment
she was distracted, I learned, on account of a little bank clerk
of forty whom she'd known in Berlin. She wanted to go back to
Berlin and love him, whatever befell, cost what it might. There
wasn't anything she would not have done as long as she could
get back there and find him.

She chased around after theatrical agents, who might promise
her a job, up grimy winding stairs to dirty offices. The scum, they
pinched her thighs while waiting for answers to their letters which
never came. But she hardly noticed what they did with their
hands, she was so entirely taken up with her distant love. A week
of this sort of thing had not gone by before a tremendous
catastrophe occurred. She had stuffed Providence with temptations
for weeks and months, like a cannon's mouth.

An attack of flu removed her marvellous young man. We heard
the fearful news one Saturday afternoon. At once she dragged me
off, dishevelled and haggard, to try the Gare du Nord. That was
all right but at the guichet in her frenzy she clamoured to get
to Berlin in time for the funeral. It took two station masters
to stop her, to make her understand that it really was too late.
In the state she was in, it was quite impossible to leave her
alone. She was entirely wrapped up in her tragedy, of course, and
particularly wanted me to see that she was off her head. What a
gift of an opportunity! Love thwarted by poverty and distance
is like the love of a sailor; there can be no doubt about it and
it works beautifully. In the first place, when you don't get a
chance of seeing each other often, you can't quarrel and that's
a great deal to start off with. As life is nothing but a delirium
full of lies, the further away you are, the more lies you can put
into it and the happier you are; that's obvious and quite reasonable.
Truth is what's inedible.

Once we had thoroughly convinced Tania that there wasn't any
possible train for Berlin, we fell back on the telegraph office. We
wrote out a very long telegram, but when it came to sending it,
that again was difficult, as we couldn't think whom to send it
to. We knew nobody in Berlin except the dead man. There was
nothing for us to talk about after that, except about his having
died. Talking about that helped us to wander round the block
two or three times and then, as we really had to do something
to lull Tania's suffering anyway, we walked slowly up towards
Montmartre, murmuring sorrowful remarks.

When you get to the Rue Lepic, you begin to come across people
on their way up to the heights of the town, in search of amuse-
ment. They hurry along. And when they search the Sacre Coeur
they look down into the night below, which is a great dark hollow
heaped with houses at the bottom.

In the little square there, we went into the cafe which looked
to us the cheapest. Tania, by way of consolation and out of
gratitude, let me kiss her as much as I liked. She was also quite
fond of drink. On the benches round merrymakers were already
asleep, half-drunk. The clock above the little church began to
chime one hour after another and never stop. We had come to
the end of the world; that was becoming more and more obvious.
You couldn't go any further, because beyond that were the dead
people.

There, close at hand on the Place du Tertre, was where the dead
began. We had a good place to see them from. They were passing
over Dufayel's, that is to say, to the east of us.

All the same, you have to know how to see them--from inside
and almost closing your eyes--because the great draughts of
light from the electric signs make it awfully difficult to see them,
even through the clouds. I realized at once that the dead would
have taken Bebert to themselves; we even made a little sign to
each other, Bebert and I, and then, quite close to him, we signalled
to the very pale girl from Raney who had had her miscarriage at
last and was there now, all empty inside.

There were lots of old patients of mine here and there, and
women patients whom I had long since forgotten about and many
others,--the Negro on a white cloud, all by himself, who was
the fellow they had thrashed rather too thoroughly, over there,
I remembered him from Topo--and old Grappa too, that old
soldier himself from the wilds! I had thought of them from
time to time, I'd certainly thought of Lieutenant Grappa and the
flayed Negro and my Spaniard, the priest; he too had come along
with the dead that evening to pray in heaven, and there was his
gold crucifix getting in his way as he hopped from cloud to cloud.
He got caught up with his crucifix in all the dirtiest, yellow
clouds, and all the time I recognized many more of the departed,
more and more of them. ... So many that one really is ashamed
of not having had time to see them while they were living here
by one's side year after year....

You never have the time, it's a fact, except to think of yourself.
So all these blighters had turned into angels, without my knowing
anything about it! There were clouds and clouds full of angels
now, very odd-looking ones and disreputable ones in all directions.
Jaunting around, high up over the town! I looked for Molly
among them; now was my chance, my dear, my only friend Molly
--but she hadn't come with them. She probably had a little
heaven all to herself, close to the Lord God; she'd always been
so kind, my Molly. ... I was happy not to find her with all that
riff-raff--because that's what these dead men were, scamps, just
a lot of scapegrace ghosts that had been gathered together this
evening over the town. They came in particular from the cemetery
next door; more and more of them came, not decent ghosts at
all. It's a small cemetery, where the Commune rioters who were
executed are buried, and these were bloody ghosts who had their
mouths wide open, trying to yell, but couldn't.... They were
waiting, this lot, alongside the others for La Perouse, La Perouse
of the Islands, who had ordered them all to reassemble that night
on parade. ... He wasn't ready himself, it took him such a
time with that wooden leg of his which kept getting stuck the
wrong way ... he always had difficulty with it and besides he
had to find his famous eyeglass.

He wouldn't come out onto the clouds without his eyeglass
round his neck; it was a whim of his, that marvellous lorgnette
for epic deeds; the devil of a wheeze, it made you see people and
things from a long way off, always farther and farther away, and
so of course nice to look upon however close up to them you went.
Near the Moulin La Galette some Cossacks who had run away
were trying to hoist themselves out of their graves. They were
struggling frightfully but they had often tried before.... They
always fell back to the bottom of their tombs; they had been
drunk ever since 1820.

Yet suddenly the rain shifted them out too, sobered by the cold
shower, and up they shot high above the town. They spread out
across the crowds, roistering around in the darkness. ... It
looked as if the Opera most attracted the dead; its light signs
blazing away in the middle, they splashed about in them and
then went bounding off again to the other end of the sky; they
skipped about so and there were so many of them, they made you
quite dizzy. La Perouse, ready at last, wanted them to hoist him
up onto the last stroke of four o'clock; they held him up, fixed
him into the saddle. Once installed and astride, he went on
gesticulating and haranguing just the same as before. The stroke
of four nearly shook him off as he was buttoning up his tunic.
Behind La Perouse is the main thoroughfare of heaven. There's
a hideous mess-up: phantoms come twirling up from all four
corners of the sky, the dead of every human epic.... They pur-
sue and defy and charge each other, century against century.
For a long time the North is cluttered with their foul melee.
The horizon breaks away and becomes blue as the day at last
begins to creep up through the great hole they have cracked
open in the night as they take flight.

After that it becomes very difficult to find them again. You
have to know how to get outside Time.

You find them again over England, if you manage it, but in
that direction the mist is so compact and thick that it is like so
many veils wafting up, one in front of the other, from the earth
to highest heaven and for all time. With practice and with care,
you can contrive to catch sight of them again even so, but not
for long, because the wind is always blowing fresh squalls and
fog in from the open sea.

The great female who sits there, guarding the Island, is the
last of all. Her head is infinitely higher than the highest mists.
There is no other nearly living thing in the Island except her
now. Her red hair, far above everything else, still slightly gilds
the clouds, and that is all that is left of the sun.

She is trying to make herself a cup of tea, so they say.

She may just as well try, since there she'll be throughout eter-
nity. She'll never get her tea to boil because of the fog which
has become much too thick and all-pervading. She uses a ship's
hull for a teapot, the hull of the biggest and most beautiful ship,
the latest she can find in Southampton Dock, and she warms her
tea in it, oceans and oceans of tea. She stirs, she stirs it all
with an enormous oar.... That gives her something to do.

She takes no notice of anything else, sitting there forever
serious, forever busied with her tea.

The phantom hosts passed directly over her head, but she didn't
even move, she is accustomed to all these Continental ghosts
coming flying over and getting lost.... It is all over now.

With her fingers she pokes the live coals that are there under
the ashes between two forests of dead trees. That's enough for her.
She tries to get it to burn properly, everything is hers now, but
her kettle will never boil again.

There's no life left in the fire.

There's no life left in the world for anybody, except just a
little for her and it is all very nearly over now....





TANIA WOKE ME IN THE ROOM WHERE WE HAD EVENTUALLY
GONE to bed. It was ten o'clock in the morning. So as to get rid
of her, I told her that I wasn't feeling very well and would stay in
bed a while longer.

Life was beginning again. She pretended to believe me. When
she had gone downstairs, I started out myself. I had something
to do, as a matter of fact. That jaunt of the night before had
left me with an odd feeling of remorse. The thought of Robinson
came back to plague me. The fact was that I had, actually, left
the fellow to his fate--worse still, to the tender mercies of Abbe
Protiste. Which was saying a good deal. Admittedly I had heard
that everything was going on well down at Toulouse and that
actually the old Henrouille had become quite friendly towards
him. But the thing is that under certain circumstances one only
hears, doesn't one, what one wishes to hear and what suits one
best.... These vague reports proved nothing definite, really.

Disturbed and curious in my mind, I now set out for Raney in
search of more definite, precise information. To get there, you
had to go through the Rue des Batignolles, where Pomone lived.
It was on my way. As I neared his place, I was much surprised to
see Pomone in person at the corner of his street, apparently
shadowing a little man pretty close. Pomone never went out, so
it must mean that something of real importance was afoot. I also
recognized the fellow he was following--it was a customer of
his, "the Cid" he styled himself in correspondence. But we had
discovered by roundabout means that this "Cid" creature had a
job in the post office.

For years he had been badgering Pomone to find him a nicely
brought-up little lady friend: that was his dream. But the young
ladies he was introduced to were never refined enough for his
taste. They committed faux pas, so he claimed. So it never worked.
When you come to think of it, there are two great categories of
lady friend,--the "broad-minded" type and the ones who have
been well brought up in "most respectable" homes. They're the
two ways poor girls have of feeling superior, the two ways of
exciting nervous and unappeased males, the "modest violet"
type and the "modern miss."

All the "Cid's" savings, month after month, had been swallowed
up by this quest. Now he had come to the end of his resources
with Pomone and also to the end of all hope. Later I learned
that he had committed suicide that same evening in some out-of-
the-way spot. Anyway, as soon as I saw Pomone leave his house,
I knew for certain that something curious was up. So I followed
them for quite a time through this quarter, whose streets straggle
on, losing their shops one after the other and finally its colours
too, until suddenly it ends up among uncertain bistrots on the
outskirts of the toll. When you're in no great hurry, you can
easily lose yourself along those streets, drifting as one does at
once, because it's all so sad and too casual a spot. If one had any
money, one would take a taxi and escape, one gets so bored. The
people you meet are so loaded with cares that you feel embar-
rassed on their account. Behind the window curtains you are
almost convinced that the people who live there have left the gas
on. There's nothing you can do to cope with it. "Christ!" you
say--which isn't much.

Besides, there isn't even a bench to sit on, either. On all sides
everything is brown and grey. When it rains, it rains from all
sides too, into your face and from both flanks, and the street
glistens like the back of a fish with a streak of rain down the
middle. You cannot even say that it's a mess--it's more like a
prison, almost a well-kept prison, a prison that doesn't need to
be locked.

Slouching around like this, after a while I lost Pomone and
his suicide, soon after the Rue des Vinaigriers. I had arrived so
close to Garenne-Rancy that I couldn't help going and casting an
eye over the fortifications.

Seen from far off, Garenne-Rancy is attractive enough, there's
no denying it, because of the trees in the big cemetery. It wouldn't
take much for you to make a mistake and imagine it was the Bois
de Boulogne.

If you really want news of some one, why you've just got to
go and ask somebody who knows. After all, I told myself then,
I haven't much to lose by paying the Henrouilles a little visit.
They must know what's happening down at Toulouse. And that is
where I was committing a great imprudence. One's too trusting.
You don't realize how far you have gone, yet you're there already,
well into the regions of the night. Something has at once gone
very wrong. Any little thing does it, and anyway, one ought not
to attempt to see certain people again, especially not that sort.
You never get yourself clear again after that.

Eventually, by walking round and round in circles, I found
myself as if by habit only a few steps away from the Henrouilles'
maisonette. I couldn't get over seeing it there in the same place.
It began to rain. No one in the street except me, who didn't dare
go any nearer. In fact, I was just going to turn back and let
the matter drop, when the door of the house opened, a little,
just enough for the younger Henrouille woman to beckon me
across. Really she missed nothing. She had seen me waiting in
distress on the pavement opposite. I had no wish at all, even so,
to go over, but she was determined I should. She called me by
name.

"Oh, Doctor--come quickly!"

She called me across like that, imperatively. I was afraid of
being seen. So I hurried up onto her doorstep, and met the little
corridor with the stove in it again, and once more faced the
decoration inside that house. It gave me a very odd feeling of
uneasiness, all the same. Whereupon she began to tell me that her
husband hadn't been at all well for two months now and that,
as a matter of fact, he was going from bad to worse.

At once, of course, I felt distrustful.

"And what about Robinson?" I asked hurriedly.

At first she eluded my question. Finally she faced it. "They're
getting along all right, both of them.... Their business at
Toulouse is going very satisfactorily... she did in the end
answer, but rapidly, just like that. And at once she started off
again on the subject of her husband's illness. She wanted me to
go and look after him right away, without losing another moment.
I was so kind ... I knew her husband so well ... And so on
and so on ... He wouldn't trust any one but me ... He had
refused to see any other doctor ... They had not known my
address ... Gabble, in fact.

Personally I had good reasons to fear that this illness of
her husband's might have come about in some very curious way.
I knew a bit too much about the good lady herself and the habits
of the house. Yet some devilish curiosity made me go up to his
room.

He was lying in the same bed where I had attended to Robinson,
following his accident, some months before.

A few months will change a room--even if you haven't moved
anything in it. However old and worn objects may be, they will
still find, God knows how, some way of aging. Around us everything
had changed. Not the furniture itself, of course, but things
themselves, deep down. Things are different when you come across
them again; they seem to have increased power to enter one's
soul more sadly, deeper still, more softly than before, melting
into that sort of death that is gently accumulating inside one,
day by day, in underhand fashion, making you each day defend
yourself a little less than you did the previous day. Occasionally
you see life wilting, wrinkling, within you--and things and beings
with it which, when you left them, were ordinary or important
or dangerous in their day. The fear of drawing to a close
has marked all that with wrinkles, while one trotted around town
after one's pleasure or one's daily bread.

Soon there will only be harmless, pitiful, disarmed things and
people round one's past--merely mistakes that have lapsed into
silence.

The woman left us alone with her husband. He was in a fine
way. He hadn't much circulation left. It was his heart that was
the matter.

I had really the devil's own luck for coming up against this
sort of case. I listened to his heartbeats, so as to do something
in the matter, to produce the one or two expected gestures. His
heart ran on, his sick heart behind his ribs, ah, yes, you could
hear it running on, leaping after life--but it hopped in vain,
it wouldn't ever catch up with life. The game was through. Soon
it would lurch on and over, falling headlong into rottenness, all
juicy and red and pulp, like a crushed pomegranate. That's how
his frail old heart would look, against the marble, slit open by
a knife at the autopsy in a few days' time. For it would all end
in a fine magistrate's post-mortem. I foresaw as much, since every
one in the neighbourhood would have a lot of spicy comments to
make about this demise, which wouldn't be considered at all ordi-
nary after that other affair.

They were lying in wait for his wife in the neighbourhood,
with all the collected gossip that was still in circulation about
the previous incident. That would come a bit later. For the mo-
ment, old Henrouille did not know what to do or how to die. He
seemed already a little outside life, but still he couldn't escape
his lungs. He chased away breath, and breath came back to him.
He would have liked to let himself slip, but he had to go on living
just the same, till the end. It was a really appalling job, and
it was breaking him.

"I can't feel my feet any more," he groaned. "I'm cold up to
my knees." He tried to touch his feet; he couldn't.

He couldn't drink, either. It was almost all over. I gave him a
brew which his wife had prepared for him and, as I did so, won-
dered what she mightn't have put in it. It didn't smell too good,
but you can't go by smell--valerian itself has a very nasty odour.
And besides, if you were gasping for breath as old Henrouille
was gasping, it didn't matter much whether there was anything
slightly odd about the stuff, or not. Yet he was struggling tre-
mendously, working frightfully hard with all that was left of
the muscles under his skin to manage to suffer on and pant still
more. He was battling as much against life as against death. It
would be right to be allowed to burst at moments like that. When
Nature takes it into its head not to give another damn, really
there seem to be no limits. On the other side of the door that
woman was listening to what I said, attending to him, but I knew
all about her. Softly I went across to catch her at it. "Tweet,
tweet!" I said to her. She wasn't in the least annoyed but came
and whispered into my ear.

"What you ought to do," she murmured, "is to get him to remove
his plate. It must get in the way of his breathing." Well,
yes, I was perfectly willing for him to remove his plate.

"But why not tell him so yourself?" I advised. It was a delicate
thing to be asked to do, in the state he was in.

"No, no. It would be much better if you did!" she insisted. "It
oughtn't to come from me; he wouldn't like it if I knew ..."

"Oh"--I was greatly surprised--"why?"

"Thirty years he's worn one and he's never mentioned it to
me...."

"Couldn't one let him keep it then?" I suggested. "Seeing that
he's so used to breathing with it...."

"Oh, no! I shouldn't forgive myself," she answered with a certain
particular warmth in her voice.

I went back then quietly into the room. The husband heard
me come back near him. He was pleased to have me there.
Between gasps he still spoke to me, even trying to say something
nice to me. He asked after my affairs and if I had found a new
practice. "Yes, oh, yes," I answered to all these questions. It
would have taken too long and been too complicated to give him
details. This wasn't the moment. Hidden by the door, his wife
made signs to me to go on and ask him to remove his plate. So
I leant over next to his ear and asked the man in a low voice to
take it out. I dropped a brick. "I've thrown it down the lavatory,"
he said, with eyes more frightened than ever. Coquettish of him,
in fact. And after that he rattled a good bit.

A man's an artist with whatever come handy. He, throughout
his life, had concerned himself asthetically about a dental
plate.

The moment had come for him to bare his heart. I should have
liked him now to give me his views on what had happened about
his mother. But he couldn't any longer. He was retreating. He
began to dribble very badly. This was the end. Impossible for
him now to get a word out. I wiped his mouth for him and went
downstairs. His wife below in the corridor wasn't at all pleased;
she almost went for me about that plate, as if it had been my
fault.

"It was a gold plate, Doctor! I know. I know how much he
paid for it. You can't get them anything like as good as that
now... Quite a song and dance about it. "All right then," I
said. "I'm perfectly ready to go on up and try asking him again,"
I was so annoyed. But only if she'd come with me.

That time her husband hardly recognized us. Just a bit he did.
His rattling was a little less when we were close by him, as if he
wished to hear everything that we were saying to each other, his
wife and I....

I didn't go to the funeral. There wasn't any inquest, as I had
rather dreaded there would be. The whole thing passed off quietly.
But that did not prevent our falling out permanently,--Widow
Henrouille and I, on account of the old man's dental plate.





THE YOUNG ARE ALWAYS IN SUCH A HURRY TO GO OFF AND MAKE
love, they're so hasty in seizing for their amusement on everything
that's given to them to believe, that where sensation's concerned
they never think twice. Rather like the people one sees travelling
who gulp down everything that is put before them at the station
buffet, while the whistle's going to blow. As long as you let the
young have two or three odd lines that'll do to get a conversation
shaping well for bed, that's all they want, they're as happy as
can be. Youth is very easily pleased, physical joys are its own for
the asking, of course.

The whole of young life lolls on a lovely beach down by the sea,
where women at last appear free, where they are so beautiful
that they no longer depend on the lies of our illusions.

But then, to be sure, when winter's come, one hates to come
back, to tell oneself that that's all over, to admit it inwardly.
You'd like to stay on in spite of everything, aged and chilled;
you go on hoping. That's understandable. One's unworthy, it's
no good blaming any one for it. Happiness and the pleasures of
love before all else. That's what I say. And then too, when you
begin to hide from people it's a sign that you are frightened of
having a good time in their company. That's a malady in itself.
It would be good to know why it is that one is never quite cured
of loneliness. Another chap that I met during the war, in hospital,
a corporal, once said something to me about such feelings. Pity
I never saw the lad again. "The earth's dead," he instructed me,
"and we're only worms on its ruddy great carcass, eating its
entrails all the time, only eating its poisons.... There's nothing
you can do with us. We're rotten from birth. That's how it is."

Though it didn't stop this philosopher having to be hurried off
one evening to the bastions--which proves that at least he'd do
to face a firing squad. There were two cops came to fetch him,
I remember, one large, the other small. An anarchist was what
they said of him at the court-martial.

Years later, when you come to remember them, you'd very
much like to bring back the words that certain people spoke and
the people themselves, to ask them what it was they meant to
say. But they're gone. One wasn't wise enough to get what they
said. One would so like to know whether they have not changed
their minds since then perhaps. ... But it's altogether too late.
All that's over. Nobody knows anything about them now. So you
have got to go on your way alone through the night. You've
lost your real companions. You didn't even ask them the question,
the true, great question, when there was time. When you were
along with them, you didn't understand. Man overboard. One's
always behindhand, that's what it is. All of which are vain
regrets that won't butter your bread for you.

In the end, thank heaven, anyway, Father Protiste came and
looked me up one fine morning to share with me the bit we'd
made on the business of old Ma Henrouille's vault. I had given
up counting on the cure. It was just as if he'd lighted down from
heaven. One thousand five hundred francs each! At the same time
too he brought good news of Robinson. His eyes were apparently
very much better. The lid wounds had stopped suppurating now.
And they all of them down there wanted me to go down and
see them. After all, I had promised I would. Protiste himself
urged me to.

From what he told me, furthermore, I gathered that Robinson
was shortly going to marry the daughter of the woman who sold
candles for the church next door to the vault, which was the
church the old lady's mummies belonged to. The wedding and
everything had been arranged.

Inevitably all that led us to talk about the death of M. Hen-
rouille, but we didn't keep on about it, and the conversation
came back more pleasantly to Robinson's future and to the town
of Toulouse itself, which I didn't know at all and which Grappa
had talked to me about in the old days, and then to the sort of
little business the two of them were running down there, Robin-
son and the old lady, and to the girl he was going to marry. In
fact, we chatted about everything and on all topics a little....
One thousand five hundred francs! They were making me feel
indulgent, not to say optimistic. I considered all the suggestions
he made about Robinson eminently wise, sensible, judicious and
most apposite in the circumstances. ... It would all be all right.
At least, so I thought. And we began to discuss ages, the cure
and I. Both of us were well past the thirties. The time when we
had been in our thirties was slipping way back into the past--
cruel, meagrely regretted shores. It wasn't even worth while turn-
ing to look back on those shores. We hadn't missed much by
growing old. "After all, one would have to be a very poor creature,"
I concluded, "to regret this or that particular year more than the
rest. We can go right ahead and grow old with a will, my dear
Cure. Was yesterday such fun? And the year before that? What
did you think about it? What is there to regret? I ask you ...
Youth? We never had any ...

"Really the poor get younger inside as they go on, rather than
otherwise, and towards the end, as long as they have tried to rid
themselves on the way of all the lies and timidity and unworthy
eagerness to obey which they were given at birth, actually they're
less unpleasant than when they started. The rest of what exists on
earth is not for them! It's no concern of theirs. Their job, their
only job, is to overcome that feeling of obedience, to spew it out.
If they can manage that before they're altogether dead, then they
can boast of not having lived in vain."

Clearly I was in excellent form. Those fifteen hundred francs
had braced me up like hell. I went on: "Youth consists, my dear
Cure, real youth consists in loving the whole world without dis-
tinction; that is the only thing that's young and new. And can
you say that you know many young people who are sound enough
to do that? I don't know any, personally. I see only scabrous old
stupidities breaking out on every side in bodies that are more or
less recent, and the more such sordidness breaks out afresh, the
more the young are teased by it and the more they swear they're
colossally young! But that's not true, it's all my bleeding eye.
... They're only young in the way furuncles are young, because
of the pus that hurts them inside and swells them up."

It annoyed Protiste to have me talk to him like this. ... So
as not to go on irritating him any longer, I changed the conver-
sation. Especially as he had just been very nice to me, a downright
windfall. ... Its awfully difficult to avoid coming back on to
some subject which is as much on your mind as that subject was
on mine. The whole business of your life overwhelms you when
you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to
daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they
hate that. To be alone trains one for death. "One ought not to
die"--I went on and told him--"merely as a dog dies: one ought
to take minute after minute to die, and every minute should
be something new all the time, bordered with all the agony that
would be needed to make you forget a thousand times over all
the joy you might have had in a thousand years of lechery before
that day.... Happiness on earth would consist of dying with
pleasure, in the midst of pleasure.... The rest amounts to
nothing at all, it's a fear one daren't confess to, it's just
so much Art."

Protiste, hearing me discoursing after this fashion, came to the
conclusion that I must surely have fallen ill again. Maybe he
was quite right and maybe I really was entirely wrong about
everything. Living on my own like that, looking for some retri-
bution to fit the selfishness of the world, I had been inflaming
my brain, rushing into a vacuum in search of that retribution.
You make whoopee any way you can, when you don't often get
a chance of going out because there isn't much money, and can
even less often manage to get outside yourself and have a woman.
I admit it was a little wrong of me to go on at Protiste with
my ideas, which went against his religious convictions--but at
the same time it must be owned that there was a nasty little
air of superiority about his whole person which must have got
on many people's nerves. According to his view of things, all we
humans were in a sort of antechamber to eternity, waiting with
our numbers. His, of course, was an exceptionally good number
for Paradise. Anything else left him quite cold.

Convictions of that sort are intolerable. On the other hand,
when he offered, that same evening, to advance me the sum needed
for my trip to Toulouse, I stopped badgering him and contradict-
ing him. My anxiety not to have to meet Tania and her phantom
at the Tarapout again made me accept his suggestion without
further argument. A week or two of a comfortable existence at
any rate, said I to myself. The devil has every trump to tempt you
with. Never will one get to know them all. Even if one lived long
enough, one would never know just where to turn to start on a
new happiness. One would have left aborted happinesses about
everywhere; there they'd be stinking in all the corners of the
earth and one wouldn't be able to breathe even. The ones that
are in museums, real abortions, make some people feel ill and
likely to be sick, just to look at them. And so too are our blood-
some little attempts to be happy enough to make one ill a good
while before actually dying altogether, they are so mangled and
bad.

We would wither away entirely if we didn't forget about them.
Not counting the trouble we've taken to get to where we now are,
to lend excitement to our hopes, our rubbishy joys, our thrills,
our lies. ... All over, bar the shouting! Then what about our
money? And all our little tricks with it too, and our eternities
galore? And the things we make each other swear, and do swear
to ourselves, and believe that the other person has never said
before, or promised that before it filled our own mouths and
hearts, and the fragrance and the fondling, and all the mimicry,
--everything in fact that is meant in the end to conceal all that
from us as much as possible, so as to avoid talking about it any
more, for fear and shame of its all coming back to us like vomit?
So it's not tenacity we lack; no, it's rather that we're not on
the right road that leads to a tranquil death.

To go to Toulouse was again a foolish thing to do. Thinking
it over, I realized as much. But by dint of following after Robin-
son in his adventures like this, I had developed a taste for
this shadiness racket. Even back in New York that time, when I
wasn't sleeping well, I had begun worrying whether I couldn't
go along a bit further with Robinson, and further yet. You delve
deeper into the night at first and start to panic, but you want
to know all the same, and after that you don't come out of the
depths of the darkness. But there are too many things to under-
stand at one fell swoop. Life's much too short. You don't want
to do any one an injustice. You have your scruples, you don't
want to jump to conclusions, and above all you are afraid of
having to die before you have done hesitating, because then you
would have come into the world for no purpose whatsoever. And
that really would be hell.

You've got to hurry, you mustn't spoil death for yourself. Or
waste the illness, the wretchedness which scatters away your hours
and days, the sleeplessness which makes a grey smudge of whole
weeks and years, and the cancer which may already be mounting
up inside you from behind, meticulous and gory.

One will never have the time, one tells oneself! Not counting
war, which too is always ready to rise up from the caverns im-
prisoning the poor. Are enough poor people murdered? One can't
really say. ... It's a moot point. Perhaps the thing would be
to slit the throats of all those who don't catch on, d' you think?
And let more of them, more of the poor, be born--and so on
until some lot came along who understood the joke, the whole of
the joke. ... As you go on mowing a lawn until the grass is really
good and lush.

When I got off at Toulouse, I found myself outside the station,
not knowing quite what to do. Half a pint at the station buffet
and there I was, strolling off down the streets. Unknown towns
are fun. That's when and where it's possible to imagine that
everybody you meet is nice. They're dreamy moments. You can
take advantage of your dreaming to go and waste a bit of time
in the public gardens. Nevertheless, after a certain age, unless
you've the very best family reasons for being there, you appear,
like Parapine, to be following little girls in a park, if you're not
very careful. The confectioner's just outside the entrance is better;
that lovely shop on the corner all twiddly-decorated like a music
hall with a lot of little painted birds dotted about on big, bevelled
mirrors. There you discover yourself, eating hundreds of buns,
reflectively. A refuge for seraphim. The young ladies who serve
there surreptitiously babble about their heart affairs, as follows:

"So I told him he could come and take me out Sunday....My aunt,
who heard me, made an awful fuss about it because of Father...

"But hasn't your father married again?"

"What has his getting married again got to do with it? Surely
he's got a perfect right to know whom his daughter's going out
with, even so?"

The other young serving lady thought so too, absolutely. Hence
arose an enthralled discussion by the whole lot of them. In vain
did I in my corner, so as not to disturb them, stuff myself, never
interrupting once, with eclairs and jam tarts, in the hope that
they would the sooner manage to resolve these delicate problems
of family interference--they stayed up in the air. Nothing came
of it. Their speculative impotence reduced them to hating in an
entirely muddled way. They choked with illogicality, vanity and
ignorance, these good young women, drooling their pretty little
insults among themselves.

However, I couldn't help being fascinated by their labouring
futility. I attacked the rum babas. I didn't keep count of the rum
babas I ate. Nor did they. I really did hope not to have to leave
before they had come to some conclusion.... But they were deaf
with excitement and soon dumb too, as they stood there next
to me.

Tart and contorted with malice, they waited pent in their lair
behind the cake counter, each of them undefeated, tight-lipped
and pinched, ruminating how to pay the other girl back even
more spikily and swiftly next time, how to throw up any livid,
hurtful idiocies she might happen to know about her little pal.
A next time which wouldn't take long to come; she'd see to it
that it did.... Tag-ends of arguments aimed at nothing at all.
In the end I sat down so that they should the better bewilder
me with their ceaseless din of words, their attempts at thought
like a seashore of small, passionate, unending waves never
straightening themselves out.

One listens, waits, hopes, here and over there, in trains and
cafes, on the street, in the drawing-room, at the concierge's; one
listens and waits for malice to put itself on an organized footing,
as in war time, but it merely shudders and shakes; it never gets
going, ever, either with these poor young ladies or with any
one else. No one comes to our aid. A vast confused muttering,
monotonous and grey, hangs over life, a foully discouraging
mirage. Two ladies came into the shop and their entry broke the
greasy charm of the ineffectual conversation spread between the
young women and myself. The pressing attention of the whole
staff was immediately focussed on these two ladies. Every one
dashed to do their bidding and anticipate their slightest wish.
They chose, here and there, and pecked at various pastries and
petits fours to take away. When they came to pay, both politely
squirmed and each insisted on offering the other little tidbits
to eat then and there.

