Part + 

I + 

Paris + 

I + 

The Luxembourg Gardens + 

“The time has now come for me to hear a step in the passage,” said Bernard to himself. He raised his head and listened. Nothing! His father and elder brother were away at the law-courts; his mother paying visits; his sister at a concert; as for his small brother Caloub⁠—the youngest⁠—he was safely shut up for the whole afternoon in his day-school. Bernard Profitendieu had stayed at home to cram for his bachot; he had only three more weeks before him. His family respected his solitude⁠—not so the demon! Although Bernard had stripped off his coat, he was stifling. The window that looked on to the street stood open, but it let in nothing but heat. His forehead was streaming. A drop of perspiration came dripping from his nose and fell on to the letter he was holding in his hand. + 

“Pretending to be a tear!” thought he. “But it’s better to sweat than to weep.” + 

Yes; the date was conclusive. No one could be in question but him, Bernard himself. Impossible to doubt it. The letter was addressed to his mother⁠—a love-letter⁠—seventeen years old, unsigned. + 

“What can this initial stand for? A V? It might just as well be an N.⁠ ⁠… Would it be becoming to question my mother?⁠ ⁠… We must give her credit for good taste. I’m free to imagine he’s a prince. It wouldn’t advance matters much to know that I was the son of a rapscallion. There’s no better cure for the fear of taking after one’s father, than not to know who he is. The mere fact of enquiry binds one. The only thing to do is to welcome deliverance and not attempt to go any deeper. Besides which, I’ve had sufficient for the day.” + 

Bernard folded the letter up again. It was on paper of the same size and shape as the other twelve in the packet. They were tied up with pink ribbon which there had been no need for him to untie, and which he was easily able to slip round the bundle again to keep it tight. He put the bundle back into the casket and the casket back into the drawer of the console-table. The drawer was not open. It had yielded its secret from above. Bernard fitted together the pieces of wood which formed its top, and which were made to support a heavy slab of onyx, readjusted the slab carefully and gently, and put back in their places on the top, a pair of glass candelabra and a cumbersome clock, which he had been amusing himself by repairing. + 

The clock struck four. He had set it to the right time. + 

“His Honour the judge and his learned son the barrister will not be back before six. I shall have time. When His Honour comes in he must find a letter from me on his writing table, informing him in eloquent terms of my departure. But before I write it, I feel that it’s absolutely essential to air my mind a little. I must talk to my dear Olivier, and make certain of a perch⁠—at any rate a temporary one. Olivier, my friend, the time has come for me to put your good-fellowship to the test, and for you to show your mettle. The fine thing about our friendship so far has been that we have never made any use of one another. Pooh! it can’t be unpleasant to ask a favour that’s amusing to grant. The tiresome thing is that Olivier won’t be alone. Never mind! I shall have to take him aside. I want to appal him by my calm. It’s when things are most extraordinary that I feel most at home.” + 

The street where Bernard Profitendieu had lived until then was quite close to the Luxembourg Gardens. There, in the path that overlooks the Medici fountains, some of his schoolfellows were in the habit of meeting every Wednesday afternoon, between four and six. The talk was of art, philosophy, sport, politics and literature. Bernard walked to the gardens quickly, but as soon as he caught sight of Olivier Molinier through the railings, he slackened his pace. The gathering that day was more numerous than usual⁠—because of the fine weather, no doubt. Some of the boys who were there were newcomers, whom Bernard had never seen before. Every one of them, as soon as he was in company with the others, lost his naturalness and began to act a part. + 

Olivier blushed when he saw Bernard coming up. He left the side of a young woman to whom he had been talking and walked away a little abruptly. Bernard was his most intimate friend, so that he took great pains not to show that he liked being with him; sometimes he would even pretend not to see him. + 

Before joining him, Bernard had to run the gauntlet of several groups and, as he himself affected not to be looking for Olivier, he lingered among the others. + 

Four of his schoolfellows were surrounding a little fellow with a beard and a pince-nez, who was perceptibly older than the rest. This was Dhurmer. He was holding a book and addressing one boy in particular, though at the same time he was obviously delighted that the others were listening. + 

“I can’t help it,” he was saying, “I’ve got as far as page thirty without coming across a single colour or a single word that makes a picture. He speaks of a woman and I don’t know whether her dress was red or blue. As far as I’m concerned, if there are no colours, it’s useless, I can see nothing.” And feeling that the less he was taken in earnest, the more he must exaggerate, he repeated: “⁠—absolutely nothing!” + 

Bernard stopped attending; he thought it would be ill-mannered to walk away too quickly, but he began to listen to some others who were quarrelling behind him and who had been joined by Olivier after he had left the young woman; one of them was sitting on a bench, reading L’Action Française. + 

Amongst all these youths how grave Olivier Molinier looks! And yet he was one of the youngest. His face, his expression, which are still almost a child’s, reveal a mind older than his years. He blushes easily. There is something tender about him. But however gracious his manners, some kind of secret reserve, some kind of sensitive delicacy, keeps his schoolfellows at a distance. This is a grief to him. But for Bernard, it would be a greater grief still. + 

Molinier, like Bernard, had stayed a minute or two with each of the groups⁠—out of a wish to be agreeable, not that anything he heard interested him. He leant over the reader’s shoulder, and Bernard, without turning round, heard him say: + 

“You shouldn’t read the papers⁠—they’ll give you apoplexy.” + 

The other replied tartly: “As for you, the very name of Maurras makes you turn green.” + 

A third boy asked, deridingly: “Do Maurras’s articles amuse you?” + 

And the first answered: “They bore me bloody well stiff, but I think he’s right.” + 

Then a fourth, whose voice Bernard didn’t recognize: “Unless a thing bores you, you think there’s no depth in it.” + 

“You seem to think that one’s only got to be stupid to be funny.” + 

“Come along,” whispered Bernard, suddenly seizing Olivier by the arm and drawing him aside. “Answer quickly. I’m in a hurry. You told me you didn’t sleep on the same floor as your parents?” + 

“I’ve shown you the door of my room. It opens straight on to the staircase, half a floor below our flat.” + 

“Didn’t you say your brother slept with you?” + 

“George. Yes.” + 

“Are you two alone?” + 

“Yes.” + 

“Can the youngster hold his tongue?” + 

“If necessary.” + 

“Listen. I’ve left home⁠—or at any rate I’m going to this evening. I don’t know where to go yet. Can you take me in for one night?” + 

Olivier turned very pale. His emotion was so great that he was hardly able to look at Bernard. + 

“Yes,” said he, “but don’t come before eleven. Mamma comes down to say good night to us and lock the door every evening.” + 

“But then⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

Olivier smiled. “I’ve got another key. You must knock softly, so as not to wake George if he’s asleep.” + 

“Will the concierge let me in?” + 

“I’ll warn him. Oh, I’m on very good terms with him. It’s he who gives me the key. Goodbye! Till tonight!” + 

They parted without shaking hands. While Bernard was walking away, reflecting on the letter he meant to write for the magistrate to find when he came in, Olivier, not wishing it to be thought that Bernard was the only person he liked talking to in private, went up to Lucien Bercail, who was sitting by himself as usual, for he was generally left a little out of it by the others. Olivier would be very fond of him, if he didn’t prefer Bernard. Lucien is as timid as Bernard is spirited. He cannot hide his weakness; he seems to live only with his head and his heart. He hardly ever dares to make advances, but when he sees Olivier coming towards him, he is beside himself with joy; Lucien writes poetry⁠—everyone suspects as much; but I am pretty sure that Olivier is the only person to whom Lucien talks of his ideas. They walked together to the edge of the terrace. + 

“What I should like,” said Lucien, “would be to tell the story⁠—no, not of a person, but of a place⁠—well, for instance, of a garden path, like this⁠—just tell what happens in it from morning to evening. First of all, come the children’s nurses and the children, and the babies’ nurses with ribbons in their caps.⁠ ⁠… No, no⁠ ⁠… first of all, people who are grey all over and ageless and sexless and who come to sweep the path, and water the grass, and change the flowers⁠—in fact, to set the stage and get ready the scenery before the opening of the gates. D’you see? Then the nurses come in⁠ ⁠… the kids make mud-pies and squabble; the nurses smack them. Then the little boys come out of school; then there are the workgirls; then the poor people who eat their scrap upon a bench, and later people come to meet each other, and others avoid each other, and others go by themselves⁠—dreamers. And then when the band plays and the shops close, there’s the crowd.⁠ ⁠… Students, like us; in the evening, lovers who embrace⁠—others who cry at parting. And at the end, when the day is over, there’s an old couple.⁠ ⁠… And suddenly the drum beats. Closing time! Everyone goes off. The play is ended. Do you understand? Something which gives the impression of the end of everything⁠—of death⁠ ⁠… but without mentioning death, of course.” + 