One of them prettily and fussily refused, explaining at great
length and in confidence to the other ladies, who were tremend-
ously interested, that her doctor had forbidden her all saccha-
rines from now on, that he was a really marvellous man, her
doctor, and that he had already effected the most wonderful cures
in cases of constipation both here in Toulouse and elsewhere, and
that, among others, he was at present curing her of an occlusion
she had suffered from for over ten years, thanks to an altogether
special treatment of his own, a marvellous method known to no
other doctor in the world. The other ladies weren't going to be
so easily beaten in this particular matter of constipation. They
suffered from constipation worse than anybody. They vied with
each other, demanding proofs. Thus doubted, our sufferer gave
it them in fullest detail; she discoursed on the tearing pains she
experienced now as a happy result of the treatment in question,
adding that it was a veritable firework display when she went
to the lavatory.... There was no gainsaying her superior claims.
Assuaged in this way, these voluble dames left the patisserie,
Petits Oiseaux, being escorted over the threshold by a battery
of the sweetest smiles in the place.

The public garden opposite struck me as ideal for a few mo-
ments' rest and recuperation; I waited there just long enough
to get ready again before setting out to look for my friend
Robinson.

Provincial park benches are almost always empty on weekday
mornings, by their clumps of cannas and daisies. Close to the
rockery, on the strictly captive waters of a pond, a little zinc
boat, floating cinders encircling it, was moored to the shore by
a sodden rope. This skiff put out to sea on Sundays, so it said
on the notice board, and the price of "once round the lake" was
written up too: Two francs.

How many years? And young men? How many phantoms?

In every corner of a public garden you find, lying forgotten,
any number of tombstones to dreams like that; bosky nooks
echoing lovers' vows and handkerchiefs full of everything on
earth. All quite absurd.

All the same, no more day dreaming! On your way, said I to
myself; you've got to find Robinson and that church of his,
Saint Eponime, and the vault in which he and the old lady have
mummies on show. That's what I had come for; I might as well
get going....

So in a cab we started to thread our way at an odd little trot,
delving among the shadowy streets of that old town, with the sun-
light caught up there between the roofs. A great clatter of wheels
we were making behind that hoofy horse over bridges and gutters.
It's a long time now since these towns in the South were burnt
down. They've never been so old as they are now. Wars no longer
pass their way.

We reached Saint Eponime's church as it was striking noon.
The vault was a little farther on, under a mound surmounted by
a cross. They showed me where it was, right in the middle of a
little dried-up garden. You went down into this crypt through a
sort of barricaded hole. From some distance off I saw the crypt
attendant, a young girl. I asked her right away for news of
Robinson. She was at that moment locking the door. The young
girl gave me a charming, friendly smile in answer to my question
and at once told me news of Robinson, good news.

In the noonday sun there in that place everything about us went
pink and the worn stonework of the church rose up to heaven,
ready too with the rest to dissolve in air.

About twenty years old Robinson's little friend must have been,
with legs straight and solid, a quite enchanting little bosom, a
small, well-shaped, neat head on top of that, eyes a little too
alert and dark perhaps for my taste. Not the dreamer type at all.
It was she who wrote Robinson's letters for him, the ones I got.
She walked ahead of me to the crypt, neatly stepping, trim of
foot and ankle. Short, hard hands, firm-holding hands, the hands
of a capable worker. A neat, swift turn of the key in the lock. The
heat danced round us, shimmering above the flags. We talked about
various things and then, once the door was opened again, she decided
anyway to show me the vault, although it was lunch time.

I began to feel rather more gay again now. We struck into the
growing cool, she ahead with the lantern. It felt very good. I made
as if to stumble over a step in the ladder so as to steady myself by
catching hold of her arm; that went quite well, we laughed, and on
reaching the beaten earth floor below, I kissed her a little on the
neck. She protested at first, but not too much.

After a moment of friendliness, I slithered up against her body.
It was fine with the lantern on the ground, because you could
watch at the same time the shifting reliefs of the light on her
legs. Ah! Nothing must be missed of moments like that! One's
cock-eyed with excitement. It's worth it every time. What a
fillip, what sudden good humour overtakes you! Conversation
began again on a new note of understanding and easiness. We
were friends. We had just economized ten long years.

"Do you get a lot of people coming to see the crypt?" I asked,
short of breath and tactlessly. But I switched off that at once:
"Your mother supplies candles for the church next door, doesn't
she? Father Protiste also mentioned her."

"I only take Madame Henrouille's place over the lunch hour,"
she replied. "In the afternoon I work in a dress shop. In Theatre
Street. Did you come past the theatre on your way here?"

Once again she put my mind at rest with regard to Robinson;
he was ever so much better; even the eye specialist had thought
he would soon see enough to be able to go out alone. He'd had a
shot at it yesterday. It all augured excellently well. Old Mother
Henrouille too was thoroughly pleased with the vault arrangement.
She was doing good business and saving money. There was only one
drawback: in the house where they lived, bugs prevented them all
from getting any sleep, especially on stormy nights. So they burned
sulphur in the house. It seems that Robinson often spoke of me
and, what is more, said nice things about me. One thing led to
another and soon we were talking about their engagement and
how it had come about.

Actually with all this talk, I hadn't yet asked her her name.
Madelon her name was. She had been born during the war. After
all their intention of getting married suited me very well. Mad-
elon was an easy name to remember. Presumably she knew what
she was about, marrying Robinson. ... Of course, however much
better he might get, he'd always be an invalid. . . . She also be-
lieved that it was only his eyes that were wrong. . . . But he
had the nerves of a sick man, and a sick man's outlook on life
and everything else. I was almost on the point of telling her,
of putting her on her guard. . . . Conversations about marriage
have always had me guessing; I've never known how to make
them go right or what to say.

By way of changing the subject, I took a sudden and keen
interest in the things in the crypt; since I'd come a very long
way to see the crypt, now was the time to take notice of it.
She with her little lantern, Madelon and I, we then brought
the corpses out of the shadows, out of the wall, one by one. It
must have given tourists something to think about, this place!
Stuck up against the wall, as if sentenced to be shot, the long
since dead. . . . They were no longer made of skin exactly, or
bone, nor wearing clothes. There was just a bit of each of these
about them, that's all. In a very awful state, and full of holes
everywhere. Time, which had been after their hides for centuries,
still hadn't given them up. ... It tore away little bits of their
faces here and there, even now. It widened the holes in them
and still found long strips of skin which Death, after their gristle,
had forgotten. Their stomachs had been entirely emptied out,
but that gave them a sort of little cradle of shade in place of a
navel.

Madelon explained to me that these dead had waited for more
than five hundred years in a quicklime pit before they reached
their present state. You couldn't have called them dead bodies.
They had been dead bodies long ago. They had come, very quietly,
to the borderlands of dust.

There were twenty-six of them in this crypt in all, large and
small, each one wanting nothing better than to enter into Eternity.

They weren't being allowed in yet. There were women with
bonnets perched on the tops of their skulls, a hunchback, a giant,
and even a baby, he quite finished too, with a little sort of lace
bib, if you please, round his weeny, dessicated neck, and a tagend
of layette.

A lot of money Ma Henrouille made out of these centuries-old
rakings. When I think that I had known her as near as anything
to these ghostly creatures ... So we slowly passed them all back
in review, Madelon and I. One by one their so-called heads stood
out in silence in the sharp light of the lamp. It's not exactly the
darkness of night that they have in those sockets, it's almost a
look, but it's much softer, like the look of people who know and
understand. What one might object to is more their smell of dust,
which catches you at the end of the nose.

Old Mrs. Henrouille never missed a single visit with the tour-
ists. She made the dead work like a circus. They brought her
in a hundred francs a day at the height of the good season.
"They don't look unhappy, do you think?" Madelon asked
me. It was part of the ritual, that remark.

Death meant nothing to this little charmer. She was born in the
war time, when death was cheap. But I knew well how people
die. I've learnt that. It hurts like hell. You can tell tourists that
these dead men are happy. They have nothing they can say to
that. Ma Henrouille used even to tap them on the stomach when
they had parchment enough left on them, and it would go "boom"
dully. But that is no proof either that all's well.

Then in the end Madelon and I talked again about our own
affairs. It was apparently really true that Robinson was better.
That's all I wanted to know. She seemed genuinely keen on this
idea of marriage, the little dear. She must be awfully bored stuck
down in Toulouse. It wasn't often that one met a boy who had
travelled around as much as Robinson had. There were a lot of
interesting things he could tell of. Some were true and some
weren't so true, either. Anyhow, he had already told them all
about America and the Tropics. So what could be nicer?

I too had been to America and seen the Tropics. I knew a thing
or two myself. I decided I'd tell them a few too. Why, it was just
because we had done a bit of travelling about together, Robinson
and I, that we had become friends. The lamp went out. We lit
it ten times over while we sized up the future with the past. She
kept her breasts from me, because they were much too sensitive.
Nevertheless, as Ma Henrouille would be coming back from
lunch any moment now, we had to go out into the daylight again,
up the sharp, ricketty stairs which were as bad as a stepladder.
I noticed that.





THE LITTLE STAIRCASE WAS SO FLIMSY AND TREACHEROUS THAT
Robinson did not often go down into the crypt where the mummies
were. As a matter of fact, he usually stayed in front of the
door, exchanging pleasantries with the tourists, and also getting
accustomed to letting a little fresh light filter in places through
his eyelashes.

Meanwhile old Ma Henrouille kept things going in the depths
below. She really toiled like a nigger over these mummies. The
visiting tourists she regaled with a little speech about these
parchment-clad corpses of hers.

"There is nothing offensive about them, ladies and gentlemen;
they've been preserved in quicklime, just as you see them now,
for over five centuries. Ours is a unique collection. . . . The flesh
has clearly entirely disappeared: only their skin remains, and that
has turned much darker in colour. . . . They are naked, but not
indecent. ... You will observe that a baby child was buried along
with his mother. . . . His little corpse is wonderfully preserved.
. . . And this strapping fellow still retains his shirt, which has
some lace left on it, even now. None of his teeth are missing.
. . . You will notice? She rapped each one on the chest by
way of bringing her peroration to a close, and it sounded like
a drum--"Look, ladies; look, gentlemen; this one has only one
eye left . . . dried up, you see . . . and so's his tongue--quite
leathery, like the rest of him." She tugged at it. "He's putting
out his tongue but that doesn't make him at all repulsive. . . .
You may give what you please, ladies and gentlemen, on your
way out, but the usual thing is two francs a head, children half
price. ... You may touch them before you leave . . . And see
for yourselves . . . But do not, I beg you, handle them too
roughly . . . They're extremely fragile. . . ."

As soon as she arrived down here, old Ma Henrouille had thought
of raising her prices: it was a point that had to be referred
to the Bishop to decide. But there was a certain amount of dif-
ficulty in this, because the vicar of Saint Eponime wanted one
third of the takings to accrue to him personally, and also because
Robinson was continually complaining as he said she didn't give
him a large enough share of the receipts.

"I've been done," he concluded, "properly done. . . . And it's
not the first time, either. ... I really have the most bloody awful
luck! And it's a paying show, you know, this crypt of the old
girl's. You can take it from me she makes a damned good thing
out of it, the old hag."

"But you didn't put up any of the cash, man!" I objected, to
calm him down a bit and make him see reason. "And you're well
fed: you're decently looked after. . . ."

But Robinson was as obstinate as a mule--a real case of perse-
cution mania, that's what was the matter with him. He refused
to understand; he would not be resigned.

"When all's said and done, you're pretty well out of a damned
ugly bit of business, if you ask me! You can't complain. You
were heading dead straight for Cayenne, if we hadn't switched
the points. . . . And here you are grumbling! Quite apart from
having found little Madelon, who's so good to you and has such
a soft spot for you . . . Although you're ill and all . . . So
what have you got to complain about? Especially now that your
eyes are so much better."

"One would say you thought I didn't know damn well what
I've got to complain about, wouldn't one?" That's the way he
answered me. "But I just feel I've got to complain. . . . That's
how it is . . . It's all I have left . . . Listen to me, will you?
It's the only thing they'll let me do ... No one need listen if
you don't want . . ."

And there it was; as soon as we were alone together, he never
stopped bewailing everything. I'd come to the point when I
dreaded these confidential moments of his. I watched those eyes
which blinked as I looked at them and still oozed a bit in the
sun, and I came to the conclusion that really he wasn't a very
attractive person, Robinson. There are some animals so made that
it isn't any good their being simple and unfortunate and all;
one's aware of it, but one just can't bear them all the same.
They've something lacking.

"You could have pegged out in a cell ..." I started off again,
wanting to get him to think it over a bit more.

"But I've been to prison, I tell you . . . it's no worse than
this . . . you're on quite the wrong track."

He had never told me that about having been in prison. It
must have happened before we met, before the war. He stressed
the point, and ended up, "There's only one kind of liberty, let
me tell you, only one: and that's first of all to have your eye-
sight, and secondly to have your pockets full of dough--the
rest's all hooey!"

"Well, what are you trying to get at, then, in the end?" I
asked him. When you made him have to take a decision like
that, forced him to declare himself and really speak his mind,
he went all to pieces. Yet it was just what it would have been
interesting to know.

While Madelon was away, during the day, at her workroom
and old Ma Henrouille was showing her bits and pieces to
people, we two went to a cafe under the trees. This cafe under
the trees was a spot Robinson liked very much. Probably because
of the noise the birds made overhead. What masses of them there
were! Especially about five o'clock, when they were returning to
their nests, thrilled at its being summer. They settled down onto
the square then, like a thunder-storm. It was even said about
these birds that there was a hairdresser whose shop was close by
the garden, who'd gone mad, merely through hearing them all
twittering away together for years. Certainly you could not hear
yourself speak. But it was nice all the same, Robinson thought.
"If only she'd give me a regular four sous per visitor, I
wouldn't say . . ."

Once in every fifteen minutes or so he harked back to this worry
of his. Between whiles though, the memory of days gone by
seemed to come back to him, and anecdotes too, anecdotes about
the Porduriere Company in Africa, among others which, come
to think of it, we'd both of us known, and some of them hair-
raising stories which he had never yet told me. Not dared to,
perhaps. He was a pretty reserved, even secretive, chap at bottom.
As regards the past, it was chiefly Molly I remembered clearly,
when I was feeling good, like the echo of an hour that has struck
far in the distance; whenever I thought of anything that was nice,
at once I thought of her.

In the end, when selfishness loosens some of its hold on one,
when the time has come to be through with all that, the only
memory one has kept in one's heart is that of women who really
did love men a little, not just one man, even if it was you, but
all men.

When we came back from the cafe in the evening, we had done
nothing, like retired non-commissioned officers on half pay.
During the season there were endless streams of tourists. They
hung about in the crypt and Mother Henrouille contrived to
make them laugh. The vicar kept an eye cocked at these goings-on,
but as he was nabbing more than his share, he lay low; besides,
smutty stories were a bit beyond him. A fine sight, and worth
hearing, was Ma Henrouille, surrounded by these cadavers of
hers. She'd gaze right into their faces for you--she wasn't afraid
of death, and yet so wrinkled, so puckered herself that she was
like one of them--sidling up with her lantern to blather away
right in their apologies for faces.

When we got back to the house and had collected for dinner,
we would go on arguing, about the food, and then Ma Henrouille
used to call me her "little Doctor Jackal" because of the differ-
ences of opinion there'd been between us at Raney. But only in a
facetious way, of course. Madelon bustled about in the kitchen.
These premises we lived in got only a very feeble light, they were
an annex to the sacristy, and extremely narrow, cluttered with
beams and dust-filled corners. "All the same," the old lady used
to point out, "although, as you might say, it's always nighttime
in this place, you can at least always find your way to your bed,
your mouth and your pocket--and that's really all that matters."
She hadn't mourned long, after the death of her son. "He always
was delicate," she told me confidentially one evening, "and
here am I, seventy-six years old, and I never in my life complained
of being ill. ... He was always complaining and saying he wasn't
well; it was part of his character, just like that Robinson of yours,
to give you an example. . . . For instance, that's a difficult little
staircase down into the vault, isn't it? You know it, don't you? . . .
I find it tiring, I admit, but there are days when it brings me in
two francs for each step. ... I worked it out. . . . Well, if that's
what I was getting, I'd climb right up to the sky if you suggested
it. . . ."

Madelon used to put a lot of spices into our food and plenty
of tomato. It was grand. And light red wine too. Even Robinson
had taken to drinking wine after living in the South. Robinson
had already told me everything that had happened since he arrived
down here. I no longer listened to him. To tell the truth,
he disappointed and rather disgusted me. "You're respectable
middle class," I came to the conclusion (for at that time that, to
my mind, was the most insulting thing you could say to any one).

"You really have no thought for anything beyond money . . .
by the time you get your eyesight back, you'll have become nastier
than the rest of them. . . ."

Swearing at him didn't put him out in the least. You'd have
said, on the contrary, that it rather pulled him together. He knew
it was true, anyway. The young man's quite out, I felt; there's no
use bothering any more about him. There's no doubt about it. A
young woman with a certain amount of guts and a certain amount
of vice in her system will transform a man for you so completely
that you won't know the result. . . . Here's Robinson, I reflected,
whom I once took for an adventurous sort of bloke, and he's
really only a poor fish, cuckold or no, blind or not. ... So there
it was.

On top of which the old Henrouille had at once contaminated
him with her passion for saving money, and Madelon had too,
with her desire for marriage. That just about covered everything.
He was pretty well up the spout. Especially as he'd soon be taking
a liking to the kid--I know what it's like, all right! It would be
a lie, anyway, to pretend I wasn't just a bit jealous; it wouldn't be
fair. Madelon and I got together from time to time for a minute
or two before dinner, in her bedroom. But these interviews weren't
easy to fix. We didn't breathe a word. We were as discreet as discreet
could be.

You mustn't think because of that that she didn't love her
Robinson. That hadn't anything to do with it. Only he was
merely playing at being engaged, so of course she too merely
played at being faithful. They were just fond of each other. In
these matters it's all a question of knowing what to expect. He
was going to wait till he was married before he laid a hand on
her, he told me. That was his plan. Well, he was welcome to eter-
nity; mine was the immediate moment. Anyway, he'd spoken to me
about another project he had of setting up a small restaurant with
her, and giving old Henrouille the go-by. It was all going to be
perfectly straightforward. "She's nice, customers will like her,"
he foresaw in his best moments. "Besides, you've sampled her
cooking. She's in a class of her own with a frying pan."

He thought he might even wheedle a little initial capital out
of Ma Henrouille. Yes, I thought that was O.K., but I foresaw
he'd have a good bit of difficulty bringing her up to scratch.
"You see everything through rose-coloured spectacles," I said to
him, meaning just to calm him down and make him think things
over a bit more. Right away he began to cry and say I was
horribly unkind. Obviously one mustn't discourage people and I
agreed at once that I'd been wrong and that really it was my
moroseness that had always been my undoing. Robinson's line
had been copper engraving before the war, but he wouldn't have
anything to do with it now at any price. That was for him to
decide. "With my lungs as they are, what I need is open air;
get me? And besides, my eyes will never be what they were." He
was quite right too, in a way. I had no answer to make. When we
went along the crowded streets together, people turned round and
were sorry for the poor blind man. There's pity in people for the
blind and infirm; they really have got love in reserve. I'd often
felt the presence of this love in reserve. There's any amount of
it. No good saying there isn't. Only it's a pity people should still
be such sods, with so much love in reserve. It stays where it is,
that's what. It's stuck away inside and it doesn't come out, doesn't
do them any good. They die of love--inside.

Madelon used to sit with him after dinner, looking after her
little Leon, as she called him. She read the paper to him. At
the moment he was mad about politics and the Midi papers are
festered with politics, of a really lively kind.

Around us at evening the house sank into the dilapidation of
ages. That's just the time, after dinner, when the bugs have their
little chat, the time too for trying out on these bugs the effect
of a corrosive solution that I wanted later to surrender to some
chemist for a small sum. A bit of a side line. The idea rather
took the old girl's fancy; she used to help me with my experi-
ments. We walked round together from nest to nest, looking at
every crack and cranny, and squirting swarms of them with my
bug poison. They staggered and passed out in the beams of a
candle carefully held for me by old Mme. Henrouille.

While we worked, we talked of Raney. Just to think of the
place gave me a pain; I'd have stayed at Toulouse for the rest of
my days. I could ask nothing better, when all's said and done--
a regular crust and some time to myself. The happy life, dammit.
However, I had to be thinking of getting back to work. Time
was passing, and so was the curate's bonus, and my savings.
I wanted, before leaving, to give Madelon a few further pieces
of instruction and advice. Undoubtedly it's better to give people
cash when one can afford to, and would like to be helpful. But
it's also some use to a person to be forewarned and know exactly
what they may expect and, above all, just what they are risking
by jumping into bed with people to right and left. That's what I
said to myself, especially as Madelon really rather frightened me
where disease was concerned. She was a bright girl, true enough,
but when it came to microbes, just as ignorant as they're made.
So I embarked on fully detailed explanations of what she ought
to pay particular attention to before saying "yes" when some one
was nice to her. Points about colour . . . and moisture ... In
fact, the classical things that one ought to know, that are so
eminently practical, worth knowing . . . When she had listened
to what I had to say, and had heard me out in full, she protested
for the sake of form. In fact, she treated me to a sort of scene
about it. "A perfectly respectable" girl she was ... I ought to
be ashamed of myself ... I had got a shockingly wrong impression
of her . . . And just because with me she had, she didn't make
a practice ... I must have a very poor opinion of her . . .
"Men were all such beasts."

In fact, what every lady always says on such occasions. I
could have seen it coming. A smoke screen. But all that interested
me was that she had heard what I'd said and seemed to have taken
in the more essential points. . . . The rest didn't signify a bit.
Having heard me well, what was really making her feel sad at
heart was to think that you could catch all these things I'd told
her about simply through being tender and having fun. It didn't
matter that it was really Nature; she considered me just as dis-
gusting as Nature herself, and that's what was such an insult to
her. I didn't stress the point further, except just to comment slightly
on certain precautions which are really so convenient. In the end,
we played the psychologist and tried to do a little analysing of
Robinson's character. "He isn't exactly jealous," she told me at
this point. "But he has his difficult moments."

"All right, all right!" I said, and I set out to define Robinson's
temperament, as if I myself really knew what he was like, but
I realized immediately that I didn't know Robinson at all--aside
from one or two rough indications of his character. No more than
that.

It's astonishing how difficult it is to conceive of what will make
one human being either more or less likeable to others. . . .Yet
one wants to help him, to stick up for him--and one just
babbles. . . .You open your mouth, and it's pitiful. . . . You're
absolutely lost.

It isn't easy in our day to play the La Bruyere. The whole
subconscious mind slinks away from you as you approach.





JUST WHEN I WAS GOING TO GO AND BUY MY TICKET, THEY
MADE me stay--for another week, was the idea. The point being to
show me the country round Toulouse, the banks of the fine cool
river, which I'd heard so much about, and above all those lovely
vineyards, about which every one in town seemed so proud and
pleased, as if they all owned land themselves. I mustn't leave
without having seen anything except Madame Henrouille's mum-
mies. They couldn't allow that. Fuss, in fact . . .

I was silent in the face of such polite overtures. I didn't dare
to seem eager to stay, because of my intimacy with Madelon,
an intimacy which was getting to be rather risky. The old lady
was beginning to suspect that there was something between us.
A bit of a business.

But the old lady wasn't coming with us on this expedition.
For one thing, she didn't intend to shut the vault, even for a
single day. So I agreed to stay on and we went off one fine
Sunday morning into the country. We supported Robinson between
us, each taking him by an arm. We went down to the station
and took Seconds. The compartments smelt of sausage, though,
just like Third. We got off at a place called Saint-Jean.
Madelon seemed very well acquainted with this part of the
world; she kept meeting people she knew from all over the
place. It looked like being a fine summer day, a really grand day.
Robinson had to be told about everything we saw all the time
as we went along. "There's a garden just here. . . . Now we're
coming to a bridge, with a man sitting on it fishing. ... He
isn't catching anything, though. . . . Look out, here's a bicycle
coming . . ." The smell of chips, for instance, gave him a sense
of direction at once. It was he, in fact, who led us along to a place
where they were selling them at half a franc a portion. I'd always
known Robinson to be fond of chips, as I am too. It's very Parisian,
this liking for potato chips. Madelon preferred vermouth, dry and
by itself.

Rivers don't have an easy time of it in the South. They seem not
to be getting on too well ; they're always on the point of drying
up. Hills and the sun, fishermen, fish, boats, ditches, washhouses,
vines, weeping willows, they all want some, all clamour for it.

It's asked to give up far too much water and there isn't much
left in the riverbed. In some places you'd say it was more like
a badly flooded road than a real river. As we'd all come out to
enjoy ourselves, obviously we'd got to set about it at once. As
soon as we'd finished the chips, we came to the conclusion that
a little excursion in a boat, before lunch, would be fun; me
rowing, of course, and they two sitting opposite me, hand in hand,
Robinson and Madelon.

So we slip off downstream, as they say, scraping the bottom
every now and then, she squealing, he not too happy either.
Flies and still more flies. Dragonflies too, surveying the surface
of the water, all a pair of bulging great eyes, and with little fear-
ful flicks of their tails. Astonishing heat everywhere, hazing the
water. We glide across it from those long flat swirls over there
to an encounter with rotten branches over here. . . . Close to
the broiling banks we pass, in search of gusts of shade which we
grasp as best we can under trees not too stricken by the sun.
Talking makes you hotter still, if that's possible. Still you don't
like to say you're not enjoying it much.

Robinson, naturally enough, was the first to have had enough
of this boat business. So I suggested we go and sit outside a
restaurant. We weren't the only ones to have had the same little
idea. All the anglers on that stretch had already installed them-
selves at the cafe before us, eager for a drink before lunch,
entrenched behind syphons. Robinson didn't like to ask me whether
it was an expensive cafe I'd chosen but I spared him this worry
at once by assuring him that all the prices were marked and all
very reasonable; which was true. He still held on to Madelon's
hand.

I can say now that we paid in this restaurant as though we'd
eaten, but we had really only attempted to eat. It's better not
to talk about the dishes we were served. They're still there.
Then after that, fixing up about some fishing for Robinson
and me, so as to while away the afternoon, was far too compli-
cated a business, and it would only have made him miserable
because he wouldn't even have been able to see his float. But as
for more rowing, as an alternative, I was already far too done
in after just the morning's effort. That had been quite enough.
I'd lost the form I once had on the African rivers. I had grown
old that way too, just as in everything else.

But to change our form of exercise anyway, I suggested that a
little walk, a little simple walk on foot along the banks, would
do us a whole heap of good--at any rate, as far as the long grass
we could see less than three quarters of a mile away by a row
of poplars. So we started off again, Robinson and I walking arm
in arm, Madelon a few yards ahead of us. It was easier that
way, walking through the grass. As we rounded a bend in the
river, we heard some one playing an accordion. The sound came
from a sloop, a beautiful sloop moored at this spot in the river.
The music made Robinson stop short. Being blind, it was quite
understandable that it should, and besides, he'd always had a
great fondness for music. So, pleased at having found something
to entertain him, we settled ourselves down right there on the
grass where it was less dusty than on the steep bank near by. You
could see that it wasn't just an ordinary sloop. Very spick and
ornamental it was, a yacht just for living in, not for carrying
cargo, all decorated with flowers up above and even a very smart
little kennel for the dog. We described the yacht to Robinson.
He wanted to know every detail.

"I should like to live in a fine clean boat like that myself," he
remarked. "Wouldn't you, Madelon?" turning to her.

"I know what you mean, dear," she answered. "But it's a rather
expensive idea you've had, Leon! It would cost a good deal more
to buy. I'm sure, than a tenement house."

At that we all three began to wonder what a yacht like that
could possibly cost, and lost ourselves in endless estimates. . . .
Each held to his own figure. It was that habit that people like
ourselves have of always calculating about everything out loud.
The strains of the accordion came over to us very coaxingly
all this time and we could even catch the words of a song they
were singing to it. ... In the end, we all came to the conclusion
that anyway a sloop like that must cost at least a hundred
thousand francs. . . . That gave you something to think about!

　　　Ferme tes jolis yeux, car les heures sont breves . . .
　　　Au pays merveilleux, au doux pays du re-e-eve.

That's what they sang inside the cabin, mingled voices of men
and women, a little out of tune but pleasant all the same because
of the setting. It fitted in with the hot sun and the fields
and the afternoon hour and the river.

Robinson insisted on making it thousands and thousands. He
was sure, such as we had described the yacht to him, that it must
have cost considerably more than we'd said. It had a piece of
glass on top so as to let more light in, and bits of brass ever-
ywhere; luxurious it was . . .

"You're tiring yourself out, Leon," Madelon tried to quiet him.
"Why don't you lie back on the grass; it's nice and thick, and
you'll feel rested. . . . Whether it's five thousand or five hun-
dred thousand, you and I haven't got that much, have we? So it's
really not worth getting all worked up about."

But he lay on his back and went on worrying all the same about
the cost of the thing, and he wanted frightfully to know all about
it and try to see a yacht like that, that cost such a lot to build.
"Has it a motor?" he asked. We didn't know.

I went and had a look at the back of it, as he was so keen about
it, just to please him, to see if I could see the exhaust of any
little motor.

　　　Ferme tes jolis yeux, car la vie n'est qu'un songe . . .
　　　L'amour n'est qu'un menson-on-on-ge . . .
　　　Ferme tes jolis yeuuuuuuuux!?

The people inside the boat went on singing like that. At last
we began to feel awfully drowsy. . . . They were putting us to
sleep.

Then all of a sudden the spaniel inside the little kennel came
leaping out and dashed on to the gangway and started barking
in our direction. He woke us up with a start and we yelled angrily
at the spaniel. Robinson was much alarmed.

At that a fellow who looked as if he might be the owner of
the yacht came out on deck through the little hatch place. He
said we weren't to yell at his dog and we had a word or two with
him about that. But when he realized that Robinson was, so to
speak, blind, the man calmed down all of a sudden and was
really rather put out. He changed his mind about telling us to go
to hell and even went so far as to take the line that he'd made
a bit of a fool of himself, so as to put things right again. By way
of making it up, he invited us to come and have coffee with him
on board his yacht, because it was his birthday, he added. He
couldn't have us all staying out there in the sun, we'd roast. . . .
And so on. And so forth. Besides, it would be just right, because
they were thirteen at table. ... He was a young man, this propri-
etor fellow, rather an eccentric. He was fond of boats, he went
on to say. We could see that. But his wife was nervous of the
sea, so they lay up in this place, on the pebbles, as you might say.
His friends on board seemed quite pleased to see us. And so was
his wife quite pleased; a beautiful creature who played the accor-
dion like an angel. And really it was very nice of them to have
asked us, anyway; we might have been Heaven knows what. It
was nice and trusting of them. . . . We realized at once that it
wouldn't be right to let our charming hosts down. Especially not
in front of their guests. . . . Robinson had many faults, but he
was, normally, quite decently sensitive. Inwardly he realized, just
by the sound of their voices, that we'd got to behave now and
not say anything vulgar or anything. Our clothes weren't good,
admittedly, but at any rate they were clean and decent. I took a
closer look at the owner of the yacht; he must have been thirty-
ish, with a handsome head of poetic brown hair and a pretty
suit like a sailor's but more ornate. And, as it happened, his
lovely wife had real "velvety" eyes.