“Yes, I see it all perfectly,” said Olivier, who was thinking of Bernard and had not listened to a word. + 

“And that’s not all,” went on Lucien, enthusiastically; “I should like to have a kind of epilogue and show the same garden path at night, after everyone has gone, deserted and much more beautiful than in the daytime. In the deep silence; all the natural sounds intensified⁠—the sound of the fountain, and the wind in the trees, and the song of a night-bird. First of all, I thought that I’d bring in some ghosts to wander about⁠—or perhaps some statues⁠—but I think that would be more common place. What do you say?” + 

“No, no! No statues, no statues!” said Olivier absentmindedly; and then, seeing the other’s disappointed face: “Well, old fellow, if you bring it off, it’ll be splendid!” he exclaimed warmly. + 

Monsieur Profitendieu was in a hurry to get home and wished that his colleague Molinier, who was keeping him company up the Boulevard St. Germain, would walk a little faster. Albéric Profitendieu had just had an unusually heavy day at the law-courts; an uncomfortable sensation in his right side was causing him some uneasiness; fatigue in his case usually went to his liver, which was his weak point. He was thinking of his bath; nothing rested him better after the cares of the day than a good bath⁠—with an eye to which he had taken no tea that afternoon, esteeming it imprudent to get into any sort of water⁠—even warm⁠—with a loaded stomach. Merely a prejudice, perhaps; but prejudices are the props of civilisation. Oscar Molinier walked as quickly as he could and made every effort to keep up with his companion; but he was much shorter than Profitendieu and his crural development was slighter; besides which there was a little fatty accumulation round his heart and he easily became short-winded. Profitendieu, who was still sound at the age of fifty-five, with a well-developed chest and a brisk gait, would have gladly given him the slip; but he was very particular as to the proprieties; his colleague was older than he and higher up in the career; respect was due to him. And besides, since the death of his wife’s parents, Profitendieu had a very considerable fortune to be forgiven him, whereas Monsieur Molinier, who was Président de chambre, had nothing but his salary⁠—a derisory salary, utterly disproportionate to the high situation he filled with dignity, which was all the more imposing because of the mediocrity it cloaked. Profitendieu concealed his impatience; he turned to Molinier and looked at him mopping himself; for that matter, he was exceedingly interested by what Molinier was saying; but their point of view was not the same and the discussion was beginning to get warm. + 

“Have the house watched, by all means,” said Molinier. “Get the reports of the concierge and the sham maidservant⁠—very good! But mind, if you push the enquiry too far, the affair will be taken out of your hands.⁠ ⁠… I mean there’s a risk of your being led on much further than you bargained for.” + 

“Justice should have no such considerations.” + 

“Tut, tut, my dear sir; you and I know very well what justice ought to be and what it is. We’re all agreed that we act for the best, but, however we act, we never get nearer than an approximation. The case before us now is a particularly delicate one. Out of the fifteen accused persons⁠—or persons who at a word from you will be accused tomorrow⁠—nine are minors. And some of these boys, as you know, come of very honourable families. In such circumstances, I consider that to issue a warrant at all would be the greatest mistake. The newspapers will get hold of the affair and you open the door to every sort of blackmail and calumny. In spite of all your efforts you’ll not prevent names from coming out.⁠ ⁠… It’s no business of mine to give you advice⁠—on the contrary⁠—it’s much more my place to receive it. You’re well aware how highly I’ve always rated your lucidity and your fair-mindedness.⁠ ⁠… But if I were you, this is what I should do: I should try to put an end to this abominable scandal by laying hold of the four or five instigators.⁠ ⁠… Yes! I know they’re difficult to catch; but what the deuce, that’s part of our trade. I should have the flat⁠—the scene of the orgies⁠—closed, and I should take steps for the brazen young rascals’ parents to be informed of the affair⁠—quietly and secretly; and merely in order to avoid any repetition of the scandal. Oh! as to the women, collar them by all means. I’m entirely with you there. We seem to be up against a set of creatures of unspeakable perversity, and society should be cleansed of them at all costs. But, let me repeat, leave the boys alone; content yourself with giving them a fright, and then hush the matter up with some vague term like ‘youthful indiscretion.’ Their astonishment at having got off so cheaply will last them for a long time to come. Remember that three of them are not fourteen years old and that their parents no doubt consider them angels of purity and innocence. But really, my dear fellow, between ourselves, come now, did we think of women when we were that age?” + 