They'd just finished lunch. A lot had been left over. We wouldn't
refuse just a taste of the sweet--no, indeed we would not. And
a glass of port to wash it down? It was a long time since I had
heard such well-bred voices myself. Educated people have a certain
way of talking which intimidates you and, as for me, downright
frightens me, especially their women--though it's really only
absurdly turned, pretentious phrases, but as polished as old
furniture. It's an alarming kind of talk they have, although life-
less in itself; you're afraid of tripping up on it just answering
what they say. And even when they put on coarse accents, when
for fun they sing the songs of the poor, they still retain this
polished tone which fills you with distrust and dislike, a voice
which has a sort of little whip in it always, as that's what you
always need for talking to servants with. It's rather thrilling,
but at the same time it makes you want to put those women of
theirs on their backs, just to see their dignity, as they call it,
melt away.

I explained quietly to Robinson how the whole place was furnished;
with nothing but antiques. It reminded me rather of my mother's
shop, but it was cleaner, of course, and better arranged.
My mother's place had always smelt of old pepper.

And hung on the walls all round were paintings by the owner.
He was an artist. It was his wife who told me this, making a very
pretty fuss about it. His wife was in love with her husband, you
could see that. Her husband was an artist, a fine figure of a man,
with lovely hair and a lovely income--everything that's needed
to make a woman happy; and on top of that you had the accordion,
friends, dreamy days afloat on a beautiful stream which went
eddying past you as you lay there, content never to leave
your moorings. ... All these things were theirs to enjoy; and
with it a whole, sweet, precious world of freshness, created be-
tween them by a screen against the wind and the breath of a
ventilator, and divine security.

Now that we'd come in and joined them, we had to be put at
our ease. Iced drinks and strawberries and cream, my favourite
sweet. Madelon squirmed for a second helping. She had become
all pretty-mannered too, now. The men thought her charming,
especially the father-in-law, very well to do; he seemed delighted
to have Madelon by his side and took tremendous trouble to be
nice to her. The whole table had to be ransacked to find titbits
for her to eat, and she even had cream on the tip of her nose.
From what one could gather, the old man was a widower. No
doubt he'd forgotten it. Quite soon, with the liqueurs, Madelon
was a little bit squiffy. The suit Robinson had on, and mine
too, bore evidence of fatigue, and a year's continual use and
several years' continual use, but in this sheltered light that
couldn't be noticed. All the same, I felt rather abashed among
all these people with their every comfort, clean as Americans,
so well washed, so well got up, as though ready for an elegance
contest.

Madelon, now that she'd livened up, was no longer behaving
quite so well. Tilting her perky little profile towards the pic-
tures, she began to say silly things; our hostess rather realized
this and picked up the accordion again to smooth things over,
while everybody sang--and quietly we sang too, but not in tune
and not very cheerfully--the same song that we had heard outside
a little while ago, and then another.

Robinson had managed to enter into a conversation with one
old gentleman who seemed to know everything there was to know
about cocoa. A good topic. Colonial meeting colonial. "When I
was out in Africa," to my great surprise I heard Robinson remark,
"--I was at that time forestry surveyor to the Porduriere Company--
I used to put the whole population of a village on to harvesting
. . ." et cetera. He couldn't see me, so he let himself go,
hand over fist. He didn't mind what he said . . . Remembering
all sorts of things that never happened . . . Filling the old
gent up with it . . . But, good God, it was all lies! Anything
he could think of to put himself on a level with the old gentleman,
who was a cocoa expert himself. Robinson, who'd always been so
circumspect in his remarks! It annoyed and distressed me to hear
him hold forth like this.

He'd been given the place of honour in the angle of a broad and
scented settee, a glass of old brandy clasped in his right hand,
while with the other he described in sweeping gestures the majesty
of untamed jungles, the furies of an equatorial storm. He was
well away, definitely well away. . . . How Alcide would have
guffawed if he too could have seen him, sitting there in his
little corner. Poor Alcide. . . .

Well, yes, of course it certainly was beautifully comfortable
on board their yacht. Especially now that there was a slight river
breeze beginning to rise and, framed in the ship's windows,
the ample folds of the curtains fluttered like dainty, gay little
flags.

Another round of ices after that again, and then champagne as
well. It was the owner's birthday; hadn't he told us so at least
a hundred times? He intended making every one happy on this
occasion, even passers-by; meaning us, on this occasion. In an hour,
or two, or three maybe, we'd all be friends under his roof, his
old friends and the others and even strangers, even us three, picked
up off the bank, the best he could do; so not to be thirteen at
table. I was just going to let off my little chant of happiness
but then I thought better of it, feeling proud all of a sudden,
seeing the point. And so I saw fit to tell them, in order to just-
ify their invitation, which I had badly on the brain, that in asking
me onto their boat, they were entertaining one of the most distin-
guished medical men of Paris. They could hardly doubt it, of
course, from my attitude. Or from the insignificance of my two
friends, either! But as soon as they knew what an important
person I was, they declared themselves delighted and flattered
and one by one lost no time in revealing to me their own little
personal aches and pains; I took advantage of this state of
affairs to get better acquainted with the daughter of a shipowner,
a sturdy young cousin of my host's, who as a matter of fact,
suffered from nettle rash and said the least thing gave her flat-
ulent acidity.

When you're not used to comfort and good things to eat, you're
intoxicated by them in no time. Truth's only too pleased to leave
you. Very little's ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And
after all, you're not really very keen to keep hold of it. In this
sudden abundance of ease, a marvellous megalomania is all over
you before you know it. I began to make a speech myself, while
I talked of nettle rash to the little cousin. You strive to leave
daily humiliations behind you by attempting, like Robinson, to
put yourself on a like footing with the rich, by proffering lies,
which are a poor man's coins. We're all ashamed of our unpreposses-
sing flesh, our own deficient frames. I couldn't bear to show them
my own reality; it was as unworthy of them as my behind would
have been. At all costs, I had to make a good impression. I began
to answer fancifully the questions they asked me, just as Robi-
nson had with the old gentleman. I, in my turn, was swamped
with pride. My vast clientele . . . Overwork . . . My friend
Robinson, the engineer ... Who had offered me the hospitality
of his cottage in the country . . . Near Toulouse . . .

And anyway, when he has eaten and drunk well, the other fel-
low is easily convinced. Anything will do. So fortunate. Robin-
son had preceded me in the furtive delight of spinning a yarn
straight out of your head; to follow needed but slight initial
effort.

As he wore smoked glasses, people couldn't very well make out
what state Robinson's eyes were in. We generously ascribed this
infirmity of his to the war. From then on, we were properly set-
tled and raised, first socially and next patriotically, to a level
with our hosts in general; in the beginning, they had been slightly
surprised by this caprice of the husband's, who, being a fashion-
able painter, was liable from time to time to do such very odd
things. . . .

Our fellow guests had begun to find all three of us most charm-
ing--and really ever so interesting. . . . Considering that she
was Robinson's fiancee, Madelon was perhaps not behaving quite
as she should have; she flirted with everybody, including the
women--so much so that I wondered if the whole thing wasn't
going to degenerate into an all-in necking party. But it didn't.
Remarks died away bit by bit, thwarted by the awkward strain
of going beyond words. Nothing came of it.

We lay there, clinging to our last words and the cushions,
completely dazed by our joint efforts to make each other happy,
more deeply, more warmly happy, and even yet a little happier
still, body replete, in spirit only, doing absolutely all we could
to pack into the present moment all the possible contentment of
this world, all the marvellous things that one knew in one's heart,
and about everything in general, so that one's next-door neighbour
should profit by it too and might confess that that was exactly
the admirable mystery he himself had been looking for, and lack-
ing, these many years, in order to be perfectly happy himself,
at last and forever after. One would have managed to reveal to
him one's own real reason for existing. And he, then, would have
had to tell the world at large that he too had found the key to
his existence. And we'd have had just one more drink together
to celebrate this delectable discovery and it would stay forever
thus. Never again to lose this charm. . . . And, most of all,
never to return to that dreary time before this miracle, before
we met, before so marvellously encountering each other. ... All
of us together forever more! At last! And always!

The owner of the yacht could not refrain from breaking the
spell.

He had a weakness for telling us about his painting; he chatter-
ed about his pictures, which really obsessed him much too much,
now, later on and all the time. And so, through his obstinate
folly, tight though we were, banality came crushing back on us.
I'd thrown my hand in, went and delivered myself of a few well-
turned, fine-sounding compliments to the captain, the sort of
sweetness in words artists adore to hear. That's what he had bad-
ly needed. As soon as he had heard my eulogies, it affected him
like successful copulation. He sank onto one of those bulbous
sofas he had on his boat and almost immediately fell asleep,
very gently, in obvious bliss. The other guests, meanwhile, gaze-
d into each other's faces with dulled and mutually fascinated
scrutiny--hesitating between almost irresistible drowsiness and
the ecstasy of divine digestion.

I saved up this longing for sleep myself and kept it for the
night to come. Day's surviving fears too often scare away sleep
and when you've the luck to build up for yourself, while you can,
a small supply of bliss, you need to be an awful fool to squander
it in pointless preliminary siestas. Keep all that for the nighttime.
That's my motto. Always remember there's the darkness to follow.
Besides, we'd been asked to stay on to dinner; now was the time
to work up a fresh appetite. . . .

We took advantage of the prevailing stupor to slink out. We
all three made an exquisitely neat get-away, skirting the somno-
lent guests attractively littered round our hostess's accordion.
That lady's eyes, softened by music, fluttered in search of the
shadows. "See you later," she said, as we passed her by; and her
smile finished in a dream.

We did not go far, the three of us, only to a place I had no-
ticed where there was a bend in the river, between two rows of
poplars, big pointed poplars. From there you could see the whole
of the valley, and in the distance the little town in its hollow,
clustered round the church tower, which jutted like a nail into
the red glow of the sky.

"When have we a train back?" asked Madelon, suddenly
anxious.

"Don't worry," he reassured her. "They'll be taking us back
by car. . . . The fellow said so. They've got one."

Madelon said no more. She was dreamy with contentment. It
had been a really good day.

"What about your eyes, Leon; how are they now?" she asked
him.

"They're much better. I didn't want to say anything to you
about it, because I wasn't sure, but I really think I'm beginning
to be able to count the bottles on a table even--especially with
my left eye. I had quite a bit to drink, did you notice? And
wasn't it good stuff!"

"Left is the side of your heart," Madelon remarked happily.
She was delighted, naturally, at his eyes being better.
"Kiss me and let me kiss you!" she said to him. I began to
feel in the way, with them carrying on so effusively. But I found
it hard to clear out, because there was nowhere much I could go.
I made as if to retire behind a tree a little way off, and waited
there until they should recover themselves. It was sweet, the
things they were saying to each other. I could hear all of it.
The dullest love talk is always pretty amusing when one knows
the people concerned. And I had never heard them say this sort
of thing before.

"You really do love me?" she was asking him. He answered,
"I love you as much as my eyes."

"Oh, Leon, that's a marvellous thing to say! But you haven't
seen me yet, have you, Leon? Perhaps when you've seen me with
your own eyes, not only with other people's, you won't love me
so much any more? When you do, you'll see other women too and
maybe you will start to love them all. Like some of your
friends. . . ."

That remark, made in a low voice, was meant for me. There
was no mistaking it. She thought I was a good way off and
couldn't hear. So she let me have that nasty knock. She wasn't
losing any time about it. He, my friend, started to protest. "Good
Lord!" he said. That wasn't fair, it was a slanderous accusation.
. . .
"What, me, Madelon? Not a bit of it," he said, shielding himself.
"I'm not his sort at all. What makes you think I am the same
as he is? When you've been so sweet to me always ... I'm not
the chap to fool around. I'm in earnest, I tell you. I never go
back on my word. You're pretty, I know that already; but you'll
be prettier still once I've seen you . . . There! Are you happy
now? You're not crying any longer? After all, I can't say more,
can I?"

"That's lovely, Leon," she answered, pressing herself against
him. They were swearing everlasting love to each other; nothing
could stop them now, the whole of heaven was not large enough
for them.

"I want you to be always happy with me," he said very softly,
after a while. "I want you to have nothing to do all day and yet
have enough of everything you want."

"Oh, you're wonderful, darling Leon. You're nicer than I
thought even--you're sweet and true and everything that's
lovely!"

"It's because I adore you, my precious . .

And they clung together more passionately, holding each other
still closer in their arms. Then, as if to keep me as far removed
as possible from their own intense happiness, they again turned
nastily on me. She said, "Your friend, the doctor, is a nice man,
isn't he?" Off she went again, as if she simply couldn't get over
the thought of me.

"Yes, he's nice. I don't want to say anything against him, since
he is a friend of yours. . . . But he's the sort of man, I should
think, who treats women very badly. ... I wouldn't say unpleasant
things about him, because I believe he is really attached to you
. . . . But he's not my sort, I must confess. You see, I--you
won't be angry if I tell you something, will you?" No, nothing
was going to annoy our Leon. "Well, it seems to me that, if
anything, our doctor's a bit too fond of the women. ... You
know . . . Rather like an animal. Don't you think so? As if
he was all the time ready to pounce on them, you might say.
Just doing all the harm he can and then going on his way. Don't
you think he's like that?"

He thought so indeed, the dirty dog; he thought whatever she
wanted him to; in fact, her remarks struck him as extremely true
and amusing. Yes, terribly funny. He encouraged her to go on,
helpless with laughter.

"That's quite right what you say about him, Madelon. Ferdinand's
not a bad fellow, but you'd hardly say that he behaves particu-
larly well and no one could say he was faithful. . . . I'm sure of
that."

"You must have known him to have plenty of mistresses, haven't
you, Leon?" She was out to get the low-down, the little bitch.

"Well, maybe I have," he retorted, evenly enough. "But you
know? In the first place he? It isn't difficult . . ."

Some meaning had to be extracted from these remarks and
Madelon proceeded to do so.

"All doctors are beasts, of course, most of the time. Every one
knows that. But I should imagine he's what you might call weak-
ness itself."

"You're absolutely right," my good, my gallant friend agreed.
"In fact, I've often thought he must take drugs; sex has such a
hold on him. . . . Then too, he's more than normally constructed.
... If you were to see him without his clothes! It's not natu-
ral!"

"Oh," said Madelon, perplexed at this and trying to remember
what I did look like without my clothes. "Do you think he may
be diseased then? Eh? Tell me." She was suddenly very worried;
these intimate revelations upset her.

"That I can't say," he was forced to admit regretfully. "I
couldn't be certain . . . But there's every chance of it with
the life he leads."

"All the same, you're most likely right; no doubt he does
take drugs. That's probably why he's so odd sometimes."
Madelon's little brain was very busy all of a sudden. She
added, "In future, we'd better be slightly on our guard a-
gainst him."

"You're not frightened of him though, are you?" he asked
her. "Surely he's nothing to you? He's never made advances
to you, has he?"

"Oh, no, of course not that! I wouldn't have allowed it! But
there's no knowing what mightn't come into his head. ... Just
think if he had a fit or something! That can easily happen to you
if you take drugs. . . . Anyway, I certainly wouldn't have him
to attend to me if I were ill!"

"Nor would I, if it comes to that," Robinson agreed. Whereupon
more kissing and sweet speeches followed.

"Darling, darling," she said, rocking him in her arms.

"My precious, my adorable," he answered. Then between whiles
there was silence, broken every so often by sudden storms of
kisses.

"Tell me quickly, as often as you can, that you love me, while
I kiss you as far as your shoulder. . . ." It was a little kissing
game, beginning at her neck and throat.

"Oh, I'm all red in the face," she gasped. "You're smothering
me! Let me breathe!" But he didn't let her breathe. He began all
over again. I, in the grass near by, tried to see what was about
to take place. His lips were at her breast, caressing her. A pretty
pastime, to be sure. It was making me very red in the face too,
thanks to quite a number of emotions all at once--on top of which
I was also experiencing complete astonishment at my own indis-
cretion.

"We will be very happy, we two, won't we, Leon? Tell me you
are sure that we will be happy."

That was during an interval. It was followed by still more plans
for the future, a future which was to last forever and plans e-
nough to remake the world anew--a world to hold only the pair
of them, of course. Certainly I wasn't to have any place in it. It
seemed as if they could never finish ridding themselves of me,
or sufficiently erasing the dirty memory of me from their intimacy
with each other.

"Tell me, have you been friends long with Ferdinand?" The idea
was very irritating to her.

"Yes, quite a time ... in various places," he answered. "We met
at first by chance when travelling. . . . He's a chap who likes
getting about and seeing things. ... So am I, in a way. And so
we've sort of travelled along together for some time now. See?"
He was making ours appear a casual acquaintance.

"Well, listen, you'll have to stop being such friends with him,
my dear! And you'd better begin right away," she said, very
definitely and tartly. "It's going to be put a stop to. It is,
isn't it, honey? And from now on, you won't be having any other
fellow traveller but me, see? Isn't that so, honey?"

"Why, you're not jealous of him, are you?" he asked. He was
rather put out by her remarks, the bastard.

"No, I'm not jealous of him but I love you too much, don't
you see, Leon? I want to have you all to myself; I don't want to
share you with any one. And in any case, he's not the right sort
of person for you to be mixing with, now that I am in love with
you, Leon dear. He's too vicious. You understand, don't you?
Tell me you love me a lot, Leon! And that you understand me."

"I adore you."

"Good."





WE ALL WENT BACK TO TOULOUSE IN THE EVENING.

Two days later the accident happened. The time had finally
come for me to leave and I had nearly finished packing my bag,
when I heard some one shouting something outside the house.
I listened. They were telling me to come down quick to the vault.
I couldn't see who was calling me like this--but from the tone
of their voice, it was clear that something desperate was the
matter. They seemed to be in a hell of a hurry.

"Right you are; half a minute, though! Is it that urgent?" I
answered, thinking to myself, "Not so fast!" It must have been
about seven o'clock, just before supper time. We were going to
say good-bye at the station. That had been agreed upon, as it
suited everybody; the old lady would not be home until later.
On that particular day, she was expecting the visit of pilgrims
to the vault.

"Come quick, Doctor!" they called from the street. "Madame
Henrouille has had an accident."

"All right, all right," I said. "Coming at once. I'll be straight
down."

But then, after a moment's thought, I added, "You go on ahead
and tell them I'll be along as fast as I can. Just let me get my
trousers on. . . ."

"But there's no time to be lost!" they went on, clamouring from
below. "She's lost consciousness, I tell you! It looks as if she's
broken a bone in her head! She fell down the steps into the vault
. . . right down to the bottom."

"Is that so?" I said to myself, when I heard this pretty story.
I didn't have to think much longer. I cleared out straight to the
station. That was that.

I caught the seven-fifteen all right, but only just.

No good-byes were said, after all.





THE FIRST THING THAT STRUCK PARAPINE WHEN HE SAW
ME AGAIN was that I wasn't looking at all well.

"You must have been tiring yourself out down there," he
remarked, suspicious as ever.

Well, of course, I had had an exciting time of it in Toulouse,
but after all, why complain? I had come off pretty lightly and
escaped serious trouble; at least, I hoped so, sneaking off at
the critical moment like that.

So I explained the whole story to him in detail and confided
my suspicions to Parapine. But he didn't feel that I had acted
particularly adroitly in this affair. . . . However, we hadn't time
to go into the matter at any length, because the problem of finding
a job for me had gotten so pressing during the interval that I had
to be getting a move on. There was no time to be lost, therefore,
arguing it all out. ... I had a bare hundred and fifty francs
in hand now and I really didn't know at all where to turn to get
settled again. To the Tarapout? There were no jobs going there
these days. The slump was on. Should I go back to Garenne-
Rancy then? And try sounding my old practice again? I did
think of doing that at one moment, even so, but only as a very
last resort and much against my will. Nothing dies out so quick
as a sacred flame.

In the end it was Parapine himself who put me on to something,
thank God, in the shape of a small post he found for me, as it
happened, on the staff of the aslyum where he himself had been
employed for several months now.

Things were going pretty well. Parapine was not only in charge
at this place of the cinema class among the lunatics, but he also
looked after the electric-treatment racket. At a given time, twice
a week, he let off magnetic storms above the heads of the melan-
choly inmates assembled for this particular purpose in a very
dark and air-tight room. A sort of cerebral sport, in fact, the
putting into practice of his boss Professor Baryton's brain wave.
And it was he, this canny colleague of ours, who took me on at
an extremely small salary but with a contract as long as your
arm, full of clauses all of which were, naturally enough, to his
own advantage. A real employer, in fact.

Our emoluments at this asylum were exceedingly small, it's
true, but we weren't badly fed and we were certainly very well
housed. You could take the nurses to bed with you. That was
allowed and tacitly understood. The Chief raised no objection
to such diversions on our part and was actually aware that these
erotic facilities attached his staff to the place. He was no fool,
no martinet.

Besides, it was hardly the moment to catechize or to make
terms, considering I had just been offered a little bit of bread
and butter which was more than heaven-sent. Thinking it over,
I couldn't quite understand why Parapine had shown me such
active kindness. His doing this for me puzzled me completely.
To put it down to brotherly feelings on his, on Parapine's part
--well, no, that was really too beautiful. It must be something
rather more complicated than that. Still, you never know . . .
We had our midday meal together--that was the arrangement
--at Baryton's table, seated round this distinguished alienist
with his pointed beard, his short fat thighs; a nice little man,
apart from any consideration of his own pocket, on which point he
was really utterly sickening whenever there was half a chance
of the subject coming up.

I must say he spoilt us with macaroni and harsh Bordeaux
claret. An entire vineyard had been left him in somebody's will,
he explained. Which was pretty tough on us. It was no sort of
a vintage, I declare.

His asylum at Vigny-sur-Seine was always crowded. It was
billed as a "Sanatorium," because it had a big garden round it,
in which our lunatics went for walks when the weather was fine.
They strolled about in it with their heads balanced very oddly
and, it seemed, precariously on their shoulders, as if in constant
fear of spilling everything they contained on the ground, if they
stumbled. They had all sorts of outlandish things skipping about
inside, of which they were horribly fond.

The lunatics never talked to us about the precious things they
had stored up in their minds without a whole series of terrified
contortions or very condescending, high-and-mighty airs in the
manner of tremendously powerful and punctilious officials. Noth-
ing, not even a gold mine, could coax these creatures to venture
outside their minds. All that makes a lunatic is the ordinary i-
deas of mankind shut up very tight inside a man's head. The outer
world held well at bay and that's enough. Then the mind gets
like a lake without an outlet; it's a head bolted and barred,
infected, stagnant.

Baryton got his macaroni and vegetables wholesale from Paris.
So that tradespeople of Vigny-sur-Seine were not at all fond of
us. In fact, to put it bluntly, they loathed us like hell. But
this animosity didn't spoil our appetites. When I first went there,
Baryton used regularly at meal times to elaborate philosophical
dissertations and conclusions out of our desultory remarks. But
having spent a lifetime in the company of the insane, having made
his daily bread out of them, sharing meals with them, counteracting
their insanities as best he might, nothing was more irksome to him
than to have to go on discussing their foibles at our meal times.
"They shouldn't enter into the conversation of normal people,"
he would insist peremptorily and on the defensive. He personally
was strict in his observance of this mental hygiene.

Baryton was very fond of conversation, almost nervously addict-
ed to it; but he liked it to be amusing, reassuring and full
of good sense. "Loonies" were a subject he did not care to dwell
on. An instinctive antipathy towards them was as much as he
ever intended feeling for them. On the other hand, it enchanted
him to listen to our talk of travels and adventure. He could never
have enough of that. Parapine had been partially freed from his
verbosity since my arrival on the scene. I was just what was
needed to keep the Chief amused during meals. For his benefit, all
my travels were passed in review at table and recounted at great
length, suitably arranged, of course, and decked out in the proper
literary trappings. Baryton made a great deal of noise with his
mouth and tongue when he ate. His daughter always sat on his
right. Although she was only ten, his daughter Aimee already
seemed faded. There was something inanimate about Aimee; a
sort of greyish tinge was stamped on her face, as if continual
unhealthy little clouds were passing forever before her eyes.
There was a certain amount of friction between Parapine and
Baryton. Yet Baryton never bore any one any malice so long as
they did not interfere in any way with the profits he made out
of his establishment. His accounts had long been the one sacred
thing in his life.

One day, at the time when he still spoke to Baryton, Parapine
quite suddenly told him straight out at table that he lacked
ethics. At first, this remark displeased Baryton. But afterwards
all was well again. You can't go quarrelling over a little thing
like that. Baryton derived, from listening to the accounts of my
travels, not only a romantic pleasure but also delight at the thought
of having saved money. "Hearing you talk, Ferdinand, one feels
there is no need to go and see these places for oneself, you describe
it all so well, Ferdinand." There was no prettier compliment he
could have thought to pay me. Into this asylum we only admitted
lunatics who were easy to manage, never maniacs of dangerous
or definitely homicidal tendencies. It wasn't by any means
a sinister spot. Very few bars and only one or two cells. Perhaps
among them all the most disquieting case was that of his own little
daughter Aimee. She wasn't numbered among the afflicted, but
obviously the child was haunted by her environment.

From time to time a shriek or two would reach us in the dining
room, but the cause of these screams was always pretty trivial.
They didn't last long, anyway. Occasionally one would observe
sudden and prolonged outbursts of frenzy coming over some group
of inmates during their ceaseless prowlings to and fro, between
the beds of begonias, the pump, and the clumps of trees.

That was all put right without much trouble or alarms by giving
them tepid baths and flagons of Thebaique syrup.

Sometimes the lunatics would come to the few refectory windows
which gave on to the street, to scream and cause a commotion
in the neighbourhood, but usually they kept their horror to
themselves. They took great pains to husband their private horror
against our scientific onslaughts; they adored putting up a re-
sistance against us in this way.

When I think nowadays of all the lunatics I got to know at
old Baryton's, I cannot help being doubtful whether there are
any other true manifestations of the inner working of our souls
besides war and disease, those two nightmares of infinite duration.
The great weariness of life is maybe nothing but the vast
trouble we take to remain always for twenty or forty or more
years at a time reasonable beings--so as not to be merely and
profoundly oneself, that is to say, obscene, ghastly, and absurd.
It's the nightmare of having to present to the world from morning
till night as a superman, our universal petty ideal, the grovell-
ing sub-man we really are.

We had all kinds and conditions of patients in the asylum, at a
variety of prices. The wealthier ones had strongly upholstered
rooms in the Louis XV style. To these Baryton paid his little
daily visit, for which a heavy charge was made. They waited
for it. From time to time he would be received with a couple of
hellishly good clouts across the face, really terrific and long
premeditated. Instantly he'd enter this on the bill as "Item.
Special Treatment."

Parapine maintained an attitude of reserve at table, not because
my successful anecdotes, which pleased Baryton, in the least
annoyed him. Quite the reverse. He seemed less preoccupied
than in his old microbe days, definitely almost happier. The
fact was that he had been very badly frightened over the business
of his escapade with the minors. He was somewhat disconcerted
now in matters of sex. In his free time, he used to amble about
the grounds of the asylum himself, exactly like one of the
inmates, and when I chanced to run into him, he would give me
a little passing smile but such indistinct, pale smiles they
were that you'd have taken them for farewells.

By engaging both of us on his technical staff, Baryton had
made a good acquisition, for we not only at all times gave him
our entire devotion, but we also entertained him with the echoes
of the adventures which he liked so much, and was frozen and
hungry for. At times he would take a delight in showing us how
pleased he was. But nevertheless towards Parapine he always
evidenced a certain reserve.

He had never been entirely at his ease with Parapine. "Parapine
. . . you know," he said to me one day in confidence, "Para-
pine's a Russian!" The fact of being Russian, to Baryton,
was something as descriptive, morphological, and irreparable, as
being a "diabetic" or a "blackamoor." Once launched on this
subject, which had been on his mind for many months, he set
his brain working like mad in my presence and for my particular
benefit. I hardly recognised the man as the same Baryton. We were
walking down together to the local tobacconist's to get some
cigarettes.

"Parapine, of course I quite realise, Ferdinand, is extremely in-
telligent, yet his is an absolutely arbitrary kind of intelligence,
all the same. . . . Don't you agree with me, really, Ferdinand?
. . . Besides, he's a fellow who simply will not adapt himself to
things. . . . You'll notice that about him at once. Why, he isn't
even at home in his job. He isn't at home in the world . . . Isn't
that so? And he's wrong . . . quite wrong . . . Because he isn't
happy. That proves it. Whereas, look at me, Ferdinand. I know
how to adapt myself." (He thumped his chest.) "If to-morrow
the earth were to start spinning the wrong way round, for example
what should I do? Why, I should adapt myself at once! And do
you know how I should do that, Ferdinand? I would sleep the
clock round and then it would be O.K. Nothing more to it than
that! I should be readjusted! But can you guess what your Para-
pine would do in like circumstances? He would be worrying it
all out, puzzling and being bitter about it, for the next hundred
years. I'm positive that's what he would do . . . Isn't that so?
If the earth were to turn the other way round, he'd never sleep
again. ... He would discover God knows what special injustice
in the whole thing, some intolerable injustice. That's his pet
mania, by the way; he used to talk to me a hell of a lot about
things being unfair in the days when he still did deign to speak
to me. . . . And do you think now he would be content just to whine
about it? That in itself wouldn't be so bad! . . . But not a bit
of it! He would work out some scheme for blowing the Earth to
bits. ... In revenge, Ferdinand! And the worst of it all, I'll tell
you what really would be the worst of it all--but now this, of
course, is entirely between ourselves--He'd find a way of doing
it! I promise you he would, he'd find one! See here, Ferdinand,
and try and remember what I'm going to explain to you--there are
just ordinary madmen and there are madmen who're in agony over
the set form of our civilization. . . . It is horrible to me to
think of Parapine having to be included in this class. ... Do you
know what he once said to me?"

"No, sir, I don't."

"Well, he said: 'Nothing exists, Mr. Baryton, between the
penis and mathematics. Nothing at all! It's a vacuum.' And
wait now, listen to this--do you know what he's waiting for,
before he speaks to me again?"

"No, Mr. Baryton, I have no idea. . . ."

"Hasn't he told you?"

"No, not so far . . ."

"Well, but he has told me . . . He's waiting for the arrival
of an Age of Mathematics! That's what he's waiting for. He's
made up his mind. What do you think of such impertinent behaviour
towards me--his senior? His chief?"