He came to a stop, breathless rather with talking than with walking, and forced Profitendieu, whose sleeve he was holding, to stop too. + 

“Or if we thought of them,” he went on, “it was ideally⁠—mystically⁠—religiously, if I may say so. The boys of today, don’t you think, have no ideals⁠—no! no ideals.⁠ ⁠… Apropos, how are yours? Of course, I’m not alluding to them when I speak so. I know that with your careful bringing-up⁠—with the education you’ve given them, there’s no fear of any such reprehensible follies.” + 

And indeed, up to that time, Profitendieu had had every reason to be satisfied with his sons. But he was without illusions⁠—the best education in the world was of no avail against bad instincts. God be praised, his children had no bad instincts⁠—nor Molinier’s either, no doubt; they were their own protectors against bad companions and bad books. For of what use is it to forbid what we can’t prevent? If books are forbidden, children read them on the sly. His own plan was perfectly simple⁠—he didn’t forbid bad books, but he so managed that his children had no desire to read them. As for the matter in question, he would think it over again, and in any case, he promised Molinier to do nothing without consulting him. He would simply give orders for a discreet watch to be kept, and as the thing had been going on for three months, it might just as well go on for another few days or weeks. Besides, the summer holidays were upon them and would necessarily disperse the delinquents. Au revoir! + 

At last Profitendieu was able to quicken his pace. + 

As soon as he got in, he hurried to his dressing-room and turned on the water for his bath. Antoine had been looking out for his master’s return and managed to come across him in the passage. + 

This faithful manservant had been in the family for the last fifteen years; he had seen the children grow up. He had seen a great many things⁠—and suspected a great many more; but he pretended not to notice anything his masters wished to keep hidden. + 

Bernard was not without affection for Antoine; he had not wanted to leave the house without saying goodbye to him. Perhaps it was out of irritation against his family that he made a point of confiding to a servant that he was going away, when none of his own people knew it; but, in excuse for Bernard, it must be pointed out that none of his own people were at that time in the house. And besides, Bernard could not have said goodbye to them without the risk of being detained. Whereas to Antoine, he could simply say: “I’m going away.” But as he said it, he put out his hand with such a solemn air that the old servant was astonished. + 

“Not coming back to dinner, Master Bernard?” + 

“Nor to sleep, Antoine.” And as Antoine hesitated, not knowing what he was expected to understand, nor whether he ought to ask any further questions, Bernard repeated still more meaningly: “I’m going away”; then he added: “I’ve left a letter for.⁠ ⁠…” He couldn’t bring himself to say “Papa,” so he corrected his sentence to “on the study writing table. Goodbye.” + 

As he squeezed Antoine’s hand, he felt as moved as if he were then and there saying goodbye to all his past life. He repeated “goodbye” very quickly and then hurried off before the sob that was rising in his throat burst from him. + 

Antoine wondered whether it were not a heavy responsibility to let him go in this way⁠—but how could he have prevented him? + 

That this departure of Bernard’s would be a blow to the whole family⁠—an unexpected⁠—a monstrous blow⁠—Antoine indeed was well aware; but his business as a perfect servant was to pretend to take it as a matter of course. It was not for him to know what Monsieur Profitendieu was ignorant of. No doubt, he might simply have said to him: “Do you know, sir, that Master Bernard has gone away?” But by so saying, he would lose his advantage, and that was highly undesirable. If he awaited his master so impatiently, it was to drop out in a noncommittal, deferential voice, and as if it were a simple message left by Bernard, this sentence, which he had elaborately prepared beforehand: + 

“Before going away, sir, Master Bernard left a letter for you in the study”⁠—a sentence so simple that there was a risk of its passing unperceived; he had racked his brains in vain for something which would be more striking, and had found nothing which would be at the same time natural. But as Bernard never left home, Profitendieu, whom Antoine was watching out of the corner of his eye, could not repress a start. + 