I really had to have a good laugh and make light of this out-
rageous fancy, so as to try and pass it off between the two of
us. But Baryton didn't in the least regard it as just a joke.
He even found grounds to be indignant over lots of other things
. . . ."Ah, Ferdinand, I see that all this seems to you a merely
trifling matter! An innocent jest, an idle conceit, one remark
among many. . . . That is what you would seem to imply, is it
not? Merely that . . . Oh, unwise Ferdinand! On the contrary,
let me take good care to put you on your guard against such slips,
which so falsely appear insignificant. I assure you, you are wrong
--absolutely and entirely wrong! A thousand times mistaken, if
the truth be known. ... In the course of my career, you will
surely give me credit for having heard, one way and another,
pretty nearly everything there is to hear as to every conceivable
kind of raving! I've known them all. . . . You will admit that
much, will you not, Ferdinand? And you will furthermore have
noticed, I imagine, Ferdinand, that I do not give the impression
of being one who is subject to tribulation of mind or emotional
exaggerations? That's so, isn't it? My judgments aren't biased
in the least by a word or several words or even by the force of
several sentences or of an entire speech. Fairly simple, both by
birth and by nature, you must surely concede that I am one of
those largely inhibited people whom words do not frighten. Well
now, Ferdinand, where Parapine is concerned, I have, after con-
scientiously summing him up, felt obliged to be on my guard--
to formulate very definite mental reservations. . . . His particular
form of peculiarity is totally unlike any of the more usual and
harmless ones. ... It seems to me to belong to one of the rare
and dangerous types of originality, to a species of extremely con-
tagious manias: to put it briefly, the social and overweening
type. . . . Perhaps it's not yet actual madness exactly that we've
to deal with in your friend's case . . . Maybe not. It's probably
as yet only overconviction. . . . But I know what I'm talking
about in this matter of contagious dementia. . . . There is noth-
ing more perilous than overconviction. ... I myself, as I stand
here talking to you, Ferdinand, have known a goodly number of
these men with fixed ideas--due to very various causes. Those
who prattle about justice have always struck me as definitely the
most deranged. ... At first these seekers after justice used rather
to interest me, I admit. . . . But now these maniacs annoy and
irritate me beyond words. . . . Don't you agree? One discovers
in men a certain remarkable facility for transmitting this kind of
thing, which I find appalling--and all men have it. D'you hear,
Ferdinand? Take note of this, Ferdinand: they all have it. Just as
for liquor or for lechery. . . . The same predisposition. . . .
The same fatal urge . . . infinitely widespread ... Do you laugh,
Ferdinand? Then you too alarm me, Ferdinand. Weak . . . vulner-
able . . . inconsistent . . . dangerous Ferdinand! And here
was I imagining you to be a sound and serious-minded person!
Remember that I, who am old> Ferdinand, could afford to snap
my fingers at whatever the future may hold in store! I may do
that. But you?!"

In principle, I always and in all cases thought the same as
my Chief. Practically speaking, I had not advanced far in the
course of a very chequered career but nevertheless I had learnt
the etiquette of a proper deportment in the service of other people.
I had at once got on with Baryton; thanks to this knowledge, we
became quite good companions in the end; I wasn't difficult, I
didn't eat much at meals. I was really quite a decent sort of
assistant, in fact: cheap to employ, not in the least ambitious,
not likely to be troublesome at all.





VIGNY-SUR-SEINE STANDS BETWEEN TWO LOCKS, BETWEEN TWO
BARE rises. It's a village that is being transformed into a suburb.
Paris is about to swallow it up.

It loses a garden a month. You enter it and find posters bedizen-
ing it like a Russian ballet. The bailiff's daughter knows how to
shake cocktails. The tramcar, which seems likely to become a part
of history, is the only thing which won't disappear without a revo-
lution. People don't like it at all, children haven't the same accent
as their parents any more. One feels almost embarrassed to be still
part of Seine-et-Oise. The miracle's taking place already. The last
nook of garden has disappeared with Laval's rise to power and
charwomen charge twenty centimes more an hour since the summer
recess. A bookmaker's arrival is advertised. The postmistress
buys pederastie novels and imagines much more realistic ones
in her own mind. For two pins the cure says Hell" and, if you're
awfully good, gives you tips on the exchange. The Seine has
killed all its fish and is being Americanized 'twixt a double row
of cutter-sweeper-tractor machines which give it frightful false
teeth of rubbish and old tin cans. Three real-estate men have been
clapped into gaol. We're getting on. This local transformation of
the land did not escape Baryton's notice. He regretted very much
not having had the gumption, twenty years ago, to buy more land
on the other side of the valley at a time when they begged you
to take it for twopence the yard, like rather stale tart. Those were
the good days. Happily his psychotherapeutic asylum still held
its own very nicely. Not, however, without certain difficulty.
Patients' insatiable families never ceased demanding, nay, insist-
ed on having, the most up-to-date cures, more electrical, more
full of mystery, more everything else. . . . The latest mechanical
contrivances, above all, appliances even more showy was what
they wanted, and at once. And so as not to be outdone by compe-
tition, he was obliged to buckle down to it. He mustn't be beaten
by similar institutions hidden away in the neighbouring woods
of Asnieres, Passy, and Montretout, lying in wait for any luxury
"loon."

Baryton, aided by Parapine, hastened to fall into line with
modern tastes, as inexpensively as possible, of course, buying at
a discount, or secondhand, or at sale prices, but without failing
to appear, thanks to the acquisition of new electric, pneumatic
and hydraulic gadgets, better equipped than ever to pander to
the fancies of his captious, monied little inmates. He groaned at
having all this useless apparatus forced upon him, at being oblig-
ed to conciliate the good graces of the deranged themselves.
. . .

"I opened my asylum, Ferdinand," he confided in me one day,
pouring out his regrets, "just before the Exhibition, the big
Exhibition. . . . There was only a handful of us alienists about
in those days, and we were far less depraved and strange than we
are to-day, believe me! Not one among us at that time ever tried
to be as mad as his patient. . . . It was not yet the fashion to
rave, oneself, on the pretext of bigger and better cures, an inde-
cent fashion, I would beg you to note, as is almost everything
which comes to us from abroad. . . . When I first went into prac-
tice, Ferdinand, the French medical profession still had some self-
respect left. . . . Doctors didn't consider it incumbent on them-
selves to go off their heads at the same time as the sick people
committed to their charge. The idea being to achieve perfect
harmony with them, I suppose? I give it up. ... To please, to
humour them? Where will all this lead us? I ask you. ... By
being more astute, more morbid and more perverse than the most
crack-brained of our asylum inmates, by wallowing with a sort
of muddy pride in all the various insanities they parade before
us, where will that lead us? Are you in a position to reassure me,
Ferdinand, as to the fate of our human reason? Or even of mere
common sense? At this rate, how much common sense shall we
have left? None. ... It's clear to be seen. . . . None at all! I can
promise you that. It is perfectly obvious. . . .

"Ferdinand, is it not true that in the face of a truly modern
intelligence, everything in the end assumes equal importance?
Nothing's white . . . nor black either. . . . It's all unravell-
ed. That's the new system! It's the fashion! Then why not, for
a start, go mad ourselves? Right now? And boast of it to boot?
Make one great parrot house of it, and ourselves advertise our
madness! Who can stop us? Answer me that, Ferdinand. . . . One
or two supreme, superfluous human scruples? A few sickly misgiv-
ings? You know, Ferdinand, sometimes when I listen to certain
of our confreres--and I'm referring to the most highly esteem-
ed and most sought after, both by patients and the academies?
I ask myself where they are leading us. Honestly, it's diabolical!
These lunatics stagger, appall, and infuriate me, and above
all, they revolt me! To hear them report at one of their modern
conferences the result of their personal researches makes me
blanch with terror; my mind boggles as I listen to them. Possess-
ed, malignant, captious and cunning, these favourite exponents of
modern psychiatry, by dint of superconscious analyses, are thrust-
ing us down into the abyss! Down to the nethermost depths, I tell
you! Some day, Ferdinand, if you of the younger generation do
not react against all this, the fatal slip will have occurred ?
understand me, the fatal slip! For we are overreaching ourselves,
sublimating ourselves, bludgeoning our brains, and we shall have
crossed the border line of intelligence, to the other side, the
fearful side from which there is no return. . . . Why, one would
think that these supercrooks were already confined in the regions
of the damned, so fiercely do they fiddle with their powers of
judgment day and night!

"Day and night I say truly, Ferdinand, for you know that even
at night they don't stop fornicating throughout their dreams,
the dirty scum! Delving into, dilating, inflaming their brains!
And that about sums it up. It is a disgusting medley of worn-out
organisms, a hotchpotch of bubbling, delirious symptoms which
ooze and leak from them at every pore. ... We have our hands
full of the remnants of our human understanding, sticky with
them, grotesque, contemptible, putrid. . . . Everything will
crumble, Ferdinand; everything is crumbling. I predict it, I,
Baryton, an old man, and it won't be long now, either! You will
live to see this tremendous rout, for you are still young. You will
live to see it! Ah, and I promise you you will have some fun. . . .
You will all join in aberration, in one vast burst of madness!
One too many! Go ahead--be mad! You will be released, as you
put it. You have been tempted, longing for it to happen, for too
long! Audacity--it certainly will be that, I can tell you! But
once you are there amongst the madmen, you won't return, mark
my words!

"Remember this well, Ferdinand, that the beginning of the
end is the loss of a sense of proportion. I am in a position to
tell you, Ferdinand, how the grand confusion started. It began
with a wild lack of moderation! Foreign frenzies! An outworn
sense of fitness, an end to strength! It was written. . . . Chaos for
all then? Why not? For every one? It is agreed. We are not going
in that direction, we are rushing there. ... It's a real rout. I've
seen the soul, Ferdinand, give way bit by bit, lose its balance and
dissolve in the vast welter of apocalyptic ambitions. It began in
I900. That's the date! From that time onwards the world in
general and psychiatry in particular frantically raced to see
who could be most perverse, salacious, original, more disgusting,
more creative, as they say, then his little next-door neighbour.
A first-class scramble! Each strove to see who could immolate
himself the soonest to the monster of no heart and no restraint.
. . . The monster will scrunch us all, Ferdinand, that's how it
is, and rightly so. . . . What is this monster? A great brute
tumbling along wherever it listeth! Its wars and its droolings flood
in towards us already from all sides. We shall be swept away on
this tide--yes, swept away. The conscious mind was a bore,
apparently. . . . We sha'n't be bored any longer! We've begun
to give Sodom a chance and from that moment we've started
having 'impressions' and 'intuitions'. . . . Just like women!

"Is it really necessary, at the point we have now arrived at,
to encumber ourselves with dangerous words of logic? Certainly
not! Logic would only be a kind of restraint in the presence of
infinitely subtle psychological savants such as our own day pro-
duces, genuine progressives. . . . Don't imagine me to be saying,
Ferdinand, that I despise women. By no means! You know that.
But I dislike their intuitions. I am a testicled animal myself,
Ferdinand, and when I've got hold of a fact, it is hard to shake
me off it. . . . Only the other day a very curious thing happened
to me, speaking of all this. ... I was asked to admit a writer
into my asylum. . . . The fellow was nuts, all right. Do you
know what he had been shouting for the last month? "We mict-
urate! We micturate!" That's what he went yelping through
the house. He'd got it badly, there was no question of that. He'd
crossed the border line of intelligence, but the point was, actually,
that he had the very greatest difficulty in making water. ... An
old stricture of the kidney was poisoning him, blocking up his
bladder. ... I passed probe after probe into him, rid him of it
drop by drop. . . . The family would have it that it was due
to his being a genius. It was no use my trying to explain to them
that really what was wrong was his bladder; they wouldn't hear
of it. ... In their view, he had succumbed to a flash of excessive
brilliance and that was that. ... In the end, I was forced
to fall in with their opinion. You know, don't you, what families
are; it's impossible to make a family see that a man, whether
he's a relation of theirs or not, is nothing but arrested putrescence.
No family would pay for the upkeep of arrested putrescence."

For over twenty years, Baryton had never succeeded in satisfying
the ticklish vanity of his lunatics' families. They made life
hell for him. Patient and well balanced as I knew him to be, he
nevertheless retained in his heart an old residue of rancid hate
against the families of his patients. ... At the time when I was
living in contact with him, he had become exasperated and in
secret was obstinately seeking to free himself once and for all
from this family tyranny, by one means or another. . . . Every
one has his own reasons for wishing to escape his personal misery
and every one of us, in order to manage it, coaxes some ingenious
method out of circumstances. Blessed are they for whom mere
whoring does the trick!

Parapine, for his part, seemed content to have chosen the way of
silence. As to Baryton, he, though I only realized it later, often
asked himself in his heart if he would ever contrive to escape
from these families, and their hold over him, and the thousand
beastly commonplaces of alimental psychiatry--from his whole
situation, in fact. He had so great a longing for absolutely new
and different things that at bottom he was ripe for evasion and
flight; whence, no doubt, these critical tirades. ... His ego was
being choked by routine. There was nothing left for him to subli-
mate; he just wanted to go away, to take his body somewhere
else. There was no harmony in him, so that to be through with
it all he had to upturn everything like a bear.

He, who considered himself so reasonable, cut himself loose
by means of an altogether most regrettable scandal. I shall
endeavour later on, at my leisure, to explain how all this
came about.

As far as I myself was concerned, for the moment there seemed
to me to be nothing wrong with my job as his assistant. The rou-
tine work of treatment was not at all strenuous, although indeed
from time to time a certain uneasiness seized me, when, for
instance, I had conversed at too great a length with the inmates;
a sort of vertigo used then to take hold of me, as if these
people had led me far from my usual haunts, without seeming
to do so, from one ordinary little remark to the next, by innocent
phrases, right into the very middle of their own delirium. For a
second I would wonder how to get out, or whether by any chance
I had not been shut up once and for all with their madness, not
realizing it.

I hovered on the dangerous outskirts of the mad, on their
border line, so to speak, always being pleasant-spoken with them
--which it was my nature to be. I wasn't tottering but all the
time I felt I was in danger, as if they were artfully luring me
into the purlieus of their unknown city. A city whose streets
became softer and softer as you advanced between their slimy
houses, the windows melting away, that would not shut, midst
dubious rumours. The doors, the ground slipping, and still you
were seized by the desire to go a little further, so as to know if
you would have the strength even so to recover your reason. . . .
Among the ruins, reason soon turns to vice, like good humour and
sleepiness with neurasthenics. You can think of nothing besides
your reason. Nothing counts after that. Laughter's over.

Thus everything was progressing from doubt to doubt when
we came to May 4th. A notable occasion, that Fourth of May.
It happened on that day that I was feeling so extremely well
that it felt rather as if it was a miracle. Pulse 78. As though
after a good lunch. Then suddenly everything began to spin round.
I gripped on tight. It all turned sour. People took on the queer-
est look. They seemed to me as sharp as lemons and even more
malevolent than before. No doubt from having climbed too high,
too giddily, to a high crest of health, I had come crashing down
before the mirror, to gaze with passionate interest at myself
growing old.

You no longer count your cares when these vile days come
crowding in between your nose and eyes--there's room enough
there alone for all the summed-up years of many men. Far too
much for one man.

By and large I suddenly found I would have preferred to go
back that very instant to the Tarapout. Especially as Parapine
had also given up talking to me too. But the Tarapout was out,
as far as I was concerned. It's hard lines to have no one but your
boss to turn to for every material and spiritual comfort, especial-
ly when he's an alienist, and one's not too sure now about one's
own head. One's got to stick it and not say a word. There were
still women for us to talk about, a benign topic, and one on which
I could still hope to make him laugh from time to time. On this
subject he used indeed to accord me a certain credit for experi-
ence, a minor disgusting competence.

It wasn't at all a bad thing that Baryton should look with some
disdain upon me as a whole. An employer is always somewhat
reassured by the ignominiousness of his staff. At all costs the
slave should be slightly, even much, to be despised. A mass of
little chronic blemishes, moral and physical, are a justification
of the fate which is overwhelming him. The world gets along
better that way, because then each man stands in it in the place
he deserves.

A being who is useful to you should be low, flat, prone to weak-
ness; that is what's comforting; especially as Baryton paid us
really very badly. In cases of acute avarice like this, employers
are always a bit suspicious and uneasy. A failure, a debauchee,
a black sheep, a devoted black sheep, all that made sense, justified
things, fitted in, in fact. Baryton would have been on the whole
rather pleased if I had been slightly wanted by the police. That
always makes for real devotion.

I had, of course, long ago given up every kind of self-esteem.
Such feelings had always seemed to me much above my position
in life, a thousand times too extravagant for my resources. I was
perfectly comfortable, having made that sacrifice for good and
all.

At present all I needed was to keep myself tolerably well
balanced as far as food and physical condition went. The rest no
longer mattered to me in the very least. But all the same, I
found it very hard to live through certain nights, especially
when the memory of what had happened at Toulouse came to
keep me wakeful for hours on end.

At such times I imagined, I couldn't help myself, all sorts of
dramatic consequences to Mother Henrouille's header into her
cellarful of mummies, and fear crept up within me from my entrails,
fear seized my heart and held it, thumping, till it made
me bound right out of the sheets to pace across my room, first
one way, then the other, into its deepest shadows and into the
morning light. During these attacks I came to despair of achiev-
ing for myself sufficient peace of mind ever to sleep again.
Never believe straight off in a man's unhappiness. Ask him
if he can still sleep. If the answer's "yes", all's well. That
is enough.

But I should never again be able to sleep to the full. I had,
as it were, lost the habit of confidence, the confidence it's
essential you should have--and truly vast it needs to be--to sleep
soundly among men. I should have required at least an illness,
a temperature, a definite desperate climax to get back some of
this indifference, and neutralize my personal anxiety, and so
retrieve foolish, divine tranquillity. The only bearable days I
can remember in the course of many years were the few days of a
sultry feverish attack of influenza.

Baryton never questioned me about my health nor did he bother
about his own. "Science and life make the most disastrous
mixture, Ferdinand. Always avoid taking care of your health,
believe me. . . . Every question you put to your body becomes
a wedge-end of anxiety, of obsession. . . These were his sim-
plified and pet biological principles. "Cunning old bird!" he
wanted me to think. "The obvious is enough for me," he'd often
say too, hoping to make me blink with surprise.

He never spoke to me about money, but that was only so as to
think of it the more himself, more intimately.

All this mix-up of Robinson's with the Henrouille family re-
mained, still only partly understood, on my conscience, and I
often tried to tell bits and episodes of it to Baryton. But it
didn't interest him in the least. He much preferred my African
experiences, especially those which referred to members of our
own profession whom I had met in all sorts of odd places and
the weird or dubious medical methods of these most unusual
colleagues of ours.

From time to time we at the asylum would pass through a
period of alarm on account of his little daughter Aimee. Of a
sudden, at dinner time, she would be found to be missing from
her room and not in the garden. Personally, I always expected
to come across her dismembered body behind some bush one
fine evening. With our lunatics wandering about all over the
shop, the worst might happen to her. As it was, she had already
had several very narrow escapes from rape. When this occurred,
a hell of a lot of squeals and douches and explanations ensued.
It was no good telling her not to go up certain too sheltered
paths; the child was invincibly attracted back each time to these
dark corners. Her father never failed on each of these occasions
to thrash her more than vigourously. It did no good. I believe
the whole thing rather appealed to her.

We on the staff had to be somewhat on our guard when we en-
countered or passed lunatics in the corridors. Madmen have a
greater facility for murder than ordinary mortals. So it had
become a sort of habit with us to turn our backs to the wall when
we met them, prepared always to welcome them with a good hefty
kick in the pit of the stomach if they made the slightest move.
They watched you closely and passed on. Aside from madness,
we understood each other beautifully.

Baryton deplored the fact that none of us knew how to play
chess. I had to start learning the game just to please him.

During the day Baryton was remarkable for an irritating and de-
tailed activity which made life all round him exceedingly trying.
A new little idea of some flatly practical kind would blossom
in his mind each morning. In order to replace the rolls of lavatory
paper by packets of loose sheets, we were obliged to ponder for
a whole week, which we wasted in contradictory determinations.
Finally it was decided that we should wait for the sales and then
go the round of the shops. Following that, another tedious prob-
lem presented itself; viz., flannel chest protectors. . . . Should
they be worn over one's shirt or under it? And what was the
best way of administering sulphate of soda? . . . Parapine with-
drew himself in stubborn silence from these sub-intellectual
wrangles.

Egged on by boredom, I had finished up by telling Baryton
many more adventures than had ever really taken place in the
course of my travels; I ran dry. After which it was his turn to
monopolize the entire conversation with his suggestions and petty
reticences. There was no way out. He had won by wearing me
down. And I had no such complete indifference with which to
defend myself as Parapine had. On the contrary, I had to answer
him, despite myself. I couldn't now prevent myself. I could no
longer avoid arguing futilely with him on the comparative merits
of cocoa and cafe creme. ... He was casting a spell of stupidity
over me.

We burbled at each other about everything and nothing under
the sun, about elastic stockings for varicose veins, optimum
faradic currents, cures for cellulitis of the elbow. ... I had come
to the point of blathering, exactly in accordance with his hints
and likings, about everything and nothing, like a master at the
game. He would accompany me and run on ahead of me in this
infinitely wasteful promenade. He saturated me with conversation
to last me forever and a day. Parapine laughed like hell in
his beard, hearing us wander off on quibbles as tortuous as the
macaroni, and spattered the boss's claret all over the tablecloth.

Still, God rest the soul of this old bastard Baryton. In the
end, I made him disappear, even so. But it needed tremendous
cleverness to do it.

Among the patients entrusted to my special care, the more
slobbery females led me the hell of a dance. . . . Always having
to attend to them with douches and catheters. . . . Their little
pranks and smacks in the eye; their gaping imperfections to be
kept clean all the time. . . . One young bedlamite frequently
earned me the Chiefs reproval. She wrecked the garden by pulling
up all the flowers; that was her mania, and I didn't like the
Chief having anything to say. . . .

"The Bride" they called her, an Argentine; physically speaking
not at all bad, but her mind was just one single idea--that
of marrying her father. One by one she picked all the flowers
in the garden and stuck them into the great white veil which she
wore everywhere, night and day. The case was one of which her
fanatically religious family was horribly ashamed. They hid their
daughter away from the world, and her idea with her. Baryton's
theory was that she had succumbed to the consequences of too
rigid and severe an upbringing, to an obdurate morality which
had, so to speak, exploded inside her brain.

At dusk, all our creatures were brought in, after long calls,
and we went the round of the various rooms, above all to prevent
the more excitable ones from abusing themselves too frequently
before going to sleep. Saturday evenings it was particularly im-
portant to hold them in check and pay special attention to this
sort of thing, because on Sunday, when their relations visit
them, it's bad for the reputation of the place for them to find
the patients pale and fagged out.

All this reminded me of that time with Bebert and the syrup
I had prescribed for him. At Vigny I gave quantities of this
marvellous syrup. I had kept the prescription. I ended up by
believing in it myself.

The doorkeeper of the asylum used to run a sweet little bus-
iness with her husband,--a real hefty guy whom we had to call
on now and again when some job needed tough handling.
Thus things went on, and months slid by, fairly well on the
whole, and we would not have had much to complain of if
Baryton had not suddenly hit on another of his grand new
ideas. No doubt he had for some time been wondering if he
could not maybe get rather more out of me for the same money.
Finally he hit on just the thing.

One day after lunch he trotted out his scheme. First of all,
he had had us served a bowl brimful of my favourite sweet--
strawberries and cream. That struck me at once as damned sus-
picious. Sure enough, I had hardly despatched the last of his
strawberries before he turned sharply in my direction.

"Ferdinand," he said, just like that, "I have been wondering
if you would be willing to give my little Aimee a few English
lessons. . . . What do you say to that? I know you have an
excellent accent--and in English a good accent's half the battle,
isn't it? Also, Ferdinand, without wishing to flatter you, may I
say that you have always been kindness itself?"

Taken aback, "Certainly, Monsieur Baryton," I said.

And it was agreed, without further ado, that I should give
Aimee her first lesson in English the very next morning. And
others followed, in due course, for weeks and weeks. . . .

We entered with these English lessons on a period of the
gravest unrest and misgiving, during which time events followed
each other in a rhythm which wasn't at all that of normal life.
Baryton insisted on being present at his daughter's lessons.
In spite of all my care and trouble, poor little Aimee couldn't
make head or tail of this English. Really not the first thing, to
tell the truth. She did not care one little bit what all these
strange new words could conceivably mean. She just wondered why
we should all of us want to keep on so, in this malicious way, try-
ing to make her remember what they meant. . . . She didn't cry,
but she came very near to crying. Aimee would have preferred
to be left quietly alone to muddle along with the small amount
of French she knew already, whose difficulties and facilities
amply sufficed to keep her busy all her life.

But her father did not look upon it at all in this light. "You've
got to grow up into an up-to-date young woman, Aimee dear,"
he would urge, trying all the time to make her feel better about
it. I, your father, have lost a great deal through not knowing
enough English to be able to get along properly with foreign pa-
tients. . . . There, there. . . . Don't cry, precious! Just listen
to Monsieur Bardamu who's so patient with you, so kind. . . .
And when you've learnt to pronounce the 'thes' with your tongue,
as he shows you, I'll give you a lovely shiny bi-cy-cle. . . ."

But Aimee had no wish to achieve these "thes" and "enoughs."
It was her father who said them for her instead, the "thes" and
"boughs," and quite a lot more things, in spite of his Bordeaux
accent, and his mania for logic, which is such a damned nuisance
in English. One month, then another, of this sort of thing went
by. As her father grew more and more passionately keen to master
English, Aimee had less and less often to do battle with these
vowels. Baryton took up all my time. He monopolized me, never
let go of me, he pumped my English out of me. As our rooms
were next to each other, I used to be able to hear him first thing
in the morning while he dressed, turning his everyday life into
English. "The coffee is black . . . My shirt is white . . . The
garden is green . . . How are you to-day, Bardamu?" he yelled
through the partition. He quite soon acquired a liking for the
most elliptical forms of the language.

This perversion of his was bound to drag us quite a way. As
soon as he came into contact with great literature, it was im-
possible for us to pull up. . . . After eight months of abnormal
progress of this sort, he was practically prepared to readjust
himself entirely, on Anglo-Saxon lines. And so it was that he
contrived to make me utterly disgusted with him, twice over.

By degrees we had reached the point where little Aimee was
left entirely outside our conversations and more and more to her
own devices. She retired once again, peaceably, into her private
clouds, with no intention of asking for anything that was left
over. She simply was not having to learn English any longer,
and that was that. Baryton could have the whole lot.

Winter came round again. It was Christmas time. Travel agen-
cies were advertising cheap return tickets to England. I not-
iced their posters on the boulevards, going to the cinema with
Parapine. ... I even went in to find out about the prices.

Then at table later, talking about other things, I let fall a
couple of words on the subject to Baryton. At first, my informa-
tion did not seem to interest him at all. He let the remark pass.
I even thought he had forgotten all about it, when one night
he himself referred to it again and asked me to bring him along
a prospectus some time.

Between our sessions of English literature, we'd often play
Japanese billiards and "bouchon" in one of the isolation wards,
this one being well provided with solid iron bars, just above the
porter's lodge.

Baryton excelled at games of skill. Parapine regularly played
him for drinks and as regularly lost. We spent whole evenings
in this little improvised billiard room, especially in winter when
it rained, so as not to muck up the chief's best reception rooms.
Sometimes we would have a troublesome maniac under observation
in there with us, but that wasn't at all usual.

While Parapine and the boss rivalled each other in skill on the
carpet or floor, I would amuse myself, if one can call it that,
by trying to experience the same sensations as a prisoner in his
cell. That was something I had missed. If you try hard enough,
you can achieve quite a liking for the queer people who pass
by in these suburban streets. At the end of the day, you can
almost feel pity for the little bustling movement that the tram
creates as it brings home from Paris subdued, submissive bunches
of men who have been at work throughout the day. Round that
first bend beyond the grocer's their defeat comes to an end.
They pour quite silently back into the night. One has hardly had
time to count how many of them there were. But Baryton very
rarely let me muse at my leisure. He'd break off in the middle
of a game of billiards to pester me with some absurd question.

"How do you say 'impossible' in English, Ferdinand?"

In short, he never tired of making great strides in his English.
With the utmost stupidity of which he was capable, he strove for
perfection. He would not hear of half measures or of anything
being "more or less" right. Luckily a crisis was to deliver me
from him. Not a moment too soon.

By degrees, as we forged ahead in our reading of English
history, I noticed him losing some of his assurance and finally
the better part of his optimism. When we got to the Elizabethan
poets, profound, undefinable changes seemed to come over his
mind and spirit. I was reluctant at first to let myself be con-
vinced of this, but finally I was forced, with the rest of us, to
accept Baryton for what he'd become, truly a lamentable specimen.
His attention, formerly so keen and so precise, now floated
away towards vague and interminable digressions. And little by
little it was he who took to sitting there for hours on end in
his own home, before our very eyes, lost in reverie, already far
removed. . . . And although I had been profoundly and thoroughly
disgruntled with Baryton for some time past, I nevertheless
felt a certain remorse as I watched him go to pieces like this.
... I considered myself somehow responsible for this debacle.
The chaos of his mind was not entirely inexplicable to me. So
much so that one day I suggested that we should call a halt for
a time in our studies of literature, with the excuse that a break
would do us both good and leisure would give us an opportunity
to look out new material. ... He wasn't in the least taken in
by my feeble ruse and refused on the spot, quite kindly but
firmly. He intended to proceed without slackening on our joint
spiritual discovery of England. . . .Just the same as he'd begun.
... I had no answer to that. ... I capitulated. He was actually
afraid he might not have enough hours left to live to accomplish
this task completely. . . . And though I feared the worst, there
was nothing for it but to pursue with him, willynilly, this des-
olate and purely academic quest.

Truly Baryton was no longer himself. Things and persons
round about us, slowed down and fanciful, were already losing
their importance, and even the colours we'd known them have
before assumed an entirely equivocal and dreamlike sweetness. . . .

Baryton now showed only a gradually languishing interest in
the details of running his establishment, although after all it
was his own creation, the work of his own hands, in which he had
been intensely engrossed literally for more than thirty years. He
left the entire management of the place to Parapine. The gathering
disorder of his brain, which in public he bashfully strove to hide,
soon became utterly obvious to us, irrefutable, a physical thing.

Gustave Mandamour, the policeman we knew at Vigny, whom
we employed at times when there was some big job on hand, and
certainly the most unobservant being it has ever been my lot to
meet among others of his sort, asked me one day, about that
time, if maybe the boss hadn't heard some very bad news. . . .
I reassured him as best I could, but hardly with conviction.

Baryton was no longer interested in tittle-tattle. His one wish
was not to be disturbed on any pretext whatsoever. At the begin-
ning of our studies we had, for his liking too rapidly, run through
Macaulay's "History of England," an exhaustive treatise in six
volumes. At his command we perused the whole of this great
work again--and that under altogether alarming mental conditions--
chapter by chapter.

Baryton seemed to me more and more perilously affected by
meditation. When we came to that utterly implacable passage in
which Monmouth the Pretender has just landed on the uncertain
shores of Kent ... Just at the moment when his adventure
begins to revolve in nothingness . . . When Monmouth the Pre-
tender no longer quite knows what it is he pretends . . . What
he wants to do. What he's come here to do. When he begins to
feel that he'd be glad to go away but no longer knows whither
or how to escape . . . When defeat rises up in front of him . . .
In the pallor of morning ... As his last ships are borne away
seawards . . . When Monmouth, for the first time, starts to
think . . . Then Baryton himself felt sick at heart, powerless
to forge his own decisions. ... He read and reread the paragraph,
muttering it over to himself . . . Exhausted, he shut the book and
flung himself down beside me.

From memory, with eyes half shut, he repeated the passage
many times; and in that English accent which was the best of
the many Bordeaux twangs I had given him to choose from, again
and again he recited it to us.

Confronted by this adventure of Monmouth's, in which all the
pitiable absurdity of our puerile and tragic natures is exposed,
so to speak, in the face of eternity, Baryton himself went dizzy
and as he was holding to our common fate merely by a thread,
he let go completely. . . . From that moment I can truthfully
say he was no longer one of us ... he had come to the end of his
tether.

Towards the close of that same evening, he asked me to go to
him in his private office. I certainly expected, at the stage we'd
now reached, that he would inform me of some big resolution
he had taken, such as, for instance, to sack me on the spot. . . .
No, that wasn't it at all. ... On the contrary, the decision he
had arrived at was entirely favourable to me. But it so rarely
fell to my lot to be surprised by some piece of good fortune that
I could not help a tear or two welling up into my eyes. Baryton
graciously took this sign of emotion to mean regret on my part
and felt called upon to console me.

"You will surely not go so far as to doubt my word, Ferdinand,
when I assure you I have needed something more and much
greater than courage to resolve to leave this house? You know
my sedentary habits. I am getting on now, and my whole career
has been one long, careful and detailed proof of a steadfast hard-
ness of heart, either immediate or delayed. How can it be possible
for me to have come, in the course of a few short months, to
abjure all this? Yet here I am, mentally and physically in this
condition of self-detachment and benevolence. Ferdinand: Hurrah!
--as you would say in English. Truly my past means nothing to
me now. I am going to be born again, Ferdinand! Yes, born
again! I am going away. Ah, your tears, kind friend, could never
lessen the definite disgust I feel for everything that has kept
me here throughout so many empty years. It's been too much. . . .
I'm through, Ferdinand! I tell you I am leaving. Cutting loose!
Escaping! I am tearing myself up by the roots. I know it. I bleed!
I can see all that. Yet not for anything in the world, Ferdinand,
could you make me alter my decision; no, for nothing in this
world . . . D' you understand? Even if I had dropped an eye
out in this mud, I would not turn back to look for it. Can I say
more than that? And now do you doubt the sincerity of my determi-
nation?"

I didn't doubt it at all. Baryton was evidently capable of any-
thing. What's more, I believe it would have been fatal to his
reason if I had crossed him in the state he had worked himself
up into. I let him have a bit of a rest and then, all the same,
I did try to sway him a wee bit; I risked making a last supreme
effort to bring him back to us. By means of slightly sideways
arguments; I was pleasantly oblique. . . .

"I beg you, Ferdinand, to abandon all thought of making me al-
ter my decision. It's irrevocable, I assure you, and I should
be very grateful if you would not speak of it again. Would you,
for the last time, like to do me that favour? At my age, after
all, sudden impulses are extremely rare. That is true. But when
they come, they're irresistible."

Those were his words, almost the last he spoke. I merely record
them.

"Perhaps, dear Monsieur Baryton," I dared in any case to
interrupt him, "perhaps this impromptu holiday which you think
of taking may prove in point of fact merely a romantic break,
a welcome diversion, a bright interlude in the austere course of
your career? Perhaps after you have tried another mode of life
. . . more pleasureful, less dully methodical, than the life you
lead here . . . Maybe then you will come back to us, happy to
have been away, unattracted by the thought of further novelties.
. . . You would thereupon automatically and easily resume your
place at the head of affairs here . . . Proud of your recent ex-
periences . . . Renewed, refreshed, in fact, and no doubt thence-
forth completely reconciled to the day-by-day monotony of our
working round . . . Grown old, in a word--if you will allow me,
Monsieur Baryton, so to express myself?"

"Ah, age, what a flatterer he is, this Ferdinand! He knows how
to touch the weak spot of my uncovered masculine pride, sensi-
tive and imperious still, in spite of so much weariness and so
many trials in the past. . . . No, Ferdinand, all the ingenuity
you may employ cannot soften the profound hostility and dis-
illusion in my heart. . . . No, no, Ferdinand, the time to hesitate
and retrace my steps is over now! I am, I admit, Ferdinand, empty!
Crushed! Overcome! That is what forty years of shrewd trivialities
have done for me. It is infinitely more than I can bear. . . . What
do I aim to do? Do you wish to know! I can tell you, and only
you, my greatest friend, you who have been willing in your admir-
able disinterestedness to share an old man's sufferings and
defeat. ... I want, Ferdinand, to try to go and do away with
my soul, as one goes and does away with a mangy old dog--a pet
who stinks and sickens you--so as to be alone. Quite alone at
last . . . Before the end comes . . . Calm . . . And one's own
self."

"But, my dear Monsieur Baryton, I had never received from
your speech or manner any indication of the violent despair whose
intractable stress you now disclose. ... I am dumbfounded. Quite
to the contrary, your ordinary conversation has appeared to me
to this very day eminently sane and to the point. Your abundant
lively initiative . . . The methodical and judicious exercise of
your medical skill ... In vain might I have sought for the least
sign in your daily life of any breakdown or collapse ... In truth,
I notice no such thing."

But for the first time since I had known him, Baryton took no
pleasure in my complimentary remarks. In fact, he gently asked
me to desist from continuing the conversation in this laudatory
vein. "No, my dear Ferdinand, I assure you . . . This evidence
of your friendship for me to some extent tends to sweeten in an
unexpected way my last moments here, but not all your solicitude
can render even tolerable for me the memory with which this
place is impregnated, of a past which entirely overwhelms me.
. . . I wish, at all costs, you understand, and in whatever cir-
cumstances, to leave all this in my wake."

"But what about the house itself, Monsieur Baryton; what are
we to do about that? Have you considered that?"

"Of course I have, Ferdinand. ... You will take over the
management during all the time I am away; that's quite simple.
Have you not always been on the best of terms with our clients?
They will therefore be only too pleased to accept you as Director.
It will all be perfectly all right, you'll see, Ferdinand. As to
Parapine, since he cannot endure conversation, he shall take charge
of the mechanical side, the apparati and laboratory. . . . That's
his strong suit. So everything's settled for the best. . . . Besides,
I no longer believe in people being indispensable. There, even in
that, you see, my friend, I have changed."

Indeed, there was no doubt. He was unrecognisable.

"But, Monsieur Baryton, aren't you afraid that your departure
may be most spitefully misconstrued by your professional friends
in the neighbourhood? In Passy, for instance? And Montretout?
And Gargan Livry? By all around? Spying on us ... By our indef-
atigably malicious confreres . . . What construction will they
put on your voluntary disappearance? What motives will they
impute to it? Flight? What otherwise? A prank? Fiasco? Bankruptcy?
Who knows?"

This eventuality had no doubt given him long and painful pause.
He was worried at this point, and turned pale before my eyes
as he thought of it. . . .

His daughter Aimee, our feeble-witted Aimee, was going to have
a pretty rough time of it as a result of all this. He was entrust-
ing her to the care of an aunt of hers who lived in the country,
a stranger really. Thus, with his private affairs arranged, it only
remained for Parapine and me to look after his interests and run
the place for him to the best of our ability. Heigh-ho, for a ship
without a captain!

I felt justified, since he had given me his confidence, in asking
him in what direction he felt this new adventure would take
him. . . .

Without the flicker of an eyelid, "England, Ferdinand!" he
replied.

All this had overtaken us in so short a space of time, to me it
seemed difficult to assimilate, but just the same we had to get
used to this new fate with alacrity.

Next day, Parapine and I helped to fix him up some luggage.
The passport, with all its little pages and visas, amazed him
rather. He had never had a passport before. While he was about
it, he would have liked to have had several, so as to be able
to change occasionally. We were able to convince him it wasn't
possible.

Once again, he wavered over the question of the hard or soft
collars he ought to take and how many of each sort. This problem,
barely solved, brought us very nearly up to the time of the train.
The three of us jumped on to the last tram for Paris. Baryton was
taking only a small suit case with him, as he meant, wherever
he went and in all circumstances, to travel light and be perfectly
mobile.

At the station, the imposing height of the international trains
impressed him mightily. He hesitated to mount such majestic
steps. He stood back from the coaches as if gazing up from the
foot of a monument. We helped him a little. Having taken a
second, he smilingly addressed to us a comparison of a practical
nature. "The firsts aren't any better," he said. We shook him by
the hand. The time had come. The whistle blew for the train to
start, which it did with a shudder and a clashing of steel, on the
tick of the minute. Thus our adieus were brutally curtailed. "Au
revoir, my friends!" he barely had time to shout, and his hand
appeared, uplifted towards ours. . . .

His hand moved yonder in the smoke, waving through the noise,
snatched by the night further and further into the distance
across the rails, still gleaming white. . . .





ON THE ONE HAND WE DIDN'T REGRET HIS GOING, BUT ALL
THE same his departure made the house seem damnably empty.
In the first place, the way in which he had gone off made us
rather sad--in spite of ourselves, you might say. It wasn't
natural, the way he had left. We wondered what mightn't happen
to us after a move like that

But I didn't have much time to wonder or even to feel bored
either. Only a few days after we had taken him down to the
station, there was a visitor to see me at the office, to see
me personally. The Abbe Protiste.

I had quite a bit of news to tell him--very exciting news.
Above all the incredible way in which Baryton had given us
all the slip and gone rambling off north. . . . Old Protiste
couldn't get over this when I told him, and when he at last
understood what I was saying, he could see nothing in the
new development but the advantages for me of such a situation.

"That your Director should have placed such trust in you
strikes me as a most flattering preferment for you," he kept
on droning at me.

I did my best to calm the man down, but he was well into his
stride and nothing in the world would shake him from this set
idea of his; he kept on prophesying the most magnificent future
for me, "a brilliant medical career," as he put it. I couldn't
get a word in edgeways. Even so with a great deal of difficulty
he did eventually revert to serious topics, and in particular
Toulouse, whence he himself had returned the night before.

Of course I let him in his turn tell me everything he knew. I
even showed surprise and stupefaction when he informed me of
the accident which had befallen the old lady.

"What? How's that?" I broke in. "She's dead? I say, but when
did that happen?"

So bit by bit he had to spill it all out. Without exactly tell-
ing me that it was Robinson who had tripped the old girl up on
her little staircase, he anyway didn't prevent me from suspect-
ing as much. She hadn't had time to say "Ouch!" We understood
each other well enough. Very prettily done, very neat. . . .
The second time he'd had a shot at it, he hadn't bogged it at
all. This time he'd put it over swell.

It was lucky that Robinson was supposed by the neighbors in
Toulouse to be still entirely blind. As it was, no one had looked
for more than an accident in all this, a very tragic accident, to
be sure, but in any case understandable enough when you came to
consider everything, the circumstances and all, the old person's
age and how it had happened at the end of the day, when she
was tired. . . . Personally, I had no wish to know more for the
present; as it was, I had quite enough to go on with. But it was
devilishly hard to get the Abbe to change the conversation. He'd
gotten the whole thing on the brain. He returned to it again and
again, always, no doubt, in the hope of making me slip up and
say something compromising; or so it seemed. . . . But there
wasn't anything doing. ... He could go ahead and try. . . .
Still, he did give up eventually and contented himself merely
with telling me about Robinson and Robinson's health. . . . About
his eyes. . . . Much better they were, apparently. But with him
it was the moral side that had always been weak. Definitely a
washout now, I gathered. And this in spite of the kindness, the
affection those two women continued to shower on him. ... In
return, he never stopped grumbling about his hard lot and the
life he led. . . .

It didn't surprise me, didn't at all surprise me, to hear all this
from the Cure. I knew what old Robinson was like. An ungrateful
disposition he had. But I distrusted the Abbe even more. . . .
I was as mum as a mouse while he talked to me. He had to do all
the confiding. . . .

"Despite the fact, Doctor, that, quite apart from the happy pro-
spect of an approaching marriage, life has now been made both
pleasant and easy for him, your friend, I must confess, disap-
points all our hopes. . . . Is he not once more a prey to that
fatal love of dubious adventures, that taste for going off the
rails, which you recognised in him of old? What do you make of
these tendencies of his, Doctor?"

Robinson's one idea down there in fact, if I undertsood aright,
was to chuck up the whole thing. The girl and her mother were
very put out about it, of course, and as upset as may be imagined.
That's what the Abbe Protiste had come here to tell me. It was
all not a little perturbing, to be sure, and for my part I was
definitely determined to hold my tongue and not intervene any
further in the little affairs of this family. . . . Our conversation
was inconclusive and we parted, the Abbe and I, at a tram stop--
rather coolly, if the truth be known. As I went back to the asylum,
I didn't feel at all easy in my mind.

Very soon after this visit our first news of Baryton reached us
from England. A few post cards. He hoped we were all well and
wished us "good luck." He dropped us a further line or two from
several odd places. A card with no wording on it showed us that
he had gone across to Norway. And a few weeks later a telegram
arrived to reassure us slightly: "Calm crossing," from Copenhagen.
. . .

Just as we had foreseen, the chief's absence was most maliciously
commented on in Vigny itself and in the country round. It would
be better for the Institute's reputation if in the future we
were to give no more than the fewest possible explanations as
to the motives prompting this absence, either to our patients
or to our colleagues in the neighborhood.

Months passed, extremely cautious months, silent and unrelieved.
In the end, we came entirely to avoid any evocation of Baryton's
memory. Actually his memory really rather made us feel a little
ashamed. . . .

Then summer came again. We couldn't stay in the garden, keep-
ing an eye on the lunatics all the time. To prove to ourselves
that we did have some slight liberty anyhow, in spite of it all,
we'd venture as far as the banks of the Seine, just to get out a
bit.

Beyond the mound of the other bank is where the great Genne-
villiers plain begins, a lovely long stretch of grey and
white, with its factory chimneys standing gently out through a
haze of dust and mists. Right by the towpath there's the bargees'
bistral, guarding the entrance to the canal. The yellow
stream comes pushing in against the lock.

We used to gaze down on it for hours on end, and to one side
too, over a kind of broad marsh, whose smell wafted stealthily
up on to the road with its motor cars. You got accustomed to it.
It had no colour left, this mud, so old was it and so worn out
by the risings of the canal. On summer evenings sometimes, the
slime would look kind of gentle and nice, with the sky gone pink
and sentimental. We'd come down there on to the bridge to listen
to them playing accordions on the sailing boats, waiting before
the lock gates for the night to be over so as to pass through to
the river. The ones that come down from Belgium are the most
musical. They've colour everywhere, green and yellow, and
clothes hanging up to dry full of tapes, and strawberry-pink
combinations too, which balloon out as the wind leaps into them,
in gusts.

I'd often go quite alone to this cafe on the marsh, after lunch
when time hangs heavy and still, and the publican's cat is at
peace within four walls, as if enclosed in a little heaven of blue
linoleum, all by himself.

There I'd too be drowsy in that early afternoon hour, out of
sight and out of mind, as I thought, waiting for time to pass.

I saw some one come along up this road from way off. It didn't
take me long to guess. He'd hardly got to the bridge before I
knew who it was. My old friend Robinson! Impossible to make
a mistake. "He's come along here looking for me!" I said to my-
self, right away. . . . "The cure must have given him my address.
... I'II have to get rid of him as soon as I can."

Just then, I thought it was hell to have to be bothered with
him, just when I was beginning to fix up a good, new little
peace of mind for myself. You don't trust what comes to you
up a long road, and you're quite right. So here he was now, nearing
the cafe. I came out. He seemed surprised to see me. "Where've
you come from now?" I asked, not very pleasantly. "Garenne,"
he said. "Oh," I said, "all right. Have you eaten?" He didn't
much look as if he'd eaten, but he didn't care to appear all
empty-bellied on arrival. "Hiking around still, are you, eh?" I
went on. Because I may say I wasn't at all pleased to see him
again. I didn't like it a bit.

Parapine was also coming up from the canal side, to look for
me. That was a good thing. Parapine was tired of being on duty
so often at the asylum. ... It is true too that I was taking
things fairly lightly. In any case, both he and I would have
given a good deal to know just when Baryton was thinking of
returning. We hoped he'd stop roaming about moderately soon
and come back to take over his darn madhouse and run it himself.
It was more than we could cope with. We weren't ambitious,
either of us, and didn't give a damn for any prospects in the
future. Which was wrong of us, of course.

There's another thing to be said in Parapine's favour: he
never asked any questions about the financial management of
the asylum or my methods of dealing with our clientele; however,
I told him just the same, against his will, you might say,
and when I did, I talked alone. In the case of Robinson, it was
important to tell him what was happening.

"I've often mentioned Robinson to you, haven't I?" I asked
him by way of introduction. "You know. . . . The man I made
friends with during the war. You remember, don't you?"
He had heard me tell all those war stories and stories of Africa
a hundred times over and in a hundred quite different ways. It
was a habit of mine.

"Well, here's the very man himself," I went on, "come all the
way from Toulouse to see us. . . . We're all going to have supper
together at the house." As a matter of fact, coming forward in this
way in the name of the house, I felt a little uncomfortable. It
was, in a way, an indiscreet thing to have done. The situation
required a smooth, ingratiating air of authority on my part,
which I was very far from possessing. And Robinson wasn't helping
matters at all. On the way home, he already showed signs of
curiosity and uneasiness as regards to Parapine, whose long pale
face beside us greatly intrigued him. He thought at first that
Parapine was a lunatic too. Since he had found out where we
lived in Vigny, he was seeing madmen everywhere. I told him
it was all right and not to worry.

"And what about you?" I said. "At least, you've found some
sort of a job since you got back?"

"I'm going to start looking for one," was as much as he'd
say in reply.

"But your eyes are all right again? You can see now, can't
you?"

"Yes, I see almost as well as before."

"So you're quite content then?" I said.

No, he wasn't. Not at all content. He had something better
to do than be content. I refrained from mentioning Madelon to
him as yet. That was a subject which it was still too delicate
for us two to touch on. We got on quite nicely over a drink
before dinner and I took that opportunity to tell him a lot of
things about the asylum and plenty of other details besides.
I've never been able to prevent myself from prattling indiscri-
minately. Not so very different from Baryton really, at bottom.
By the end of dinner, the atmosphere had grown cordial. After
it was over, I couldn't very well send Leon Robinson away again,
just like that. I decided there and then that for the present they
should rig up a little camp bed for him in the dining room.
Parapine continued to express no opinion. "There, Leon," said I.
"That'll be somewhere for you to stay, while you're still looking
for a job." "Thanks," he answered simply, and every morning
after that he took the tram into Paris to look for a
commercial-travelling job, so he said.

He was fed up with factory work, he said; he wanted to "travel."
Of course, he may have gone to some trouble trying to get a job
as a traveller, one must be fair, but anyhow the fact remains
he didn't find one.

One evening he was back from Paris earlier than usual. I was
still in the garden, keeping watch near the big pond. He
came to look for me there, wishing to have a couple of words
with me.

"Listen," he began.

"I'm listening," I said.

"Couldn't you give me something to do right here? ... I
can't land a job anywhere else."

"Have you tried hard?"

"Yes, I've tried hard."

"You want a job in the asylum? But what doing? Do you
mean you can't find yourself some little job in Paris? Would
you like me to talk to Parapine about it and see if we know
any one who could help?"

My offering to take a hand in trying to get him a job annoyed
him.

"It's not that you absolutely can't find anything," he then
went on. "One might find something . . . some small job. . . .
That's possible, of course. . . . But you've got to understand
how it is . . . I'II tell you. . . . It's simply got to seem as
if I was a bit wrong in the head. ... It's important and it's
essential that I should seem to be a bit wrong in the head."
"All right," I said at that point. "You don't need to tell me
any more. . . ."

"Yes, but listen, I must tell you, Ferdinand; there's a whole
heap more I've got to tell you," he insisted. "You've just got
to understand what I'm driving at. . . . And, anyway, I know you
--I know how long you take to understand things and make up
your mind."

"Go ahead, then," I said, resigned to it. "Go ahead, tell me."

"Listen, if I don't seem to be nuts, it's going to be just too
bad. . . . Things'll be in a hell of a mess, I can promise you
that. She's capable of having me arrested. . . . Now d'you get
me?"

"Madelon, are you talking about?"

"Why, sure it's Madelon."

"That's pretty!"

"You've said it, Ferdinand."

"Is it all off between you two then?"

"I guess so."

"Come this way, if you're going to tell me more about all this,"
I broke in at that point, and I led him off to one side. "It'll
be safer . . . with these lunatics about . . . they understand
things too, you know, and can be pretty awkward about repeating
what they hear when they like, even if they are mad."

We went up to one of the isolation rooms and once we got there,
he didn't take long to give me the whole affair, especially
as I already knew very well what Robinson was capable of and
anyway the Abbe Protiste had let me guess a good deal of it. At
his second attempt, he hadn't made a mess of it. No one could
say that he'd slipped up again this time. Oh, no. Not a bit of
it. That had been that, all right.

You see, the old girl kept getting my goat worse and worse.
. . . Especially after my eyes began to heal. . . . When I
was beginning to get around in the street on my own, I mean.
From then on, I was seeing things all right again. . . . And I
saw the old bird too. . . . Couldn't see anything else, damn
it. ... I had her there in front of my eyes all the time. It was
as if she was stopping up existence for me. ... I think she did it
on purpose. Just to sour things for me. ... I can't explain it
otherwise. . . . And besides, in that house we all lived in--you
know what it's like, don't you--it wasn't easy not to get sore
with each other. ... You know how small it was. You were
all on top of one another. ... No one could deny that."

"And the steps down to the vault weren't too good either. Were
they?" I had myself noticed how dangerous that staircase was
when I went over the place for the first time with Madelon,?
how the steps were shaky, even then.

"No, that didn't need much doing to it," he admitted, with
perfect frankness.

"And how about the folk down there?" I questioned him further.
"The neighbours, the church people, the reporters. . . .
Didn't they have any little remarks to make, what, when all this
happened?"

"No, you know, they didn't. . . . Anyway, they didn't believe me
capable of such a thing. They looked on me as a poor, washedout
creature. ... A blind man. Get me?"

"So that as far as that goes, you can consider yourself lucky--
because otherwise, eh? But Madelon? What part did she play in
all this? Was she in it too?"

"Not exactly. . . . But up to a point she was, of course, all
the same, because the crypt, you know, was to be ours entirely
when the old girl passed out. . . . That's the agreement that
had been come to. We two were going to take over between us."

"Then why couldn't you hit it off together after that?"

"Well, you know, that's rather complicated to explain."

"Madelon didn't care for you any more?"

"Why yes, quite the reverse; she cared for me a lot, and she
was certainly dead keen on the marriage business. . . . Her
mother was set on it too, much more than before. She wanted it
to take place right away, on account of old Ma Henrouille's
mummies which were our property now, and enough for all three
of us to live on comfortably in the future."

"What happened to break it up between you, then?"

"Oh, you know, I wanted them to leave me alone. . . . That's
all it was. The mother and the daughter both."

"Listen, Leon!" I pulled him up when I heard him say that.
. . . "Listen to me. That isn't on the level, you know, even at
that. Put yourself in their place, Madelon's and her mother's--
would you have been pleased, if you'd been them? Would you,
though? When you first went down there, you'd barely a shirt
on your back, you'd no job, nothing; you kept on all day about
how the old woman was pocketing your dough and one thing and
another. . . . Then she's out of the way--you put her out of
the way, rather. . . . And you start pulling faces again just the
same, the way you do. . . . Put yourself in the place of those
two women; try doing that! It's intolerable, man! I'd pretty soon
have told you what you could do with yourself, and damn fast
too, I would. . . . That's what you certainly deserved, that they
should kick you clean and hard in the pants. . . . And you may
just as well know it."

That's the way I spoke to Robinson.

"Possibly," he answered me back at once, "and you may be a
doctor and an educated man and all the rest of it, but you don't
understand my make-up one little bit."

"Shut up, Leon!" I had to say to him; really it was too much.
"Shut up, you little misery, you and your precious make-up!
You talk like a sick man. It's a damned pity Baryton's gone
haring off, Christ knows where, or he'd have taken you in hand
all right! And that's the best thing that could happen to you,
anyway. You ought to be locked up, for a start! D'you hear?
Locked up! Baryton would have looked after your make-up
for you!"

"If you'd had what I've had and been through what I've been
through," he retorted, when he heard me say that, "I've no doubt
you'd be a sick man yourself. You bet your life you would. And
worse than me too, maybe. ... A weak-kneed sissy like you!"
And then he started to curse me up hill and down dale, just as
if he'd a perfect right to.

I had a good long look at him while he bawled me out. ... I
was accustomed to being called names like that by the lunatics.
It had longed ceased to bother me.

He'd grown thinner since Toulouse and something too, which
I hadn't ever known in him before, had come over his face, like
a portrait, I thought, superimposed on his features,--a sort of
already forgottenness, with silence all round it.

Mixed up in all this Toulouse business there was something else,
something far less serious, of course, which he hadn't been able
to get over, and which, when he thought of it, nauseated him
again like bile. And that was having been forced to grease the
palms of a whole host of middlemen for nothing. He couldn't
stomach having had to hand out commissions right and left,
when they'd taken over the crypt,--to the priest, the woman
who let the chairs, the Town Hall, the Church Council and a
whole lot of others; and all to no purpose, when you come down
to it. It knocked him right up, the very thought of it. Robbery
was what he called that sort of thing.

"Well, and are you married at last, after all this?" I wound
up by asking him.

"No, I'm telling you. I wasn't having any after that."

"But little Madelon was a pretty cute piece though, surely?
You wouldn't deny that?"

"That's not the point. . .

"But, damn it, of course it's the point. You've told me you
were free, haven't you? If you were so set on leaving Toulouse,
you could have perfectly well have let her mother run the crypt
for a time . . . You could have gone back there later on. . .

"As far as being physically attractive's concerned," he continued,
"you're quite right. She really was charming, I admit; you hadn't
misled me, and that's a fact, especially as just imagine--when
I saw things again for the first time, as if it had happened
on purpose, the first thing I saw was her, in a mirror. ... You
can imagine it, can't you? In the light! It was almost two months
after the old woman had had her fall. ... I was trying to see
Madelon's face and sight returned to my eyes suddenly, while
they were on her. ... A flash of light, in fact. ... Do you
get me?"

"Wasn't that nice?"

"Yes, it was nice. . . . But that isn't everything."

"You cleared out just the same."

"Sure--and I'll explain, as you seem to want to understand.
. . . It was she in the first place who began to think me odd.
Said I'd lost interest in life. . . . Wasn't nice to her any-
more. . . . A lot of silly nonsense of that sort."

"Maybe it was your conscience that was troubling you."

"Conscience?"

"Well, how should I know?"

"You can call it what you like, but I wasn't feeling too good.
That's all I know about it. . . . All the same, I don't think it
can have been conscience. . . ."

"Are you ill then?"

"Yes, I should say that's it, ill . . . Anyhow, that's what I've
been trying to get you to see for the last hour. . . . You'll admit
you're pretty slow on the uptake."

"Oh, all right," I answered. "We'll say you're ill, if you think
that would be the safest plan."

"You'd do well to," he insisted, "because I can't guarantee any-
thing where that little girl's concerned. . . . She's capable of
squealing to the cops any minute."

It was as if it were a piece of advice he was giving me, and
I didn't want any advice from him, thank you. I didn't like this
kind of thing at all, because of the complications that were start-
ing all over again.

"D'you think yourself that she'd squeal?" I asked him further,
to make quite certain. "But she's something of an accomplice
of yours, though, isn't she? That ought to make her think
twice, say, before starting to blab."

"Think twice!" he leapt when he heard me say that. "Any
one can see you don't know her." It made him laugh to hear me
talk that way. "Why, she won't hesitate a second! Honestly,
man. ... If you'd seen as much of her as I have, you'd have no
doubt of it. She's in love, I keep telling you. . . . Haven't you
yourself ever had any dealings with women in love? When she's
in love, she's mad, that's all there is to it. Mad! And it's me she's
in love with and me she's mad about! It's perfectly simple. That
doesn't stop her. Quite the reverse."

I couldn't tell him it really rather amazed me that Madelon
should have reached such a pitch of excitement in the space of
only a few months; after all, I had had some slight experience
of her myself, come to that. I knew what I thought about her,
but I couldn't tell him.

From the way she had behaved in Toulouse and as I had heard
her when I was behind the poplar that day of the yacht, it
was difficult for me to suppose that her nature could have
changed so completely in such a short space of time. . . . She'd
appeared to me quick-witted rather than tragical, to have a
pleasantly open mind and to be quite ready to get fixed up by
means of bluff and little tricks, wherever there was a chance
of their catching on. But at the present juncture I had no further
remark to make. The only thing to do was to let it go. "Right.
All right." I said. "What about her mother, though? She must have
set up a bit of a holler when she realized you were slipping out
on them for good?"

"Say--didn't she, though? She jabbered all day long about
my having the instincts of a swine and that, mark you, just
when what I badly needed was just the opposite--to be treated
particularly nicely! What a game it was! It couldn't go on like
that, with the mother either, you know, so in the end I suggested
to Madelon that I would leave the crypt to the two of them,
while I went off on my own for a bit; I'd go travel about alone
a piece, see something of the world again. . . .

You'll take me with you,' she protested. 'I'm engaged to
you, aren't I? Leon, either you take me with you or you don't
go at all! . . . And what's more,' she insisted, 'you aren't well
enough yet, anyway.'

"'Hell, I'm all right. And I'll go alone,' I told her. So there
we were, stuck.

" 'A wife goes everywhere with her husband,' her mother said.
Why don't you get married?' She backed her up just to make me
really sore.

"Listening to all this rot made me feel like hell. You know me.
As if I had needed a woman to go to the war with. Or to come
out of it again! And I didn't have any women with me in Africa,
did I? And you didn't find me having women around in the
States, did you? Anyway, to hear them arguing away like this,
hour after hour, gave me a pain in the stomach. Gripes, man!
I know what women are good for. You do too, I expect? Damn
it all. I've been around in my time, too. In the end one evening,
when they'd made me lose all patience with their yowling, I let
out finally and told the mother exactly what I thought of her.
'You old cow,' I said to her. I said: 'You're even more of a
B.F. than Ma Henrouille was. ... If you'd known a few more
people and been around a bit more, as I have, you wouldn't be
in such a hurry to go about giving every one advice. And just
mucking about with tag-ends of tow in a corner of that godfor-
saken old church of yours, you won't be getting to know any
more about life, see? It would do you good to get out a bit more.
. . . Why don't you go out for a walk sometimes, you old skunk?
Maybe that'd freshen you up. You'd not have so much time for
saying prayers; you wouldn't look such a blistering idot!'
"That's what I said to that mother of hers. For a hell of a time
I'd had it on my mind to have a whack at her, honestly I had--
and she badly needed it, anyway. . . . But, all in all, it was me
it did good to mostly. . . . But you know, you'd have thought
that was all the old scab was waiting for, me spreading myself
like that, to let fly at me in her turn and call me every kind of
bastard she could think of! She flared up all right--said really
more than she need, as a matter of fact. 'You felon! You cad!'
she squealed. 'Why, you don't even work for your living! I've
been feeding you for nearly a year now, I and my daughter?
you good-for-nothing pimp!' You can imagine what it was like.
A slap-up family scene. . . . She sort of thought for quite a
time and then she said it under her breath, but you know she
had let it out then and she really meant it: 'Murderer! You mur-
derer!' she called me. I felt a bit queer when she said that.