“Before going.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He pulled himself up at once; it was not for him to show his astonishment before a subordinate; the consciousness of his superiority never left him. His tone as he continued was very calm⁠—really magisterial. + 

“Thank you.” And as he went towards his study: “Where did you say the letter was?” + 

“On the writing table, sir.” + 

And in fact, as Profitendieu entered the room, he saw an envelope placed conspicuously opposite the chair in which he usually sat when writing; but Antoine was not to be choked off so easily, and Monsieur Profitendieu had not read two lines of the letter, when he heard a knock at the door. + 

“I forgot to tell you, sir, that there are two persons waiting to see you in the back drawing-room.” + 

“Who are they?” + 

“I don’t know, sir.” + 

“Are they together?” + 

“They don’t seem to be, sir.” + 

“What do they want?” + 

“I don’t know. They want to see you, sir.” + 

Profitendieu felt his patience giving way. + 

“I have already said and repeated that I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m at home⁠—especially at this time of day; I have my consulting room at the law-courts. Why did you let them in?” + 

“They both said they had something very urgent to say to you, sir.” + 

“Have they been here long?” + 

“Nearly an hour.” + 

Profitendieu took a few steps up and down the room, and passed one hand over his forehead; with the other he held Bernard’s letter. Antoine stood at the door, dignified and impassive. At last, he had the joy of seeing the judge lose his temper and of hearing him for the first time in his life stamp his foot and scold angrily. + 

“Deuce take it all! Can’t you leave me alone? Can’t you leave me alone? Tell them I’m busy. Tell them to come another day.” + 

Antoine had no sooner left the room than Profitendieu ran to the door. + 

“Antoine! Antoine! And then go and turn off my bath.” + 

Much inclined for a bath, truly! He went up to the window and read: + 

Sir, + 

Owing to an accidental discovery I happened to make this afternoon, I have become aware that I must cease to regard you as my father. This is an immense relief to me. Realizing as I do how little affection I feel for you, I have for a long time past been thinking myself an unnatural son; I prefer knowing I am not your son at all. You will perhaps consider that I ought to be grateful to you for having treated me as if I were one of your own children; but, in the first place, I have always felt the difference between your behaviour to them and to me, and, secondly, I know you well enough to feel certain that you acted as you did because you were afraid of the scandal and because you wished to conceal a situation which did you no great honour⁠—and, finally, because you could not have acted otherwise. I prefer to leave without seeing my mother again, because I am afraid that the emotion of bidding her a final goodbye might affect me too much and also because she might feel herself in a false position in my presence⁠—which I should dislike. I doubt whether she has any very lively affection for me; as I was almost always away at school, she never had time to know much of me, and as the sight of me must have continually reminded her of an episode in her life which she would have liked to efface, I think my departure will be a relief and a pleasure to her. Tell her, if you have the courage to, that I bear her no grudge for having made a bastard of me; on the contrary, I prefer that to knowing I am your son. (Pray excuse me for writing in this way; it is not my object to insult you; but my words will give you an excuse for despising me and that will be a relief to you.) + 

If you wish me to keep silent as to the secret reasons which have induced me to leave your roof, I must beg you not to attempt to make me return to it. The decision I have taken is irrevocable. I do not know how much you may have spent on supporting me up till now; as long as I was ignorant of the truth I could accept living at your expense, but it is needless to say that I prefer to receive nothing from you for the future. The idea of owing you anything is intolerable to me and I think I had rather die of hunger than sit at your table again. Fortunately I seem to remember having heard that my mother was richer than you when she married you. I am free to think, therefore, that the burden of supporting me fell only on her. I thank her⁠—consider her quit of anything else she may owe me⁠—and beg her to forget me. You will have no difficulty in explaining my departure to those it may surprise. I give you free leave to put what blame you choose on me (though I know well enough that you will not wait for my leave to do this). + 

I sign this letter with that ridiculous name of yours, which I should like to fling back in your face, and which I am longing and hoping soon to dishonour. + 