"The daughter, hearing her mother speak that way, seemed
afraid I might knock her down on the spot. She flung herself
between us. She shut her mother's mouth with her hand. Quite
right. So they are in league against me, both of them, I thought
to myself. It was obvious. ... In the end, I let it go. It wasn't
the moment to be violent. . . . And anyway, what did I care
whether they were in league together or not? Maybe you think
that now that they'd let off steam, they'd let me alone for a
time? You'd say so, wouldn't you? But oh, no! That wouldn't
have been like them at all. The daughter began all over again. . . .
She was all hot in the head and hot somewhere else too. . . .
She went to it again, harder than ever:

" 'I love you, Leon, you know how much I love you, Leon. . . .'
That's all she knew,--that 'I love you' of hers. As if it was an
answer to everything.

"'You still love him?' her mother broke in, when she heard
her say that. 'But can't you see he's nothing better than a tramp?
Lower than dirt? Now that he's got his eyesight back, thanks to
the care we've taken of him, he's going to do you wrong, my
daughter! Listen to your mother, my darling--she knows.'

"Every one wept in the end, even I wept too, because in spite
of everything I didn't want to put myself too much in the
wrong with these two bitches, or to quarrel with them more than
I need.

"So I pushed off, but too many things had been said for this
situation to be left very long as it was between us. It dragged
on anyway for weeks, with us snapping at each other every
other moment and keeping a watch on each other all day and above
all, at night.

"We couldn't decide to part but our hearts weren't in it. It
was still mostly certain fears we had in common which kept us
together.

"'You don't love another, do you?' Madelon asked me sometimes.

'"No, of course not,' I'd try to reassure her. 'Sure I don't.
But it was obvious she didn't believe me. To her way of thinking
you had to love somebody in life and we couldn't get
beyond that.

"'Tell me," I'd say to her, 'what should I be wanting with
another woman?' But she'd got love on the brain. I couldn't
think what to say to calm her down. She went to lengths I'd never
dreamt of before. I never would have believed she could have
things like that in her head.

" 'You've stolen my heart away, Leon,' she'd accuse me, and she
seriously meant it. 'You want to leave me,' she'd threaten, 'Well ?
go then! But I warn you I shall die of a broken heart if you do,
Leon!' Now why should she be going to die because of me? What
sense did that make, eh? I ask you. . . . 'No, no, look here,
you're not going to die,' I'd say. 'I haven't done a thing to you,
anyway! I haven't given you a child or anything, have I now? Just
think! You haven't caught any infection off me, have you? Well,
then? I just want to go away, that's all. Go off on holiday, as
you might say. There's nothing strange about that, after all. . . .
Try to be reasonable.' Yet the more I tried to make her understand
my point of view, the less it appealed to her. In fact we just
couldn't come to an understanding. She went sort of crazy at
the thought that I might really feel the way I said I did, that it
was nothing but the truth, entirely straightforward and sincere.

"She also believed it was you who were urging me to clear out.
... So then, seeing that she couldn't hold me back by making
me ashamed of my attitude, she tried to keep me another way.
"'Don't imagine, Leon,' she said, 'that I wish to keep you
because of the crypt or anything. . . .You know money doesn't
really mean anything to me, fundamentally. . . . What I want,
Leon, is to be with you. ... To be happy. That's all. It's nat-
ural enough. I don't want you to leave me. ... It's wrong to
separate when one has loved as we two have loved. . . . Swear
to me at least, Leon, that you won't be gone long?'

"And this sort of thing went on for weeks and weeks. . . . She
certainly was in love and a hell of a nuisance. . . . Every even-
ing she harped back to this love-madness of hers. Finally she was
willing at all events to leave the vault for her mother to look
after, on condition that we should both go off together to hunt
for a job in Paris. ... It was always 'together' though. What a
game! She'd fall in with any scheme except my going my way and
she hers. . . . Nothing doing, so far as that went. . . . But the
more she seemed stuck on that, the iller she made me feel, of
course.

"It wasn't worth trying to make her see reason. I was beginning
to be made to see myself that it was really so much time
wasted and that her mind was made up and that everything I
said only made her madder still. So I simply had to set to and think
out some scheme to rid myself of her love, as she called it. That's
how I hit on the idea of putting her off by telling her, casual like,
that from time to time I went a bit queer in the head. . . . That I
was taken that way sometimes. . . . Never knew when it was
coming.. . . She gave me a dirty look, a very odd look. She wasn't
too sure it wasn't just another yarn of mine. . . . But then,
anyway, what with all the things I had told her had happened
to me before, and the war having affected me, and especially
that last business of the old lady and also my strangely altered
attitude towards her, all of a sudden, it did give her something to
think about all the same.

"And she thought about it for more than a week, letting me
alone all that time. . . . She must have whispered a word or
two to her mother about my being subject to these fits. . . .
Anyway, they no longer made quite such a fuss about keeping me,
after that. 'It is all right,' I said to myself, 'It's going to work. . . .
I'm free at last.' I saw myself quietly on my way to Paris, with
no bones broken. . . . Not so fast, though! I began to play the
game a little too well. ... I went in for fancy work. I thought
I'd hit on the perfect scheme for proving to them once and for
all that it really was the truth. . . . That I really did go cuckoo
at times. . . . 'Feel that!' I said to Madelon one evening. 'Feel
this bump on the back of my head. Can you feel the scar on it
and that great bump I've got, eh?"

"But when she'd properly felt the bump on the back of my
head, I can't tell you how thrilled she was. It gave her a whole
lot more of a kick, it did indeed; it didn't disgust her at all!
'That's where I was wounded in Flanders. That's where they
trepanned me,' I kept on.

"'Oh Leon!' she exclaimed as she felt the bump, "I'm terribly,
terribly sorry, darling Leon! . . . I've doubted you up to now,
but from the depths of my heart I beg you to forgive me! I
realize now I've been horrid to you. Yes, oh, yes, Leon dear, I've
been dreadfully unkind. . . . I'll never be unkind to you again!
I promise. Oh, but I want to make amends, Leon! At once. You
will let me make amends, won't you? I'll make you happy
again! I'll look after you from now on, I'II always be patient
with you. I'II be so sweet to you. You'll see, Leon. I'll understand
you so well that you won't be able to get on without me. . . .
I give you back my whole heart; I belong to you. All of me,
Leon. My whole life I give to you, Leon. But tell me at least
that you forgive me; you do, don't you, Leon?'

"I hadn't said a word of all that myself, not a thing. She'd
said it all, and so it was easy enough for her to answer herself
on her own. . . . Then, what in hell would make her stop?
"Touching that scar and that bump of mine had, you might
say, sort of made her quite drunk with love all of a sudden. She
awfully wanted to take my head in her hands, never let it go
again, and make me happy to my dying day, whether I liked
it or not. And after that her mother was never allowed to yell
at me any more. Madelon wouldn't let her mother speak. You
wouldn't have recognised the girl; she wanted to protect me
from every least little thing.

"A stop just had to be put to all this. I'd have preferred us
to part good friends. . . . But that wasn't even worth trying
for. . . . She was sick with love now and all of a heap. One
morning when they were out shopping, she and her mother, I
did what you did, I made up my little bundle and quietly pushed
off. . . . You surely can't say after all this that I wasn't pa-
tient enough? Only I promise you there wasn't anything to be
done. . . . Now you know all about it. And when I tell you there's
nothing that girl isn't capable of and that she may come here
any minute to have another crack at me, you needn't come and
tell me I'm imagining things! I know what I'm talking about. I
know what she's like, all right. And we'd be much easier in our
minds, I think, if she were to find me already by way of being
shut up with a lot of madmen, see? Like that, it'd be less diffi-
cult for me to make out I didn't understand any more. . . .
With her, that's what you need to do. . . . Just not understand
a thing."

Two or three months previously, all these things Robinson
had just told me would still have interested me a lot, but
I'd grown sort of old all of a sudden.

At heart, I had grown more and more like Baryton; I didn't
care a damn. This whole Toulousian escapade of Robinson's
was no longer a really vivid danger to me; I tried to wax excited
over the situation he was in, but it just seemed stale. Whatever
people may care to make out, life leaves you high and dry long
before you're really through.

The things you used to set most store by, you one fine day
decide to take less and less notice of, and it's an effort when
you absolutely have to. You're sick of always hearing yourself
talk. . . . You abbreviate. You renounce. Thirty years you've
been at it, talking, talking . . . You don't mind now about being
right. You lose even the desire to hang on to the little place you've
reserved for yourself among the pleasures of life. . . . You're
fed up. From now on, it's enough just to eat a little, to get a
bit of warmth, and to sleep as much as you can on the road to
nothing at all. In order to get interested again, you would have
to find new faces to pull for the benefit of the other people. But
now you haven't the strength to renew your repertoire. You
stammer over your words. You still, of course, go on looking for
gambits and excuses for staying on with the boys, but death's
there with you too, stinking alongside all the time now, less
mysterious than a game of cribbage. The only things that still
mean anything very much to you are the little regrets, like
never having found time to get round and see your old uncle at
Bois-Colombes, whose little song died away forever one February
evening. That's all one's retained of life, this little very hor-
rible regret; the rest one has more or less successfully vomited
up along the road, with a good many retchings and a great deal
of unhappiness. One's come to be nothing but an aged lamppost
of fitful memories at the corner of a street along which almost
no one passes now.

If you're to be bored, the least wearisome way is to keep absol-
utely regular habits. I made a point of seeing that everyone was
in bed in the house by ten o'clock. It was I who put out the lights.
And the business ran itself.

Anyway, we didn't trouble to think up anything new. The
Baryton System of Cinematic Cures for Cretins was quite enough
to keep us going. The establishment had given up economizing
much. Wasteful expenditure, we calculated, might make the Chief
come home, since it was such torture to him.

We'd bought an accordion for Robinson to give his charges
something to dance to in the garden in summertime. It was difficult
to keep the lunatics occupied at Vigny day after day and night
after night. You couldn't send them to church all the time; they
got too bored.

We got no further news from Toulouse and the Abbe Protiste
never came back to see me again, either. Life in the asylum
became settled and furtively monotonous. Morally speaking, our
consciences weren't entirely easy. There were too many ghosts,
one way and another.

Still more months passed. Robinson began to look better in
health. At Easter, the lunatics became somewhat restless; women
in light dresses were passing back and forth before our garden
railings. Burgeoning spring. We prescribed bromide.

Since I had worked at the Tarapout, the casts had been changed
there several times. The little English girls were far away now,
they told me, in Australia. We shouldn't be seeing them again. . . .
I wasn't allowed back stage, after my Tania episode. I didn't
press the point.

We started writing letters to one place after another, chiefly
to the consulates in the northern countries, hoping to get some
inkling of Baryton's possible movements. We got no answer of
any interest from any of them.

All the while Parapine discharged his technical duties deliber-
ately and in silence. In the last two years he had certainly not
uttered more than a score of remarks in all. It came to my having
to decide the small practical and administrative details and ever-
yday requirements of the place almost on my own. I slipped up
once or twice, but Parapine never blamed me in any way. We
got on together by dint of sheer indifference. In any case, an
adequate influx of new patients kept the place financially on its
feet. When we'd paid the tradespeople and the rent, we had still
quite enough left over to live on ourselves, after regularly mak-
ing Aimee's allowance over to her aunt, of course.

Robinson, I thought, was much less jumpy now than he had been
on his first arrival. He was looking better and had put on
three kilos. In fact, it seemed that as long as there was any
insanity left in people's families, they would be delighted to
turn to us, admirably placed as we were, within easy reach of town.
Our garden alone was worth the trip out. People came all the way
from Paris to admire our baskets and our clumps of roses on
fine days in summer.

It was on one of these June days that I first thought I recog-
nized Madelon, in the middle of a strolling group of people. She
stood quite still for a moment or two just at our gate. Right at
first I didn't want to let Robinson know anything about this
apparition, so as not to frighten him, but then, after all, when
I'd thought about it carefully, a few days later, I advised him
not to stir far from the house in future, at any rate for a time,
on those aimless strolls round the neighbourhood which he'd got
into the habit of taking. This advice of mine he found disquieting.
He did not, however, make any attempt to know more.

Towards the end of July, we got several post cards from Baryton,
from Finland this time. We were glad to get them but still
there was no word about returning home; he merely once again
wished us "'Good Luck" with a whole lot of other pleasant messages
besides.

Two months passed into the distance, and others followed them.
. . . The dust of summer clad the roads again. One of our madmen,
on All Saints' Day, caused a bit of a hullabaloo in front
of the Institute. Up to now a quite peaceful, well-behaved patient,
the funereal exaltation of All Saints' Day disagreed with him.
We weren't quick enough to stop him screeching from his window
that he never wanted to die. More and more passers-by kept find-
ing him deliciously droll. It was in the midst of this flare-up
that again, and this time much more distinctly than before, I
received the very disagreeable impression of thinking I recognized
Madelon standing in the front row of a group of onlookers, in
exactly the same place, opposite our gateway.

Later, during that night, I woke in an agony of mind; I tried
to forget what I'd seen, but all my efforts to forget were vain.
It was no good trying to get any more sleep.

I hadn't been back to Raney for a long time now. As soon
as be haunted by my nightmare, I wondered whether I mightn't
just as well go and have a look-see in that direction, whence all
misfortunes came, sooner or later. . . . Down yonder, I had left
nightmares behind me too. ... An attempt to forestall them
might pass at a pinch for some sort of precaution. The shortest
road to Raney from the Vigny direction lies along the embankment
as far as the bridge at Gennevilliers?that flat one, stretched
out across the Seine. The slow river mists are torn apart at the
water's edge, curl, hasten, sail up, tremble and sink down over
the other side of the parapet round the bitter, flaring light of the
ancient oil lamps. There on the left, the squat great works, where
tractors are made, hides in a slab of darkness. Its windows are
open to the mournful fire which is burning it away inside and
never gets put out. Once past the factory, you're alone on the
riverside. . . . But you can't lose your way. ... You realize
more or less when you've arrived by how tired you are feeling.
Then all you have to do is to turn left up the Rue des Bournaires
and it's not very far after that. It isn't hard to know where you
are, because of the red and green signals at the level crossing,
which always show a light.

In the pitchest-black night I could have gone to the Henrouilles'
little house with my eyes shut.

I'd been there often enough, at one time. . . .

Yet that night, when I reached their door, I stopped to ponder
instead of going forward.

She was living alone in the house now, I reflected. . . . They
were all dead, all the others were dead. . . . She must have known,
or at least she must have surmised, how that old mother-in-law
of hers had met her end down there in Toulouse. . . . What had
she felt about it, I wondered. ...

The lamp-post on the pavement shone white on their little glass
portico, as if there was snow on the step. I stayed there, at
the corner of the street, just looking, a long while. I could just
as well have gone on and rung the bell. She would certainly have
opened to me. After all, we hadn't really quarrelled as badly as
all that. It was icy-cold standing there where I had stopped. . . .
The street still ended in a quagmire, as in my time. The authori-
ties had promised to do something about it; nothing had been
done. No one came by that way.

It's not that I was afraid of her, afraid of Madame Henrouille,
Junior. No. That wasn't it. But all of a sudden, as I stood there,
I no longer had any desire to see her again. I'd made a mistake,
setting out to visit her again. There, in front of her house, I
realized in a flash that there wasn't anything now she could tell
me. ... It would now be even a bore to have her talk to me;
that is all. That's what we had come to mean for one another.
I had gone further ahead into the night than she had, even
further than the older Henrouille woman, and she was dead. . . .
We weren't together any more. . . . We had parted for good. . . .
Separated not only by death, but by life too. ... It had happened
that way by force of circumstances. Each for himself! said
I inwardly. . . . And I went off again on my own road towards
Vigny.

She hadn't enough education to follow me now, the younger
Henrouille woman. . . . Character she had, certainly she had
that. . . . But no education. That was the snag. No wisdom!
That's what's essential--knowledge! So she couldn't understand
me now, nor understand what went on around us, however
obstinate and bloody she might be. . . . That's not enough. . . .
You need a heart and understanding to go further than the rest
of the people. ... It was along the Rue des Sanzillons that I
went to get back to the river and then down the Impasse Vassou.
My troubles were settled ... I was feeling almost good! Pleased
because I could realize that there was no longer any point in
bothering any more about the daughter-in-law Henrouille, I had
ended up by losing her en route, the creature! What an episode
that had been. We'd got on well together, after our own fashion.
. . . We'd understood each other well enough at one time, the
Henrouille woman and I. . . . Quite a while that had lasted. . . .
But now she wasn't low enough down for me, she couldn't get
down. . . . Didn't know how to join me. . . . She hadn't the
brains or the strength. You don't climb upwards in life; you go
down. She couldn't get down there to me, where I was . . . There
was too much of the night covering me. . . .

Passing in front of the tenement building where Bebert's aunt
had been concierge, I almost thought of going in, just to see the
people who now occupied her lodge, in which I had looked after
Bebert, the place from which he had slipped away. . . . Perhaps
there was still that schoolboy picture of him over the bed. . . .
But it was too late to wake people. I passed on without making
myself known to them.

A little further on, on the Faubourg de la Liberte, I came again
to Bezin's junk shop, with the light still burning. ... I wasn't
expecting that. . . . But it was only just a gas jet over the goods
in his window. Bezin knew all the gossip and the low-down on the
whole neighbourhood, through hanging about the cafes; so familiar
a sight all the way from the Foire aux Puces to the Porte Maillot.
He could have told me a thing or two if he'd been awake. I
pushed his door. The bell rang all right, but no one answered.
I knew that he slept at the back of the shop, in the room he ate
in, as a matter of fact. . . . That's where he was, too, all in
darkness, with his head on the table between his arms, sitting
sideways over the cold supper awaiting him--a plate of lentils.
He had not started to eat it. Sleep had seized him as soon as he'd
got in. He was snoring hard. It's true he'd been drinking too, of
course. I remember the day well. It was Thursday, the day of the
Lilas junk market. He had a bundle open on the floor at his
feet, full of cheap bargains.

Myself, I'd always thought Bezin a good sort, as decent a
bloke as most. He was all right. Easy-going, not tiresome at all.
I wouldn't wake him up out of curiosity, just to ask him my little
questions. ... So I pushed off again, putting his light out for
him before I went.

He found it hard to make ends meet, of course, in this sort of
little business he carried on. But he at least had no difficulty
in sleeping.

I turned back towards Vigny again, feeling sad as I thought of
all these people, these houses, these dim and dirty things which
now no longer spoke to me at all, straight to the heart as they
had spoken once, and I, too, though I might seem all cock-a-hoop,
had maybe not enough strength left either now, I felt sure, to
go on a long way further by myself, like that, alone.






WE KEPT TO THE SAME ARRANGEMENT FOR MEALS AT VIGNY
AS WE had in Baryton's time; that is to say, we all sat down to
them together, but for preference we now ate in the billi-
ard room over the porter's lodge. It was less formal than
the real dining room, which was still reminiscent of those
most unhumorous English conversations. Besides, there was
too much fine furniture in the dining room for our liking--
genuine 1900 pieces, with opaltinted window panes.

From the billiard room you could see everything that happened
in the street. There might always be something to that.
We spent all day Sundays in this room. Occasionally we'd have
guests--some local doctor we'd invited to supper--but our
most usual companion was Gustave, the traffic cop. He, indeed,
was a regular visitor. We had struck up an acquaintanceship
through the window, as we watched him on Sundays at his post
on the crossroads which marked the entrance to Vigny. He
used to get into difficulties with the cars. It started with some
casual remark from us, and after several Sundays we had come to
know one another quite well. I had happened to attend both his
sons at one time in town; first one with measles and then the
other with mumps. He was our faithful friend, Gustave Mandamour
--that was his name--and he hailed from the Cantal. In conver-
sation he was a little trying, as he had difficulty with his
words. He could find them all right but he couldn't pronounce
them; they just stayed somewhere at the back of his mouth,
rumbling.

One evening--I believe it was for a joke--Robinson casually
invited him in to billiards, but it was his nature always to
persevere with everything, so after that he came every evening
at the same time: eight o'clock. He liked being with us, he prefer-
red it to going to the cafe, as he told us himself, because of the
political discussions which frequently grew heated between the
habitues there. Whereas we never talked politics. For Gustave,
in his position, politics were a somewhat delicate topic. He
had had a certain amount of trouble on that score already. In
the first place, he ought not to have talked politics, especially
not when he'd had a few drinks, and that's what did happen.
In fact, he was known to booze a good deal; it was his weakness.
But at our place he felt himself secure on all scores. He himself
admitted as much. We didn't drink. It was all right for him
to come to our house, no ill effects could come of it. He came
to us in perfect trust.

When Parapine and I considered the situation we had once
been in and the one we had chanced on at Baryton's, we didn't
feel like complaining, it would have been quite wrong of us if
we had; because really, as a matter of fact, we had had the most
miraculous kind of luck and were well provided with everything
we needed, both in the way of consideration and material comforts.
Still, personally, I'd always had my doubts about this miracle
lasting. I had a sticky past and already it was catching me up
again, like a hang-over of Fate. Just starting in Vigny as I was
then, I had already received three anonymous letters which had
seemed to me as nasty and threatening as they well could be.
And then, following that, several more utterly spiteful missives.
It's true, of course, that we often had anonymous letters sent to
us at Vigny and normally we didn't pay any particular attention
to them. Most of them came from former patients whose perse-
cutions had started harassing them again at home.

But these particular letters did worry me rather; they were
not like the others; they were more definite in their accusations,
which invariably referred only to Robinson and myself. To tell
the truth, they accused us of living together. It was a dastardly
aspersion. I didn't like to mention the matter to him at first, but
eventually I did bring myself to, as I kept getting more and more
letters on the same lines. Then we tried to make out whom they
might be from. We worked over a list of all the possibles among
our mutual acquaintances. We couldn't make out who it could
be. Anyhow, it was a futile sort of thing to accuse us of.
Inversion was not in my line and Robinson didn't care a damn
about sex, of either one kind or another. If there was anything
on his mind, it certainly wasn't connected with any urges of that
sort. No one but a jealous woman could have thought out such
disgusting nonsense.

All told, we knew of nobody except Madelon who would be capable
of making a set at us here in Vigny with disgusting fabrications
of this sort. I didn't mind if she went on writing us all this
muck or not, but the danger was that, furious at getting no
reply, one of these days she might come after us in person and
treat us to a public scene in the Institute. We could expect the
worst.

We lived through several weeks of this sort of thing, jumping
every time we heard the bell. I was expecting a visit from
Madelon or, worse still, the police.

Every time that Gustave Mandamour came round for his game
rather earlier than usual, I wondered if he wasn't bringing a
warrant in his belt, but at that time he was still as friendly and
soothing as could be. It was only later that he too began, most
noticeably to change. At that period he was still losing almost
every day, at every game he played, with the utmost serenity. If
his attitude towards us changed, it was certainly our own fault.
One evening, just to know, I asked him why he didn't ever happen
to win at cards; I had no real reason for asking Mandamour that;
it was just my passion for always knowing the wherefore and the
how of things, especially as we didn't play for stakes anyway.
Then, as we discussed the bad luck he had, I went closer to him
and, looking at him more carefully, noticed that he suffered
quite badly from short sight. Actually, in the light we had in
that room, he could only with difficulty distinguish spades from
clubs. One couldn't have that.

I put his infirmity right for him, giving him a nice pair of
spectacles. At first he was very happy just having them on, but
that didn't last. Now that he was playing better, thanks to the
glasses, he lost less often than before and took it into his head
in future never to lose at all. And as that was impossible, he
started to cheat. And when he happened to lose in spite of
cheating, we would have him sulking on our hands for hours
at a time. In short, he became impossible.

It was damned annoying; the least little thing put him out of
temper, and what's more, he would now try in his turn to vex us,
to give us something to worry and fret about. When he lost a
game, he revenged himself in his own way. And yet I repeat we
weren't playing for money, but just for the fun and kudos of
the game. All the same, he was furious. . . .

And so one evening, when he had had bad luck, he turned on
us before he left. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am going to warn
you to look to yourselves. . . . Considering the type of people
you're acquainted with, if I were you, I'd watch my step. . . .
There's one dark girl in particular who has been walking past
your house quite regularly of late. . . . Much too regularly, if
you ask me. . . . She probably has her reasons. . . . And if
she were after having a word with one or other of you gentlemen,
I shouldn't be too surprised . . ."

That's how Mandamour threw this pernicious thing in our teeth
as he went out. Oh, yes, he got his little effect all right.
But I pulled my wits about me in an instant. "Ah, thank you,
Gustave," I answered, perfectly calmly. ... "I can't think who
this dark girl you mention can be. None of our female patients
has so far, to my knowledge, ever had cause to complain of our
care of her. ... No doubt it's some poor madwoman. . . . We
shall discover her again in time. Still, you are quite right;
it's always best to know. . . . Thank you yet again, Gustave,
for having thought to warn us. . . . And good night."

Robinson at that couldn't get up from his chair. When the
policeman had gone, we examined this piece of information he
had given us from all angles. It might perhaps not be Madelon
after all. . . . There were plenty of other women who did come
roaming around under the asylum windows. But all the same,
there was a grave likelihood of it being her and this surmise
was enough to petrify us. . . . If it were she, what was she
planning to do next? And anyway, what could she have had to live
on all these months in Paris? If she were going to come here
herself and raise Cain in the place, we'd have to bestir our-
selves and make plans, right away.

So, "Listen here, Robinson," I said at that point; "make up
your mind; now's the time; decide now and don't go back on it.
. . . What are you going to do? Do you want to go back to
Toulouse with her?"

"No, I tell you--no. No. No. No!" That was the answer he
gave me. So now I knew.

"All right," I said. "All right. But if that's the case, if you
really don't care to go back down there with her, the best thing,
I think, would be for you to go and earn your living abroad
somewhere, for a time at least. Like that, you'd be sure of giving
her the slip. She couldn't very well follow you that far, could
she? . . . You're young still. You're strong again. . . . You're
rested. . . . We'll give you a little ready cash: then--so long!
That's what I think. And anyway, you realize, don't you, that
there's no place for you here. ... It can't last indefinitely,
you know. . . ."

If he had only really listened to me, if he had gone away at
that juncture, that would have suited me down to the ground;
it would have been fine. But he didn't go away.

"You're kicking me out, Ferdinand!" he protested. "That's
not kind, at my age. . . . Take a good look at me. After
all. . . ." He didn't want to go away. He was, in fact, tired
of moving around. "I don't want to go beyond where I am," he
insisted. "You can talk as much as you like ... do what you
like ... I won't go."

That is how he responded to my friendly gesture. All the
same, I kept on.

"And what if she were to give you in charge for the murder of
old Madame Henrouille, let's suppose she did that. . . . You
said yourself she was perfectly capable of doing it."

"So much the worse, then," he replied. "She can do what
she likes."

That was something new, a remark like that, coming from
him; up to now fatalism hadn't been much in his line.

"At least, go and get yourself some little job hereabouts, in
a factory--then you wouldn't have to be here with us all the
time. ... If they came for you, there'd be time to let you
know."

Parapine entirely agreed with me on that point and even went
so far in this contingency as to address a few words to us again.
So that clearly this thing that was happening among us must
have struck him as extremely serious and important. What we
needed to do was to think out some way of fixing Robinson up,
of camouflaging him somehow. Among our business connections we
numbered one local employer, a coach builder, who owed us some
slight gratitude for certain extremely delicate little services
we had done him at critical moments. He was quite ready to give
Robinson a trial at hand painting. It was a pleasant job, not
hard work, and decently paid.

"Leon," he was told, the day he took up the job, "don't ball it
all up now; don't go and get into trouble with those deplorable
ideas of yours. . . . Get there in time. . . . Don't leave before
the others. . . . Say 'Good morning' to everybody when you arrive
. . . . Mind your p's and q's, in fact. You're in a respectable
workshop now and you're there on our recommendation."

But then all the same he went and got himself spotted at once
--and it wasn't his fault either--for making use of the head's
private washroom, and a snooper in the next workshop split on
him. . . . And that did the trick. He was hauled up. There
was an argument. He was fired.

So here was Robinson back on our hands again, out of a job,
after only a few days. As bad luck would have it.

And on top of that, he started in to cough again, almost the
same day. We overhauled him and discovered a complete series
of wheezes up the whole of his right lung. There was nothing for
him to do but to keep to his room.

This happened one Saturday evening just before supper and
some one was asking for me, waiting to see me, in the reception
room.

A woman, they said.

It was she, with a little three-cornered hat on, and wearing
gloves. I remember quite well. No need to beat about the bush;
she had come at just the right moment. I let her have it straight
from the shoulder.

"Madelon," I forestalled her, "if it's Leon you're looking for,
I don't mind telling you at once that there's no point in your
keeping on about it; you might as well go home again. He's
wrong in the lungs and the head. Pretty seriously wrong. . . .
You can't see him. ... In any case, he hasn't anything to say
to you."

"Not even to me?" she urged.

"No, not even to you. . . . Particularly not to you. ..." I
added.

I thought she would burst out at that. She didn't. She only
stood there before me, shaking her head from side to side, her
lips tight shut, and with her eyes she tried to discover me in
the place where she had left me in her memory. I was there no
longer. I had moved, I too had shifted in her memory of me.
In our present circumstances, I should have been afraid of a man,
of some tough lout, but with her I had nothing to fear. She was
weaker than I was, as the saying goes. As long as I can remember,
I had always wanted to clout a face possessed by anger, as hers
was, just to see what happens to an angry face if you do. That,
or a fat cheque, is what you need so as to see an instant change
come over all the passions which dodge around in a person's
head. It's as lovely to watch as a sailing ship going "about"
on a high-running tide. The whole mind answers to the new
shift in the wind. That's what I wanted to see.

For twenty years at least I had been pursued by this desire. On
the street, in cafes, in all the places where people, with greater
or less aggressiveness, fretful and bragging, fly at each other's
throats. But I had never dared, for fear of being slugged myself,
and above all for fear of the shame which follows coming to
blows. But here was the opportunity for once, magnificent.
"Are you going to get out?" I asked her, just to make her
angrier still, to bring her to the proper pitch.

She no longer knew who I was when I talked to her like that.
She started to smile, abhorrently, as if she were finding me very
ridiculous and negligible. . . . Biff! Bang! I landed two slaps
across her face which would have been enough to shake a house.
She tottered and fell flat across the broad pink divan on the
opposite side of the room, against the wall, her head in her hands.
Her breath came in little gasps; she moaned like a little dog
that's been too thoroughly thrashed. Then after that she seemed
to think a while and suddenly she jumped up, lithe and supple,
and was out of the door without even turning her head. I had
seen nothing. It hadn't been any good.





BUT WE WERE NO MATCH FOR HER; SHE WAS CRAFTIER THAN THE
whole lot of us put together. And the proof of it is that she got
to see her Robinson again--and saw him, what's more, exactly
as and how she wished. The first to spot them together was
Parapine. They were sitting outside a cafe opposite the Gare de
I'Est.

I had already suspected that they were seeing each other again
but I didn't wish to appear in the least interested in their
relationship. It was none of my business, anyhow. He did his job
at the asylum, not altogether too badly--a beastly job, if ever
there was one--looking after the paralytic cases: tidying them
up, washing them, changing their linen for them, making them
slaver. We had no call to ask more from him than that.

If he arranged to see Madelon on the afternoons I sent him
up to Paris to shop for us, that was his affair. The fact remains
that we ourselves never saw anything more of her at Vigny after
the face-slapping episode. But I guessed she must have had
some pretty unpleasant things to tell him about me after that.
I didn't even mention Toulouse to him now, as if none of all
that had ever happened.

Six months passed in this way, whether we liked it or not, and
then of a sudden a vacancy occurred on our staff; we had imme-
diate and urgent need of a nurse with plenty of experience of
massage work. Ours had gone off and left us without warning
to get married.

A goodly number of fine-looking girls put in for the post and
as it turned out, we only had the difficulty of choosing among so
many well-built creatures of all nationalities who flocked down to
Vigny-sur-Seine as soon as our advertisement appeared. In the
end we picked on a Slovak of the name of Sophie, whose complexion,
whose easy and at the same time gracious bearing and divinely
healthy appearance we found, I must admit, irresistible.
This Sophie child of ours spoke only a few words of French,
but I took it on myself?it was, in all politeness, the least I
could do--to give her lessons in the language at once. I experi-
enced, forsooth, on coming into contact with such freshness,
a renewal of my interest in teaching, though Baryton had
done everything to put me off it. But I was impenitent. My
hat, though, what exquisite youthfulness! What spirit! What
muscles! What an excuse! Elastic! Rippling! Perfectly aston-
ishing. Loveliness too, unhampered by any of the false or
genuine prudishness which so gets in the way of ordinary, too
occidental conversations. Personally, and to be quite frank, I
admired her to distraction. I proceeded from one set of muscles
to the next, by anatomical groups. ... By muscular slopes, by
sections. . . . Vigour at once so well coordinated and so easy-
flowing, lodged in sheaves of muscle now resilient, now yielding
to the touch--I could never tire in its pursuit . . . beneath
that velvety, taut, untaught, miraculous epidermis . . .

The era of living delights of the great, incontrovertible physi-
ological harmonies is yet to come. The body of a godhead mauled
by my unworthy hands ... the hands of an honourable man, that
unknown parish priest. . . . First must come Death and Words.
. . . What loathsome claptrap. It's smeared from head to
foot with a thick coating of symbolism and quilted top to toe
with such a foul artiness that your man of culture tries his luck
in bed. . . . Let who can manage it then! A swell, a dandy
racket! A saving, after all, not getting a thrill except out of
looking back. We've got that all right, we've got reminiscences;
you can buy reminiscences, and jolly fine ones, lovely ones to look
back on, to your heart's content once and for all. . . . Ah, but
life's more complicated, above all the life of the human form.
... A desperate task . . . There's none more difficult, hazardous.
Compared to this vice of seeking after perfection in shapes,
cocaine's nothing but a hobby for stationmasters.

But let us get back to our darling Sophie? Her mere presence
seemed a stroke of daring in the sulky, sombre, timorous atmo-
sphere of our house. After we had lived under the same roof with
her a little while, we were, it's true, still charmed to have her on
our nursing staff, but even so we couldn't help fearing that, some
time or other, she would disorganize the sum total of all our
infinite cautiousness or merely one fine day come suddenly to
realize the pitiful griminess of our condition. . . . Poor Sophie,
she was not yet aware of the extent of our cringing surrender.
A set of hopeless failures. . . . We admired her aliveness by our
side, if she merely rose and came to our table or walked away
again. . . . She enchanted us. And each time she performed these
simple gestures, we were overcome with joy--and surprise. In
some way, we seemed to gain in poetry just in admiring her being
so utterly beautiful, so much more unselfconscious than we were.
. . . The rhythm of her life was drawn from other sources than
ours. Ours were jangling rhythms, sickly and sad. . . . This happy
impulsation, at once precise and gentle, which animated her from
the waves of her hair to her ankles, troubled us; it charmed us
but it made us uneasy, that is the word--uneasy.

Our cross-grained knowledge of the things of this world rather
resented, even if instinct did not, the fresh delight of this
creature--knowledge ever present, fundamentally afraid, taking
refuge in life's depths, accustomed to accept the worst, self-
enured to it.

Sophie had that winged, supple and balanced carriage which one
so often finds in the women of America, the bearing of a people
of the future, whom life carries ambitiously and lightly towards
new forms of enterprise. ... A brigantine of tender gaiety
headed for the Infinite.

Parapine, who wasn't, you'd have said, at all given himself
to any particular lyricism over matters of attraction, would smile
to himself as soon as she went out of the room. . . . The simple
fact of contemplating her did your soul good. . . . Especially
mine, in justice be it said, which longed for it so much.

In order to catch her out, to make her lose a little of this pride,
this sort of power and hold she had over me, in short, to render
her slightly more human to fit our own paltry proportions, I used
to enter her room while she slept.

And then was Sophie quite another sight to see--this a familiar
one, yet all the same surprising, and also reassuring, as
without show or circumstance, almost without bedclothes, lying
across her bed, thighs anyhow, limbs glistening and relaxed, she
tussled with fatigue. Deep within herself, she worried sleep and
growled upon it. Only at such moments was she within my reach.
No witchcraft or enchantments here. No mere facetiousness. Dead
serious, this. She laboured on the further side of existence,
squeezing still more vitality from it yet. Greedy she seemed at
such times, drunk with gulping all she could of it. She was worth
seeing too, after these bursts of snoring, all swollen with them
still, and beneath her rosy skin her lungs and windpipe filled
with ecstasy. She was droll then, and as ridiculous as any one else.
She trembled with happiness several minutes more and then all
daylight descended on her again and, as if after the passing of too
ominous a cloud, glorious and delivered, she gathered up once
more the impetus of her life.

All that can be embraced. It's nice to touch the precise moment
when matter becomes life. You soar up to the infinite plains which
stretch out before mankind. "Ooo!" you say: and "Ooo!" As much
as you can you enjoy riding that moment and it's like great wide
desert sands.

Of our number, her friends rather than her employers, I was, I
believe, her most intimate friend. It's perfectly true, of course,
that she deceived me regularly with the male nurse in charge of the
agitated cases ward, an ex-fireman; for my good, as she explained,
so as not to tire me out with the mental strain I had to make in
all the work I had to do, which suited the outbursts of her own
unruly nature not too well. Entirely for my own good. She cuck-
olded me for hygienic reasons. There was nothing to be said in
answer to that.

All this state of affairs would have brought me really nothing
but pleasure had it not been that the Madelon business still
preyed on my mind. One fine day I ended up by telling Sophie
all about it, to see what she'd say. It helped me rather, telling
her my troubles. I had had enough of the endless wranglings and
bitterness that this unfortunate love affair of theirs had caused,
and that's a fact. Sophie entirely agreed with me.

As Robinson and I had been such friends in the past, Sophie
thought we all ought to make it up--just make it up quite nicely
and as soon as possible. This advice came from a good heart.
They have many good hearts like that in Central Europe. The
thing is, she wasn't really wise to the characters and reactions
of our own people; with the best intentions in the world, she was
giving me entirely the wrong advice. I realized that she had made
a mistake, but I only realized it too late.

"You ought to see Madelon again," she suggested. "She must be
a very nice girl at heart, from what you tell me. . . . Only, of
course, you provoked her and have been thoroughly brutal and
horrid to her! . . . You owe her an apology and ought even to
give her a lovely present to make her forget about it all. . .
That's the way they did things in her country. What she advised
was, in fact, extremely courteous. But not a bit practical.

I followed her suggestion as much as anything because I glimps-
ed the possibility, beyond all these bowings and diplomatic
how-d'you-do's and scrapings of a little foursome which would
be utterly delightful if it came off--and revitalizing too.
Under the pressure of circumstances and passing years, my
friendly feelings were taking, I am sorry to observe, a surrep-
titiously erotic turn. Treachery! And Sophie, without meaning to,
was now abetting me in this betrayal. Sophie was a little too
curious by nature not to be attracted by risks. An admirable char-
acter with never any complaint to make and not anxious in any
way to minimize life's occasions, distrustful on principle only.
Just my kind. And she went a great deal further than that. She
understood how necessary it is to change and change about in
one's diversions between the sheets. An adventurous disposition,
hopelessly infrequent in women, you'll have to admit. Definitely
we'd both chosen well.

She would have liked me to give her--and that I can quite
understand--some description of what Madelon was (made) like.
She was afraid of appearing clumsy in the presence, in any inti-
macy, of a Frenchwoman--especially in view of the great reputation
for particular artistry in this line with which the Frenchwoman's
name has been associated abroad. As for having to put up with
Robinson as well, it was only to do me a pleasure that she
would consent to such a thing. The idea of Robinson didn't appeal
to her in the least, she told me, but be that as it may, we were
agreed. And that was what mattered. Very well then.

I waited a little while for a good opportunity to come along of
dropping a word or two to Robinson about my scheme for a general
reconciliation. One day, when he was in bursar's office, copying
out medical reports in the big ledger, the moment struck me
as opportune to broach my idea. So I interposed and quite simply
asked him how he thought it would be if I approached Madelon
with the suggestion that all the recent unpleasantness between
us should be forgotten. . . . And might I not at the same time
introduce her to my new-found friend, Sophie? And whether in-
deed he did not himself feel that the time had come for us all
finally to make it up and be friends again.

At first, I noticed, he faltered a little and then he replied,
but without much enthusiasm, that he didn't see why not. . . .
Actually, I believe Madelon must have told him that I would
pretty soon be making some attempt to see her again, on one
pretext or another. About having slapped her that day she came
to Vigny, I breathed not a word.

I wasn't going to risk getting myself sworn at in this place and
be called a cad by him in public, because after all, even though
we might be old friends, in this house he had to take his orders
from me. Before all else, my authority had to be preserved.
It would do quite well to fix up this next step for January
sometime. We arranged, because that was easiest, all to meet in
Paris one Sunday; and then we could go to the movies together
and maybe take a short turn round the Batignolles fair for a
start, if it wasn't too cold. He had promised to take her to
Batignolles in fair time. Madelon was crazy about travelling
fairs, he told me. Well now, that was fine! Meeting again for the
first time like that, it would be as well to choose a fete for the
occasion.








MY, BUT THE FAIR WAS SOMETHING TO GET AN EYEFUL OF,
THOUGH! And a head-full of, too! Crash and bang--and bang again!
I spin you round here . . . And carry you off there! And I shake
you up too! So there were we all in the melee, under the lights,
in the hubbub, in the thick of it all. Walk up, walk up--this
way for showing your skill and taking a chance and howling with
laughter. Whoops! Every one tried in his overcoat to look his
best, to appear gay and wide-awake; though a little distant all the
same, just to show people that ordinarily one went elsewhere for
one's amusement, to much smarter, more "expensive" places, as the
English say.

Witty, light-hearted merrymaker was what you pretended to
be, despite the cold north wind which also helped to humiliate
you and that depressing fear of making too free with all these
diversions and having to regret it next day and maybe for a whole
week following.

A great regurgitation of music splutters up inside the round-
about. The roundabout can't quite throw up its waltz from
"Faust", but it tries the best it can. Deep down it goes, that
waltz, and then mounts up again, swirling against the round top
overhead, which revolves like a great cake sprinkled with electric
lights. The organ's not comfortable; it has a musical pain in its
pipes, in its stomach. "Like some nougat? Or would you prefer
a box of chocolates? Whichever you'd rather. . . ."

Of us, the four of us, at the shooting alley, it was Madelon,
with her hat pushed back off her forehead, who showed most skill.
"Look," she said to Robinson. "My hand's absolutely steady.
And yet we had quite a lot to drink." That's to give you an idea
of what the talk was like. We'd just come out of a restaurant.
"One more go!" Madelon won it, Madelon won the bottle of
champagne. Ting--Tiiiing! Whiz! Then I bet her something;
I bet her she wouldn't catch me in a dodge-em-car. "Oh, won't
I?" she says gaily. "All aboard--we'll take one each!" Right.
Come on, then. I was glad she'd accepted, it was a way of making
friends with her again. Sophie wasn't jealous. She knew it was
all right.

So Robinson gets in behind with Madelon in one car and I
leap into another with Sophie and we have a grand series of
collisions. Wallop--take that! Oh, you would, would you? But
soon I realize that Madelon doesn't like it, doesn't enjoy being
jolted about like this. Nor does Leon, either; he hates it. Obviously
he's not at his ease with us. As we clutch at the barrier to get out,
some little sailor boys come banging into us, men and women alike,
and make us various offers. We swerve. We hit back. We laugh.
More and more bruisers bear down on us from all sides amid the
music and the excitement; you get such frightful dunches in these
sorts of barrels on wheels that each time you bang into some one
your eyes start out of your head. Whoopee! Violence and jollity--
the whole gamut of the pleasures. I'd like to get in right with
Madelon again before we leave the fair. I try awfully hard to,
but she no longer responds to my advances. Positively not. She even
sulks at me. She holds me at a distance. I'm baffled by this. In
one of her moods again. ... I had hoped for something better.
Even physically she's changed; everything about her has changed.
I notice that by comparison with Sophie she loses, she lacks lustre.
Being friendly suited her better but you'd say now she feels above
all this. That gets on my nerves. I'd gladly slap her again, to see
if that would bring her to her senses; let her tell me what's made
her so superior, tell me that to my face. Oh, but smile, damn you,
smile! We're at a fete, you can't go moping around like this.
Put some life into it!

She's found work with an aunt of hers, she tells Sophie after
that, as we walk along. In the Rue du Rocher, with an aunt who
makes corsets. Well, I suppose that's true.

From then on it wasn't hard to see that as a reconciliation the
whole thing was a wash-out and my little idea, too, was all spoilt.
Really a crashing failure.

We had made a mistake planning to see each other again.

Sophie hadn't properly understood what the situation was. She
didn't see that we had only complicated things by meeting again.
. . . Robinson ought to have told me; he ought to have warned
me that she was through to this extent. ... A great shame . . .
Oh, well, there it was . . . Ting-a-ling . . . a-ling. Keep it
up even so, and all the time . . . This way, this way for the
"Caterpillar", as they call it. I suggest it; it's me who pays--
I'm again trying to get back into Madelon's good books. But she
continually gives me the slip, she avoids me; she manages, in the
crowd, to get onto another seat in front with Robinson; I'm
stymied. Waves of eddying darkness daze us. Nothing to be done,
I conclude to myself quietly. And Sophie has come to agree with
me. She realizes that in all this I've once more fallen a victim
to my dirty mind. "You see? She's vexed. I think it would be better
to leave them alone now. . . . We two might go and take a look
round the Chabanais before going back. . . ."

That was an idea which greatly appealed to Sophie; back in
Prague she'd often heard people talk about the Chabanais and
there was nothing she would like better now than to see it with
her own eyes so as to be able to judge for herself. But when we
considered the money we had on us we worked out that it would
cost too much. So there was nothing for it but to take a renewed
interest in the fete again.

While we were in the Caterpillar, Robinson must have had a
row with Madelon. Both of them got down off it, altogether loathing
the whole fair. It certainly was unsafe to go near her to-night.
To calm her and smooth things over, I suggested an all-absorbing
form of entertainment--a competition fishing with rings for the
necks of bottles. Madelon took to it with a bad grace. All the same,
she easily beat the lot of us at it. She got her hoop just above
the cork in the bottle and slipped it over before you could say
knife. So. Click: and there it was! The showman couldn't get over
it. He handed her out a demi Grand Duc de Malvoison as a prize.
That shows you how clever she was at it. But still she wasn't
satisfied. She at once announced she wouldn't drink it. "It's
lousy stuff," she said. So then Robinson immediately uncorked it
and drank it. Hup! And at one swig too. A funny thing for him
to do, seeing that really as a rule, he didn't drink.

We came to an "Aunt Sally" after that--a zinc backdrop and
a wedding group of dolls. Clang! Clang! We all had at it, with
hard balls. ... It's depressing how bad I always am at these
things. I congratulate Robinson. He too can beat me at whatever
game we try. But skill at games doesn't make him smile, either.
Really, you'd have said both of them were being forced to some
awful labour. There was no way to liven them up, to remove those
frowns. "We're at a fair, d' you realize?" I yelled; really for once
I was at my wits' end.

But it was all the same to them what I did to cheer them up,
what I kept saying into their ears. "What's the matter with you?"
I asked them. "How about the young ones? What are they going to
do about it? . . . Isn't youth going to have its fling? I don't take
it lying down, do I? And I'm ten pips older than the rest of you.
Eh, honey?"

They looked at me then, Madelon and he, as though they were
in the presence of some jibbering, glassy-eyed, foam-flecked idiot
and it wouldn't be even worth while answering what I said. . . .
As if there wasn't any use now in even trying to talk to me, for
I certainly shouldn't understand what it was they tried to tell
me. . . . Not one single word about anything. . . . "D' you think
maybe they're right?" I asked myself and looked round very
anxiously at all the other people round us.

But they were doing all the right things to be amused, these
other people; they weren't just brandishing their little sorrows
about like us. . . . Not at all. They were taking their share of the
fun. A franc's worth here! Fifty centimes' worth there! Wisecracks
to laugh at, tunes to hear, sweets to suck. . . . They buzzed
around like flies, even holding their little larva in their arms,
livid, pasty-faced babies, so pale in the too great light they were
almost on the point of disappearing. One little spot of pink these
babies had left, that's all, about their noses, the place for catching
colds and being kissed.

Among all the various booths, how well I recognized the "Stand
of All Nations'*, as just then I passed it by?that brought back
memories. But I said nothing to the others. Fifteen years, I said
to myself, for only me to hear--there's fifteen years have gone
by ... A good long stretch. And one's lost a buddy or two on
the way. ... I wouldn't have thought they'd ever have shifted
that "Stand of All Nations" out of the mud it was sunk in,
back there at Saint-Cloud. . . . But it had been all nicely done
up, almost as good as new, it was these days, and with music now
and all . . . Well . . . there it was. People were shooting away
at it, thirteen to the dozen. A shooting alley always pays. There
was the egg back again, like me; in the middle, on top of almost
nothing, bobbing up and down. Two francs it cost to shoot.
We passed on; it was too cold to have a go, better to keep on
walking. But not because we hadn't enough money, there was
plenty in our pockets still, money jingling, playing a little
tune of the pocket.

I'd certainly have tried any darn thing at that moment to get
some different idea into the heads of these people, but no one
helped at all. If Parapine had been with us, no doubt it would
have been even worse, considering how lugubrious he always was
when there were people around. Fortunately, he'd stayed behind
to look after the asylum. As far as I myself was concerned, I was
sorry to have come. . . . Then, even so, Madelon began to laugh;
but it was no fun hearing her. Robinson by her side sniggered so
as not to be out of the picture. Then Sophie at that point suddenly
started trying to be funny. That made the whole thing complete.
As we went past the photographer's stall, the fellow caught sight
of us hesitating. We didn't want to go in and be photographed,
any of us--except possibly Sophie. But there we soon were,
facing up to the camera, thanks to hovering about so much in
front of his entrance. We gave way to his drawled injunctions and
stood there on the three-ply bridge of what purported to be a
ship--he must have built it himself--La Belle France, The name
was on the fake life belts. There we stayed a good long time,
gazing straight ahead of us, defying the future. Other customers
waited impatiently for us to come down off the bridge and they
were already taking it out on us for having to wait by regarding
us as frightful sights; and what's more, they told us so, and in
no uncertain manner.

They were taking advantage of our not being allowed to move.
But Madelon, she didn't care, she swore back at them with a
good, full-flavoured Southern accent. She was beautifully audible.
It was a wow of a retort.

Magnesium flare. We all snarl. A snap each. We're uglier than
we were before. The rain comes through the canvas roof. The soles
of our feet are sore--with fatigue and as cold as ice. The wind
had found holes all over us as we posed, so that now our overcoats
seem barely to exist.

We've got to start wandering around again among the booths.
I don't dare suggest going back to Vigny. It's still too early for
that. Now that one's chattering with cold, that mawkish music
from the roundabout seizes the opportunity to jangle on one's
nerves just a little bit more. The collapse of the whole world--
it's that the confounded thing's giggling about. It screeches a
message of defeat through all its silver-painted pipes. The tune
sails off to fade into the near-by darkness across the smelly
streets which run down from Les Buttes.

The little servant girls from Brittany cough far more this
winter, of course, than they did last, when they hadn't been in
Paris long. Their thighs, streaked blue and green, decorate as
best they may the saddle girths of the wooden horses. The young
men from the Auvergne, who pay for rides for them, careful
little post-office officials, take careful precautions when they
go to bed with them, as every one knows. They're not going to
catch it a second time. The servant girls rock themselves to the
revoltingly melodious racket of the roundabout and wait for love.
They're not entirely happy about it, but they'll pose even when
it's 10 below zero, because this is the supreme moment, the
moment to try out their youthful charms on that permanent lover
who may, perhaps, be somewhere here, already smitten, hidden
among all the other saps in this chilled crowd. As yet, Love doesn't
dare. . . . Everything comes to you in the end, though, as it
does in the films, and along comes happiness as well. Let the son
of the proprietor love you but one single day and he will never
more leave your side. . . . That's what happens, that's all it
needs. ... Of course he's lovely, and of course he's handsome,
and of course he's rich.

Near by in the kiosk next to the Metro, the old woman who keeps
it doesn't care a cuss about the future; she's got conjunctivitis
and she scratches her eyes with her fingernails and gradually
makes them fester. It's a pleasure, after all, of a kind, an ob-
scure pleasure costing nothing. Six years those eyes of hers
have lasted her and they're itching better and better.

Groups of fair-goers, bunched against this death of cold, make
haste to huddle round the tombola. They can't quite get there.
Buttocks as warming-pans. So then they trot quickly across the
leap for warmth into that knot of people opposite, outside the calf
with two heads.

Hidden behind the public lavatory, a little fellow who's on the
verge of unemployment is naming a figure to a couple up from the
country, who blush with excitement. The morality cop's wise to
their little game but the devil he cares; his meat for the moment
is the exit of the Cafe Miseux. The whole of this week he's been
watching the Cafe Miseux. Must be at the tobacconist's or in the
back parlour of the dirty bookshop next door that this thing's
going on. Anyhow, it's been reported for some time now. One of the
pair, so information goes, procures girls under age, who appear to
be merely selling flowers. Anonymous letters again. The chestnut
merchant at the corner, he's also tipped the wink on his own. He
had to, anyway. Everything that's on the pavement belongs to
the police.

That sort of machine gun you hear going crazy in mid-air
yonder, in short, sharp bursts of sound, that's only the motor
bike of the chap in the "Wheel of Death." An escaped convict,
so they say, but you can't be sure. At all events, he's already
crashed through that tent of his twice in this same place, and
then again two years ago at Toulouse. Would to God he'd smash
the whole machine sometime and have done with it! Why can't
he smash his face and his vertebral column once and for all, and
then that would be enough said about him. Makes you mad to
listen to him. . . . Take the tram too, with its bell and all--
it's already killed two Bicetre pensioners over there by the barracks,
in less than a month. The bus, on the other hand, is a decent sort.
It takes all the care in the world drawing up on the Place Pigalle,
really rather irresolutely, blowing its horn, all out of breath, with
four passengers in it who get down very carefully and slowly, like
kids coming out of the choir.

Passing on from trays of trinkets to presses of people, from
roundabouts to swings, we had come out at the other end of the
fair ground, where there's a great empty, quite black, void for
families to pee into. . . . About face, therefore! Retracing our
steps on our way back, we ate some chestnuts to get a thirst up.
A nasty taste in the mouth we got, but no such thing as a thirst.
A worm too, in one chestnut, a dear little weeny one. Madelon hit
on it. Of course; it would be her. Actually, it was from that
moment onwards that everything began to go really wrong between
us. Till then, we had kept ourselves more or less in check,
but this incident of the maggot made Madelon absolutely furious.
Just when she stepped aside to a gutter to spit the thing out,
Leon went and said something to her, as if to prevent her. I don't
know what it was he said nor what had come over him, but this
turning aside to spit he suddenly didn't approve of at all. He
asked her, pretty idiotically, had she found a pip in it? ... It
wasn't the thing to say, I admit. . . . And now Sophie managed to
get mixed up in the argument; she didn't know what they were
quarreling about. . . . She wished to know.

Then that annoyed them all the more, having Sophie, a foreign-
er, interfere--naturally it did. And at that point, a party
of rowdies pushed between us and we got separated. They were
young people out for a pick-up actually, but gesticulating, blowing
whistles and letting off a whole series of terrified squeals.
When we were able to join up again, Robinson and she were still
fighting.

"Now's the time to go home," I thought. "If they're left here
a moment or two longer in each other's company, they'll make a
scene right in the middle of the fair. . . . That'll be enough for
to-day." There it was; it was all a washout. "Shall we leave?" I
suggested. He looked at me in a sort of surprised way. Still, that
seemed to me the most reasonable and appropriate decision to
make. "Well, haven't you really had enough of this fair?" I
added. He signed to me that it would be better if I asked Madelon
first what she thought about it. I didn't at all mind asking
Madelon what she thought about it, but I didn't think it a
particularly wise move.

"But we'll be taking Madelon along with us," I finally exclaimed.

"Taking her along? Where? Where d' you want us to take her
to?" he said.

"Why, to Vigny, of course," I answered.

That tore it! I'd put my foot in it again. But I couldn't unsay
it; I'd already spoken.

"Well, we've got an empty room for her at Vigny," I continued.
"After all, it's not as if we hadn't plenty of rooms. . . . We
could all have a little bite of supper together before going to
bed. . . .Wouldn't that be much more amusing than staying here,
freezing to death as we have been these last two hours. It'll be
easy enough . . ." Madelon made no comment on my proposals. She
didn't even look at me while I was speaking, but all the same
she had missed not a word of what I'd just said. . . . Well,
there it was, I had said it and that was that.

When I happened to stray a little to one side, she quietly came
up to me and asked me whether I wasn't trying to put something
over on her, inviting her to Vigny like this. I said nothing. You
can't reason with a jealous woman like she was; it would only
have meant a hell of a lot more flapping and fussing. Besides,
I didn't quite know who and what she was jealous of. It's often
difficult to distinguish all these emotions that are prompted
by jealousy. Jealous of everything, I suppose she was, as one
always is.

Sophie didn't quite know now what line to take, but she still
tried hard to be pleasant. She had even taken Madelon's arm in
fact, but Madelon was far too incensed and far too delighted at
being incensed to be put off by any friendly gestures of that sort.
With the very greatest difficulty, we threaded our way through
the crowd towards the trams on the Place Clichy. Just when we
were going to catch the tram, a cloud burst over the square and
the rain came down in torrents. The heavens poured themselves
down on us.

In a second, every car had been rushed and taken. "You're not
going to affront me in public like this, are you, Leon?" I heard
Madelon asking him as they stood there beside us. "You've seen
enough of me, have you? Why not say so, then--say that you've
had enough of me?" she went on. "Say it. Though you don't see
me often. But you'd rather be alone with the other two, eh,
would you? ... You all go to bed together, I'll bet, when I'm
not there . . . Tell me that you'd rather be with them than with
me . . . Say it, so that I may hear you." And then, after that, she
said nothing for a time, her face closed in a pout round her nose
which stuck up in the air and dragged on her mouth. We were
waiting on the pavement. "You see how I'm treated by your
friends? Can't you see, Leon?" she began again.

But as for Leon--one must do him that amount of justice ?
he didn't answer her back, he didn't say anything to upset her,
he stared across the square at the houses on the other side, at
the boulevard and the traffic.

All the same, he could be a tough nut too when he wanted to be.
When she saw that these attempted threats didn't work, she tried
another tack and thought she'd put it over on him with tenderness
while we still waited. "I love you a lot; listen to me, d' you
hear that I love you a lot? . . .Do you realize at least how much
I've done for you? Maybe it was just a pity I came to-day? You
do love me a little though, don't you, Leon? You couldn't not
love me at all . . . You have got a heart; speak, Leon, you do
care a wee bit, don't you? Then why do you scorn my love? . . .
We've had such lovely times together ... But how cruel you
are to me, Leon! You've shattered my dream, Leon. You've soil-
ed it! You may well say that you've shattered all my illusions!
Do you want me not to believe in love any more, eh, do you?
And now are you wanting me to go away for good? Is that what
you want?" All this she kept asking him while the rain came
through the cafe awning.

It dripped down among all the people. Really she was just as
he'd warned me she was. He hadn't made any of it up; that was
what she really was like. I wouldn't have believed they could
have come so quickly to such a pitch of emotional tension. But
it was so.

As the cars and all the traffic made a great deal of noise all
round us, I managed in any case to whisper a quiet word into
Robinson's ear about the state of affairs, to see if we couldn't
get away from her now and have done with it all as quickly as
possible, seeing it was all such a failure; just give her the slip
on the q.t. before everything went really wrong and there was
some really bitter and deadly quarrel ... I feared that might
happen. "Do you want me to find some excuse?" I whispered.
"And we all go back on our own?" "No, for heaven's sake not,"
he said. "Don't do that! She'd be quite capable of throwing a
complete fit on the spot, and then we would never be able to stop
her." I didn't press the point.

After all, perhaps he, Robinson, enjoyed having himself sworn
at like this in public. Anyway, he knew the girl better than I did.
As the downpour came to an end, we got a taxi. We dashed at
it and there we all were, huddled up together inside it. At first
no one spoke. Things were strained between us and I for my
part had dropped quite enough bricks for the moment. It wouldn't
do me any harm to wait a little while before I began again.
Leon and I took the folding seats in front and the two women
sat in the back. On evenings when there's a fair on, the road to
Argenteuil's very crowded, especially as far as the Gate. After
that, it's a good hour's run down to Vigny, on account of the
traffic. It's not much fun sitting for an hour opposite each other
not saying anything, just looking at one another, especially when
it's dark outside and you've got a rather anxious feeling about
the people you're with.

Yet all the same, if we had stayed like that, angry, but each
one angry within himself, nothing would have come of it. That's
still my opinion to-day, when I think back on it.

When all's said and done, though, it was through me that we did
start to talk again and then the quarrel resumed, fiercer than
ever. One can never be sufficiently defiant with words; words
don't seem to be saying anything much; they don't seem danger-
ous certainly, just little puffs of air, little clicks in the mouth,
neither one thing nor the other, and as soon as they reach the ear
easily apprehended by one's great soft grey lump of a brain. One's
unsuspicious about words . . . and some misfortune ensues.

Among them, there are some hidden away under all the others,
like pebbles. You don't particularly notice them and then suddenly
they've made all the life there is in you tremble, all of it
entirely, both in its weaknesses and in its strength. . . . And you're
terrified . . . The thing's an avalanche . . .You swing in the air
above a torrent of emotion like a hanged man ... A hurricane
has come up and passed on, and it's been much too strong for
you, so violent that you'd never have believed it could be as
violent as that and yet be made up of nothing but just feelings.
... So one's never distrustful enough of words, that's the con-
clusion I've come to. . . . But let me first tell things in their
order: the taxi was gently following along behind a tram as half
the road was up. "Prrrr . . . Prrrr . . ." it went. A sewer every
eighty yards. Only I didn't feel that was good enough, having
that tram in the light . . . In my usual garrulous, childish way, I
grew impatient. Really it was insufferable, such a small, funereal
pace and such lack of decision everywhere .I hastened to break
the silence, asking the tram what the hell was the matter with it.
I watched, or rather--for you could hardly see now at all--tried
to watch Madelon in her corner on the left at the back of the
taxi. She kept her face turned towards the outside, towards the
scenery, towards the night, to tell the truth. I was annoyed to
notice that she was still as obstinate as ever. Damned tiresome
I was in any case, I'll admit. I said something to her just to make
her turn her head in my direction.