Monsieur Profitendieu totters to an armchair. He wants to reflect, but his mind is in a confused whirl. Moreover he feels a little stabbing pain in his right side, just below his ribs. There can be no question about it. It is a liver attack. Would there be any Vichy water in the house? If only his wife had not gone out! How is he to break the news of Bernard’s flight to her? Ought he to show her the letter? It is an unjust letter⁠—abominably unjust. He ought to be angry. But it is not anger he feels⁠—he wishes it were⁠—it is sorrow. He breathes deeply and at each breath exhales an “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” as swift and low as a sigh. The pain in his side becomes one with his other pain⁠—proves it⁠—localizes it. He feels as if his grief were in his liver. He drops into an armchair and rereads Bernard’s letter. He shrugs his shoulders sadly. Yes, it is a cruel letter⁠—but there is wounded vanity, defiance⁠—bravado in it, too. Not one of his other children⁠—his real children⁠—would have been capable⁠—any more than he would have been capable himself⁠—of writing it. He knows this, for there is nothing in them which he does not recognize only too well in himself. It is true that he has always thought it his duty to blame Bernard for his rawness, his roughness, his unbroken temper, but he realizes that it is for those very things that he loved him as he had never loved any of the others. + 

In the next room, Cécile, who had come in from her concert, had begun to practise the piano and was obstinately going over and over again the same phrase in a barcarole. At last Albéric Profitendieu could bear it no longer. He opened the drawing-room door a little way and in a plaintive, half supplicating voice, for his liver was beginning to hurt him cruelly (and besides he had always been a little frightened of her): + 

“Cécile, my dear,” he asked, “would you mind seeing whether there’s any Vichy water in the house and if there isn’t, sending out to get some? and it would be very nice of you to stop playing for a little.” + 

“Are you ill?” + 

“No, no, not at all. I’ve just got something that needs thinking over a little before dinner, and your music disturbs me.” + 

And then a kindly feeling⁠—for he was softened by suffering⁠—made him add: + 

“That’s a very pretty thing you’re playing. What is it?” + 

But he went away without waiting for the answer. For that matter, his daughter, who was aware that he knew nothing whatever about music and could not distinguish between “Viens Poupoule” and the “March” in Tannhäuser (at least, so she used to say), had no intention of answering. + 

But there he was at the door again! + 

“Has your mother come in?” + 

“No, not yet.” + 

Absurd! she would be coming in so late that he would have no time to speak to her before dinner. What could he invent to explain Bernard’s absence? He really couldn’t tell the truth⁠—let the children into the secret of their mother’s temporary lapse. Ah! all had been forgotten, forgiven, made up. The birth of their last son had cemented their reconciliation. And now, suddenly this avenging spectre had re-risen from the past⁠—this corpse had been washed up again by the tide. + 

Good! Another interruption! As the study door noiselessly opens, he slips the letter into the inside pocket of his coat; the portière is gently raised⁠—Caloub! + 

“Oh, Papa, please tell me what this Latin sentence means. I can’t make head or tail of it.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I’ve already told you not to come in here without knocking. You mustn’t disturb me like this for anything and everything. You are getting too much into the habit of relying on other people instead of making an effort yourself. Yesterday it was your geometry problem, and now today it’s⁠ ⁠… by whom is your sentence?” + 

Caloub holds out his copybook. + 

“He didn’t tell us; but just look at it; you’ll know all right. He dictated it to us. But perhaps I took it down wrong. You might at any rate tell me if it’s correct?” + 

Monsieur Profitendieu took the copybook, but he was in too much pain. He gently pushed the child away. + 

“Later on. It’s just dinner time. Has Charles come in?” + 

“He went down to his consulting room.” (The barrister receives his clients in a room on the ground floor.) + 

“Go and tell him I want to speak to him. Quick!” + 

A ring at the door bell! Madame Profitendieu at last! She apologizes for being late. She had a great many visits to pay. She is sorry to see her husband so poorly. What can be done for him? He certainly looks very unwell. He won’t be able to eat anything. They must sit down without him, but after dinner, will she come to his study with the children?⁠—Bernard?⁠—Oh, yes; his friend⁠ ⁠… you know⁠—the one he is reading mathematics with⁠—came and took him out to dinner. + 

Profitendieu felt better. He had at first been afraid he would be too ill to speak. And yet it was necessary to give an explanation of Bernard’s disappearance. He knew now what he must say⁠—however painful it might be. He felt firm and determined. His only fear was that his wife might interrupt him by crying⁠—that she might exclaim⁠—that she might faint.⁠ ⁠… + 