"Well now, Madelon," I asked her, "maybe you've some suggestion
to make as to how we could all amuse ourselves, and yet don't
like to put it forward? Would you like us to stop in somewhere
before we get back? Let's have it."

"Amuse ourselves! Amuse ourselves!" she retorted, as if I'd
insulted her. "That's all you people ever think about--being
amused!" And then and there she heaved a whole series of
sighs, deep sighs and so touching I've seldom heard their like.

"Well, I'm doing my best," I said. "It's Sunday to-day, you
know."

"And what about you, Leon?" she turned to him. "Are you doing
your best too, eh?" It was straight enough.

"Sure I am," he said.

I looked at them both as we passed the street lamps. Angry
they were. Then Madelon leant forward as if to kiss him. It
was obvious that not one chance of dropping a brick would be
missed that evening.

The taxi was going very slowly again, because now there
were strings of lorries every few yards along the road. Being
kissed annoyed him and he pushed her away--rather roughly, I
must admit. There's no doubt it wasn't at all a nice thing to
do, especially not with other people present.

When we got to the end of the Avenue de Clichy, by the gate,
it was already quite dark, the shops were lighting up. Even under
the railway bridge, which always echoes so loudly, I heard her
voice saying, "Don't you want to kiss me, Leon?" She was keeping
on about it. He didn't answer. Whereupon she turned on me and
apostrophised me directly. "What have you done to Leon to make
him so horrid to me? Do you mind telling me that--at once?
What awful things have you been putting into his head?" That's
the way she went for me.

"Why, nothing, not a thing!" I told her. "I haven't said a word
to him! I don't meddle in your quarrels."

And the best of it is that it was perfectly true; I hadn't said
anything at all to Leon about her. He was free to do what he
liked; it was his lookout whether he stayed with her or left her.
It was none of my business. But there was no point in trying to
convince her of this, she was no longer in her right mind, and we
fell back into silence as we sat opposite each other in the taxi--
but the atmosphere was so charged with an impending scene that
this couldn't last long. She had taken to addressing me in one of
those sharp tones of voice which I'd never known her use before,
a voice as monotonous too as a person whose mind is quite made
up. Huddled back as she was in her corner of the taxi, I could
now hardly see her expression at all and that put me out a good
deal.

Sophie had been holding my hand all this while. She didn't
know what to do with herself now that things had taken this turn,
poor child.

We were just beyond Saint-Ouen when Madelon again began on
a full and frenzied inventory of the grudges she had against
Leon, again asking him endless questions, at the top of her voice
now, about his fondness for her and his fidelity. For us two,
for Sophie and me, nothing could have been more embarrassing.
But she was so overwrought that she didn't mind a bit that we
were there to hear her, quite the reverse. Clearly too, it hadn't
been very clever of me to shut her up in this box with all of us;
it echoed and, with a temperament like hers, it made her want to
treat us to a first-class scene. There again, this had been a
masterstroke of mine, this taxi.

Leon gave no sign of life. In the first place, he was tired after
the evening we'd just been spending together, and then, too, he
lacked sleep; that was always his trouble.

"See here, calm down now!" I managed, even so, to get in edgeways.
"You can quarrel as much as you like, both of you, when we get
home. You'll have plenty of time then."

"Get home?" she said then, in really an indescribable tone. "Get
home? We'll never get home, I tell you. . . . And, anyway, I've
had enough of all your revolting little tricks," she went on. "I'm
a decent girl. I'm better than the whole lot of you put together.
You set of pigs. . . . It's no good your trying to get the better
of me. . . . You're not worthy of understanding me. . . . You're
too rotten, all of you, at that, to understand me. . . . You're
beyond all hope of understanding anything clean and beautiful."

In fact, she was attacking us in our self-respect, and there was
a good deal more in this strain and it was just no good my keeping
very much to myself on my folding seat and behaving as well
as I could and not making a sound so as not to excite her any
more; every time the taxi changed gear she went off again on a
fresh tirade. The least little thing at such moments lets loose
hell, and it was as if she was overjoyed at making us miserable;
she couldn't help following up her instincts to the limit.

"And don't imagine that you'll get away with this," she continued
to threaten us. "And that you're going to get rid of the
little girl nice and quietly! Oh, no, you won't. You may as well
know that, at once. No, it's not going to go as you'd like it to.
You're disgusting, all of you. . . . You've caused my unhappiness.
I'll wake you up, you dirty swine."

Then suddenly she leant over to Robinson and seized him by
the overcoat and began to shake him for all she was worth. He
made no attempt to extricate himself. I wasn't going to intervene.
You'd even have thought Leon liked seeing her getting a little
more excited still, because of him. He grinned ; it wasn't natural ;
he shook like a puppet on the seat, while she yelled at him, eyes
downcast, head dangling.

Just when, even so, I was going to make some little gesture of
remonstrance to interrupt all this unmannerliness, she turned
back and blazed out at me, blazed out what she had long been
harbouring in her heart. Now it was my turn, with a vengeance.
. . . There, in front of everybody.

"You be quiet, you dirty beast!" she said--just like that. "It's
none of your business what happens between Leon and me! I'll
have no further affronts from you,--d' you hear me? Eh? I won't
have it. If you ever even raise a hand towards me again, I,
Madelon, will teach you how to behave! Bah--cuckolding your
friends and then striking their girl friends. . . . What a bloody
nerve the bastard's got! Aren't you ashamed?" As for Leon, when
he heard these truths uttered, he sort of woke up a bit. He wasn't
grinning now. I wondered for a second whether there wasn't going
to be a flurry and a fight, whether we weren't going to come to
blows, but there wasn't room in the taxi to hit out, anyhow, with
all four of us in it. That reassured me. It was too narrow.
Especially as we were now going fairly fast over the cobbles of
the boulevards by the Seine and the taxi jolted too much even
to move.

"Come, Leon," she ordered him then. "Come away; I'm asking
you for the last time to come away with me! D' you hear me? Let
them go to the devil. Do you hear what I'm saying to you?" A
complete comedy!

"Stop it! Stop the taxi, Leon! Stop it, or I will myself."
But Leon didn't budge from his seat. He was all done in.
"You don't want to come then?" she began again. "You won't
come?"

She had already warned me that, as far as I was concerned,
the best thing I could do was to keep my mouth shut. That
settled me. "Aren't you coming?" she kept repeating. The taxi
was still speeding ahead, the road was clear now and we bounced
about more than ever. We were being flung about all over the
shop like luggage.

"Right," she concluded, as he made no answer. "All right.
Very well! You'll have brought it on yourself. . . . To-morrow--
do you hear me?--not a moment later than to-morrow, I'll go to
the police station and I'll explain to them there at the police
station just how Mother Henrouille fell down those stairs!
Now d' you hear me, Leon? . . . Now are you happy? You've
stopped pretending to be deaf? Either you come with me at once
--or else, to-morrow morning, I go and tell them about it. . . .
Well, are you coming or aren't you? Speak up." The threat was
direct enough.

Then, at that point, he did decide to give her some sort of
answer.

"But you're in it too, you know," he said to her. "You can't
talk."

She didn't calm down at all when she heard him answer like
that; quite the reverse. "What the hell do I care," she said,
"whether I'm in it or not! You mean that we'd both go to prison?
. . . That I was your accomplice? Is that what you mean? Well,
there's nothing I'd like better."

And she began to squeal with laughter suddenly, as if in
hysterics, as if she'd never known anything half as funny as that.

"But there's nothing I'd like better, I tell you. I like the idea
of prison, d' you hear? Don't go and imagine you can scare me with
this prison of yours! I'll go to prison as much as you like--but
you'll go too, my good swine! At least, you won't not care a hoot
about me much longer, see? I'm yours, all right, but you're mine
too. All you needed to do was stay and not leave me back there in
Toulouse. I can only love once--and once for good and all!
I'm not a whore."

She was challenging us as well, Sophie and me, when she said
that. She meant it in regard for faithfulness and for respect.

In spite of all this, we were still bowling along and he still
made no move to stop the taxi.

"You're not coming then? You'd prefer to go to prison? Right!
You don't care whether I denounce you or not? Or whether I love
you or not? You don't give a damn for that, either? Nor for what
will become of me? You don't care a damn about any of it, anyway,
do you? Why not say so?"

"Yes, in a sense you're right," he replied. "But it's not you
any more than any one else that I don't give a damn about. . . .
And above all, don't go and take that as an insult! You're really
quite sweet, if it comes to that. . . . But I've no longer any wish
to be loved ... I hate the thought of it."

She hardly expected to have a thing like that said to her, right
there, to her face, and so much did it surprise her that she no
longer quite knew how to carry on with the tirade she'd begun.
She was considerably disconcerted, but somehow she managed to
get going again. "Oh! So you hate the thought of it, do you? How
do you mean, you hate the thought of it? Explain yourself, you
ungrateful cad."

"Madelon, it's not you; it's all of it disgusts me," he answered
her. "I've no wish for it. You mustn't blame me for that."

"What? What's that you say? Tell me again. ... Me and all
of it?" She tried to understand. "Me and all of it? Explain that,
will you? What does it mean? Don't talk Chink to me--tell me in
French, in front of the others, why now I disgust you. Don't you
get the same kick out of making love as every one else, you great
brute? You get excited then, don't you? Dare to say--in front of
every one?that you don't get sexually excited?"

Despite her fury, there was something rather comic about the
way she stuck up for herself with her remarks. But I didn't have
time to laugh long, for she returned to the attack. "And what about
him; he enjoys it well enough, whenever he happens to catch me
in some dark corner! The dirty beast . . . with his dirty paws!
. . . Let him dare to tell me it isn't so. . . . But why don't you
all admit that you just want a change? Confess it. . . . That
something new is what you're after. Some really no-limit party!
Then why don't you get a virgin? You bunch of degenerates! You
herd of dirty swine! Why do you bother with pretexts? You've
tried everything and you're bored, that's all it is! Only now you've
not even got the courage of your vices. Your own vices frighten
you."

And then it was Robinson who took it on himself to reply. He'd
lost his temper too, in the end, and he swore as loudly as she
did.

"Oh, yes, I have!" he exclaimed. "I've plenty of courage and
I daresay quite as much as you have! Only--if you really want
to know the whole of it . . . why, it's every darn thing that
repels me and disgusts me now. Not only you! Everything! . . .
Love especially. . . . Your love along with every one else's. . . .
All this sentimental monkey-business you're so fond of?d' you
want me to tell how that strikes me? It seems to me like making
love in a lavatory! Now do you understand? . . . And all this
sentiment you rout out to keep me glued to you affects me like an
insult, if you'd like to know. . . . And on top of that, you don't
even suspect as much because it's you who're such a numbskull
because you don't realize things at all. . . . And you don't even
guess that you make one sick. ... It's enough for you- just to
repeat all the drivel people talk. . . . You think that's quite all
right. . . . That's quite enough, you think, because other people
have told you there's nothing greater than love and that it would
always work with every one and that it lasts for ever. . . . Well,
as far as I'm concerned, you know what they can do with their
love. . . . D' you hear me? It doesn't catch on with me, my good
girl, that stinking love of theirs! . . . You're out of luck! You're
too late! It no longer works with me, that's all! And that's what
you go getting into such tempers about. Do you bave to make love
in the middle of all that's going on? And seeing the things one sees?
Or maybe you don't notice anything? No, I think it's that you just
don't care. . . . You play at being sentimental when really you're
as tough a little animal as any one. . . .You don't mind eating
rotten meat? Helping it down with that Love sauce of yours?
That's good enough, is it? Not for me, it isn't. If you don't notice
anything, you're lucky. That's because your nose is blocked up!
You need to be as thick-skulled as you are, all of you, not to be
sickened by it. . . . D' you want to know what there is between
you and me? I'II tell you?there's the whole of life between
us. . . . But maybe that isn't enough for you?"

"But I've a perfectly clean home," she retorted. "You can be
poor and be clean all the same, can't you? When have you seen
the place not clean back at home? Is that what you mean when
you insult me like this? . . . And I'm clean in my person, too,
let me tell you, sir! You may not be able to say the same your-
self. And maybe your feet couldn't, either!"

"But, Madelon, I never said that. I never said anything like
that. That it's not clean at your place? Can't you see you don't
understand?" That's all the answer he could think of making, to
calm her down.

"So you say you haven't said anything? Not said anything?
Hark at him now, making me out to be lower than dirt and then
pretending he hasn't said anything! You'd have to kill him to
stop him telling any more lies. . . . There's not enough space on
earth for such scum! The filthy, rotten pimp! Oh, no, there's not
enough . . . The scaffold's what he needs!"

She wouldn't be quieted now. You could no longer get what
they were saying in the taxi. You could only catch certain great
words in the noise of the motor and the whir of the wheels in
the wind and the rain which came flapping against the doors in
squalls. Threats--the space between us was full of them. "It's
vile of you . . ." she kept repeating. She couldn't now talk of
anything else. "It's vile of you!" And then she flung down her
last card. "Are you coming?" she asked him. "Are you, Leon?
One . . . Are you going to come? Two . . ." She waited. "Three
. . . You're not coming, then?" "No," he said, not stirring
an inch. "And you can do what you like about it," he even added.
. . . There was her answer for her.

She probably edged back in her seat, right back. She must
have held the revolver with both hands, because when the flash
came, it seemed to be straight from her stomach and then almost
at once two more shots, one after the other. . . . Then we had
the taxi full of acrid smoke.

The taxi didn't stop though. Robinson fell on to me, on his
side, jerkedly, and he was burbling. "Hep! Hep!" He didn't stop
grunting "Hep! Hep!" The driver must have heard.

He slowed up a bit at first, to make certain. Eventually he came
altogether to a standstill, by a gas lamp.

As soon as he opened the door, Madelon pushed him back violent-
ly and then she jumped out. She clambered over the parapet
and flopped. She bolted into the darkness across the fields,
splashing straight through the mud. I called to her, but it
wasn't any use; she was already a long way off.

I found it difficult to know what to do with the wounded man.
To take him back to Paris was probably the most practical
course. . . . But we weren't far now from our house. The local
people wouldn't know what the whole thing meant. . . . We
wrapped him up, Sophie and I, in overcoats and settled him in
the same comer where Madelon had sat and had shot. "Go gently,"
I said to the driver. But he still went much too fast; he was
in a hurry. The bumps made Robinson groan all the more.
When we got to the house, the driver wouldn't even give us
his name; he was anxious because of the trouble it was going to
get him into with the police, being a witness and so on.
He even said he was sure there were bloodstains on the cushions.
. . . He wanted to get away at once without waiting. But I took
his number.

Two bullets had hit Robinson in the stomach; maybe all three
had; I still wasn't quite certain how many there'd been.
She had shot straight in front of her, I'd seen that. There was
no blood from the wounds. Although, between the two of us, we
held him up carefully, he stumbled a lot all the same and his head
rolled. He spoke but it was difficult to understand what he said.
He was already delirious. "Hep! Hep!" in a singsong voice. He
had time enough to die before we got him in.

Our street had been recently repaired. As soon as we got to the
gate, I sent the concierge flying off to fetch Parapine from his
room. He came down at once, so with his help and a male nurse's,
we managed to get Leon upstairs and into bed. Then, when we'd
undressed him, we were able to feel and examine the walls of his
stomach. They had already stretched a good deal to the touch
and were now quite soft in certain places. Two holes, one above
the other, I found, but not the third; one of the bullets must
have missed.

For myself, if I'd been in Leon's shoes, I should have preferred
an internal haemorrhage; it floods your stomach and is over
quick. The peritoneum fills up and that's the end of that. Whereas,
with peritonitis, there's just infection to look forward to; it's a
long business.

You could wonder, too, how he was going to set about having
done with it all. His stomach was swelling, he was looking at us,
already quite fixedly; he moaned--not too much, though. There
was a sort of calm. I had already seen him when he was very ill
and in many different places, but this time here was a case in which
everything was unlike what it had ever been before, his gasping,
his eyes, everything. We couldn't hold him now; you'd have
said he was slipping away from minute to minute. He was sweating
such large drops of sweat that it was as if the whole of his face
had wept. At such moments it's a little embarrassing to have become
as poor and as hard as one has. One lacks almost everything
that might be of use in helping some one to die. One has nothing
left inside one but things that serve the purposes of everyday
life,--a life of comfort, one's own life, a damned insensibility.
On the way you've lost confidence in things. You've chased and
harried all the pity you had left in you carefully, right to the
back of your system, a dirty little ball. You've pushed pity to
the lower end of your bowels, with the rest of the refuse. That's
the best place for it, you tell yourself.

There was I, standing by Leon's side so as to be of help to him,
and never have I felt so awkward. I couldn't manage it. . . .
And he couldn't find me. ... He tried to and he just gaped. . . .
He must have been looking for some other Ferdinand, one of
course much greater than me, so as to die, or rather, for me to
help him to die, more quietly. He made efforts to discover whether
there hadn't been perhaps some improvement in the world. He
was going over it all, poor wretch, in his mind, wondering whether
men hadn't changed just a bit for the better while he had been
alive; whether he hadn't sometimes, without meaning to, been
unjust toward them. But there was nobody but me, really me,
just me, by his side,--a quite real Ferdinand who lacked what
might make a man greater than his own trivial life, a love for
the life of others. I hadn't any of that, or truly so little of it
that it wasn't worth showing what I had. I wasn't death's equal.
I was far too small for it. I had no great conception of humanity.
I would even, I believe, have more easily felt sorry for a dog
dying than for Robinson, because a dog's not sly; whereas, whatever
one may say, Leon was just a bit sly. I was sly too; we were
all sly. ... All the rest of it had fallen by the wayside and even
those facial expressions, which are still some use by a deathbed,
I'd lost as well. I had indeed lost everything along the road,
I couldn't find anything of what you need when you're pegging
out, only maliciousness. My feelings were like a house you only
keep for the holidays. They were barely habitable. Besides which,
too, a man wants a lot when he's in his death agony. A death
agony in itself's not enough. You've to get a good kick out of
dying, your last hiccups for breath must be made to provide a
thrill as you sink below life itself and urea fouls your bloodstream.

Dying men go on whimpering still because they can't now get
as much of a thrill as they want. . . . They clamour . . . and
complain. . . . That's just the fuss misery kicks up as it slips
out of life into death itself.

He came to slightly, after Parapine had given him an injection
of morphine. He spoke to us then about this thing that had
just happened. "It's better that it should end like that," he said,
and then: "It doesn't hurt as badly as I'd have thought." When
Parapine asked him where exactly he felt the pain, it was clear
that he had already partly gone but also, in spite of everything,
that he was keen to tell us something more. He hadn't the strength
or the means to tell us. He wept, he suffocated and directly after
wards he laughed. He wasn't like an ordinary ill man, you didn't
know what attitude to take towards him.

It was as if now he were trying to assist us to live. As if he
had sought out pleasant things for us to stay on for. He held onto
each of us by a hand. I kissed him. That is all there is that one
can do in such cases, without going wrong. We waited. He said
nothing now. A little later, an hour perhaps, not more, the hae-
morrhage did come, in an abundant, an internal, an overpowering
flood. It carried him off.

His heart began to beat faster and faster and then very fast
indeed. It was racing after the worn-out blood, thin and far away
in his arteries, tingling at his finger tips. The pallor spread up
from his neck and covered his whole face. The end came, choking.
He went, as if he had taken a spring, and gripping onto both of
us with both his arms.

Then almost at once there he was back again before our eyes,
his face strained, already beginning to take on his dead man's
weight.

We stood up and we disengaged ourselves from his hands. They
stayed up in mid-air, his hands, quite stiff, and blue and dis-
coloured in the light of the lamp.

Now, in that room, it was as if Robinson were a foreigner
who'd come from a frightful land, whom no one would dare
speak to.





PARAPINE KEPT HIS HEAD. HE SENT SOMEBODY OVER TO THE POLICE
station to fetch a cop. It turned out to be Gustave, our Gustave,
who had been on point duty and now was "on" late at the station.

"What a dreadful thing to have happened!" Gustave said, when
he came into the room and saw Robinson. After that he sat
down to puff and blow a bit, and also to have a drink at the
nurses' table, which hadn't yet been cleared away. "Seeing as how
it's a crime," he remarked, "it'd be best to take him along to the
headquarters," and then he said: "He was a good chap, Robinson;
he'd never have hurt a fly. I don't understand why she should
have killed him." He drank some more. He shouldn't have. Drink
went to his head. But he was fond of the bottle. It was a weakness
with him.

We went and got a stretcher down from upstairs with him from
the storeroom. It was far too late now to be disturbing the
staff; we decided to carry round the body to the police station
ourselves. The police station is a long way off, at the other end
of the town, beyond the level crossing, the last house you come
to.

So we set out,--Parapine holding the front end of the stretcher,
Gustave Mandamour bringing up the rear. Only they didn't
walk very straight, either of them. Sophie even had to guide
them a little down the narrow stairs. I noticed at this point that
she didn't seem particularly moved. Yet the thing had happened
at her side and really so close that she might have been hit by
one of the bullets while that maniac was firing. But Sophie, as
I had already noticed on other occasions, needed time before she
could get worked up enough to feel things. It wasn't that she was
cold, she could be tempestuously the reverse, but she had to take
her time about it.

I thought I'd follow them and the body a bit of the way, so as to
feel quite certain it was really all over. But instead of following
properly after them and their stretcher, as I should have, as a
matter of fact I strayed across from side to side the whole length
of the road and finally, once I'd passed those great school buildings
that are next to the level crossing, I slipped off down a little road
which leads at first between hedgerows and then plunges straight
down towards the Seine.

Over the top of the railings I saw them make off with the stretch-
er into the distance, and they looked as if they would suffocate
with the scarves of thick mist slowly wrapping round behind them.
Down by the river the current pressed strongly against the barges
wedged tight together against the lock. Off the Gennevilliers
flats, the mist came in cold puffs, lolling across the eddying
surface of the water, making it glisten under the arches.

That way, far in the distance, lay the sea. But at present there
was nothing I could wish to feel about the sea. I had something
else to do. Try as I might to lose my way, so as not to find myself
face to face with my own life, I kept coming up against it every-
where. I met myself at every turn. My aimless pilgrimage was over
now. Let others carry on the game! The world had closed in. We
had come to the end. ... As we had at the fair! . . . Being
sorrowful isn't all; there ought to be some way of starting up
the music again, of discovering a further poignancy. ... But not
for me; let others carry on. One's asking to have youth back again
without seeming to ask for it. Impudence! But I wasn't ready to
go on any longer now either! And yet I hadn't gone as far in life
as Robinson had ... I hadn't made a success of it; that much
was certain. I hadn't acquired one single good solid idea, like the
one he'd had to get himself severely manhandled like that. An idea
as large as my own clumsy, great head, greater than all the fear
that was in it, a beautiful idea, some splendid, some really com-
fortable one to die with . . . How many lives should I have had
to live to get myself an idea stronger than anything else in all
the world? There was no way of telling! It was all no good!
My own idea, the ideas I had, roamed loose in my mind with
plenty of gaps in between them; they were like little tapers,
flickering and feeble, shuddering all through life in the midst of
a truly appalling, awful world.

Perhaps it was going a bit better now than it had twenty years
ago; it couldn't be said I hadn't made some little progress, but
even so there was never any chance of my managing, like
Robinson, to fill my head with a single idea, some really superb
idea that was definitely stronger than death, nor of my ending
up, just because of my idea, exuding joy and insouciance and
courage--a lush demigod!

Then all of me would be full of courage. It would drip from
every part of me and life would be nothing itself but the perfect
pattern of courage, so that everything would run smoothly, all
things and men from earth up to heaven. And so much love would
one have, too, thrown in, that Death would be imprisoned in love
along with joy, and so comfortable would it be inside there, so
warm, that Death, the bitch, would be given some sensation at
last and would end up by having as much fun with love as every
one else. Wouldn't that be pretty? Ah, wouldn't that be fine?
I laughed about it, standing there alone on the river bank, as I
thought of all the dodges and all the tricks I'd have to pull off
to stuff myself like that full of all-powerful resolves. ... A
toad swollen out with ideals! The fever had come, after all.

For the last hour, my friends had been looking for me.
Especially as they had seen pretty clearly that when I left them
I wasn't in particularly good shape. Gustave Mandamour was the
first to catch sight of me under my lamp post. "Hey--Doctor!"
he called. He certainly had an awful voice. "Come along. This
way, Doctor. You're wanted at headquarters to make your state-
ment. You know, Doctor," he added, but this he whispered in my
ear, "you know, you're not looking at all well!" He came along
with me. As a matter of fact, he lent me a helping hand. Gustave
was very attached to me. I never reproached him about the drink
business. I understood everything. Whereas Parapine was a little
severe on him. He sometimes made him feel ashamed of himself
about the drink. Gustave would have done a great deal for me.
Why, he admired me! He told me so. He couldn't tell why. Nor
could I. But the fact remains, he admired me. He was the only
one.

We walked up two or three streets together until we caught
sight of the lamp outside the police station. You couldn't miss
your way now. It's the report he'd have to write which was
worrying Gustave. Though he didn't like to tell me so. He had
already made every one sign it at the bottom but even at that
there were a lot of things which weren't in his report yet.

Gustave had a large head, my style of head; in fact, I could
wear his kepi, which just shows; but he was very forgetful about
details. The ideas didn't come easily; he laboured when he talked
and it was a good deal worse when he tried to write. Parapine
would certainly have helped him to prepare his report but then
Parapine hadn't seen any of it happen. He'd have had to invent
things. And the Inspector didn't want any inventiveness in re-
ports; he wanted just the truth, he said.

I was shivering as we climbed the little staircase at police
headquarters. I couldn't tell the Inspector anything very much.
I really wasn't well.

Robinson's body had been laid out there, in front of the pre-
fecture's great rows of dossiers. Printed forms lay everywhere
around the benches, together with cigarette stubs. On the walls
scrawled insults to the police only half rubbed out.

"Did you lose your way, Doctor?" the Inspector asked me, at
any rate quite cordially, when I did at last put in an appearance.
We were all so very tired that we all rather burbled at each other
in turn.

Finally between us we settled the times and the trajectories of
the bullets, one of them being still embedded in the spinal
column. It hadn't been found. He would be buried with it. They
were hunting for the other bullets. The other bullets were some-
where in the taxi. It was a powerful revolver.

Sophie came to join us there. She had fetched me my overcoat.
She kissed me and held me tight against her, as if I was going to
die too or fly away. "But look, I'm not leaving you." I told her
several times, doing my best to make her understand. "I'm not
going away, Sophie." She wouldn't be reassured.

Standing around the stretcher, we embarked on a long discussion
with the Inspector, who had in his time, as he pointed out, seen
a great many crimes and not-crimes committed and catastrophes
occur, and wanted to tell us about his various experiences all
at once. We didn't like to leave for fear of hurting his feelings.
He was really much too kind. He enjoyed having a chance to talk
with educated people for once, instead of just ordinary toughs.
So that to keep him happy, we dawdled on in his precious station.

Parapine hadn't a mackintosh. Listening to us lulled Gustave's
mind. His mouth hung open as he listened and his thick neck
stuck forward, as if he were dragging a cart. I hadn't heard
Parapine employ so many words in conversation for many years
now, not in fact since my student days. The whole of what had
happened on this day had gone to his head. We decided to go
home now, at last.

We took Mandamour along with us and Sophie too, who still
from time to time caught me to her, her whole body strong with
the strength of her concern for me and tenderness and a heart
full also and overflowing and lovely. I felt the directness of it
myself, the directness of her tender strength. It put me off my
stroke; it wasn't my strength, and it was my own strength I needed
to go off and croak superbly some day, like Leon had done. I
hadn't any time to waste making faces. "On with the job!" I
said to myself. But no idea came.

She wouldn't even let me turn back to go and have another look
at the corpse. So I left without having another look. "Close
the Door" it had written up. And now Parapine was thirsty.
Thirsty from talking, I suppose. From talking too much, by his
standards. When we got to the estaminet by the canal, we banged
on the shutters for the space of a minute or so. Doing that re-
minded me of the road to Noirceur that time in the war. The same
little light showed above the door, ready to go out any moment.
Finally, the owner came in person to open to us. This fellow
didn't know. We told him all about it and how such a dramatic
thing had happened, a dramatic piece of news. "A love tragedy,"
was how Gustave described it.

This bar on the canal was opened just before dawn for the
benefit of the bargees. Towards the end of the night the lock
gates begin slowly to open. After that the whole countryside comes
to life again slowly and starts to work. The banks of the river
come apart from it very gently. They leave, they lift themselves
up from the water between. The day's work steals out of the
shadows. You begin to see everything again, all very simply, all
hard. Winches close by, fences, timber yards yonder, and far
away on the road men, too, returning from still further distances,
coming towards us. They straggle into the grey light in little
chilly groups. To start the day, they splash their faces with the
morning light as they walk up past the dawn. They go on. All
you can truly see of them is their pale, simple faces; the rest of
them's still in the night. They'll all of them have to die too,
some day. How will they take it?

They plod on up towards the bridge. Beyond it, little by little,
they're lost in the flatness of the land and still more of them
follow after these have gone,--more men, paler each time as
the day rises up all round. And what are they thinking?
The man who ran the estaminet wanted to hear all about the
drama and the details of it; he wanted to be told everything.
Vaudescal his name was. A lad from the North ; and scrupulously
clean.

Gustave told him as much and more.

He made an endless rigmarole of the incident; all the things
Gustave kept saying weren't the point at all; again we were getting
lost among words, and as he was a little drunk, he would begin all
over again. Only, of course, there actually wasn't anything to say
about it, nothing at all. I wouldn't have minded listening to him,
anyhow for a time, quite quietly, like a sleep, but the others
wouldn't; they disagreed with him and that made him extremely
angry.

In a rage he went and lashed out at a little stove. The whole
thing came crashing down; the chimney flue, the grill, the red-
hot coals. He was as strong as ten men.

And on top of that, he thought he wanted to show us how the
Fire Dance really should be danced. Taking off his shoes and
leaping among the glowing coals . . .

Gustave and the fellow who owned the place had had a row
at one time over a slot-machine which wasn't licensed. Vaudescal
was a crafty creature; he wasn't to be trusted very far. Those
shirts of his always were too clean for him to be really honest.
He was a snooper and a sneak. The riverside's stiff with them.
Parapine suspected that Mandamour, now that he was drunk,
was aiming to get him turned out. It was he who prevented him
from doing his Fire Dance; and he made him feel ashamed of
himself. We pushed Mandamour back to the other end of the
table. There eventually he crumpled up and behaved himself, and
amid smells and immense sighs, fell asleep.

Far away, the tugboat hooted; calling across the bridge, the
arches one by one, a lock, another bridge, further, further away.
... It was calling to itself every boat on the river, every one,
the whole town, and the sky and the country and us, all of it
being called away, and the Seine too, everything,--let's hear no
more of all of this.