An hour later she comes into the room with the three children. He makes her sit down beside him, close against his armchair. + 

“Try to control yourself,” he whispers, but in a tone of command; “and don’t speak a word. We will talk together afterwards.” + 

And all the time he is speaking, he holds one of her hands in both his. + 

“Come, my children, sit down. I don’t like to see you standing there as if you were in front of an examiner. I have something very sad to say to you. Bernard has left us and we shall not see him again⁠ ⁠… for some time to come. I must now tell you what I at first concealed from you, because I wanted you to love Bernard like a brother; your mother and I loved him like our own child. But he was not our child⁠ ⁠… and one of his uncles⁠—a brother of his real mother, who confided him to us on her death bed⁠—came and fetched him away this evening.” + 

A painful silence follows these words and Caloub sniffles. They all wait, expecting him to go on. But he dismisses them with a wave of his hand. + 

“You can go now, my dears. I must speak to your mother.” + 

After they have left the room, Monsieur Profitendieu remains silent for a long time. The hand which Madame Profitendieu had left in his seems like a dead thing; with the other she presses a handkerchief to her eyes. Leaning on the writing table, she turns her head away to cry. Through the sobs which shake her, Monsieur Profitendieu hears her murmur: + 

“Oh, how cruel of you!⁠ ⁠… Oh! You have turned him out.⁠ ⁠…” + 

A moment ago, he had resolved to speak to her without showing her Bernard’s letter; but at this unjust accusation, he holds it out: + 

“Here! Read this.” + 

“I can’t.” + 

“You must read it.” + 

He has forgotten his pain. He follows her with his eyes all through the letter, line by line. Just now when he was speaking, he could hardly keep back his tears; but now all emotion has left him; he watches his wife. What is she thinking? In the same plaintive voice, broken by the same sobs, she murmurs again: + 

“Oh! why did you tell him?⁠ ⁠… You shouldn’t have told him.” + 

“But you can see for yourself that I never told him anything. Read his letter more carefully.” + 

“I did read it.⁠ ⁠… But how did he find out? Who told him then?” + 

So that is what she is thinking! Those are the accents of her grief! + 

This sorrow should bring them together, but, alas! Profitendieu feels obscurely that their thoughts are travelling by divergent ways. And while she laments and accuses and recriminates, he endeavours to bend her unruly spirit and to bring her to a more pious frame of mind. + 

“This is the expiation,” he says. + 

He has risen, from an instinctive desire to dominate; he stands there before her upright⁠—forgetful or regardless of his physical pain⁠—and lays his hand gravely, tenderly, authoritatively on Marguerite’s shoulder. He is well aware that her repentance for what he chooses to consider a passing weakness, has never been more than halfhearted; he would like to tell her now that this sorrow, this trial may serve to redeem her; but he can find no formula to satisfy him⁠—none that he can hope she will listen to. Marguerite’s shoulder resists the gentle pressure of his hand. She knows so well that from every event of life⁠—even the smallest⁠—he invariably, intolerably, extracts, as with a forceps, some moral teaching⁠—he interprets and twists everything to suit his own dogmas. He bends over her. This is what he would like to say: + 

“You see, my dear, no good thing can be born of sin. It was no use covering up your fault. Alas! I did what I could for the child. I treated him as my own. God shows us today that it was an error to try.⁠ ⁠…” + 

But at the first sentence he stops. + 

No doubt she understands these words, heavy with meaning as they are; they have struck home to her heart, for though she had stopped crying some moments before, her sobs break out afresh, more violently than ever: then she bows herself, as though she were going to kneel before him, but he stoops over her and holds her up. What is it she is saying through her tears? He stoops his ear almost to her lips and hears: + 

“You see.⁠ ⁠… You see.⁠ ⁠… Oh! why did you forgive me? Oh! I shouldn’t have come back.” + 

He is almost obliged to divine her words. Then she stops. She too can say no more. How can she tell him that she feels imprisoned in this virtue which he exacts from her⁠ ⁠… that she is stifling⁠ ⁠… that it is not so much her fault that she regrets now, as having repented of it? Profitendieu raises himself. + 

“My poor Marguerite,” he says with dignity and severity, “I am afraid you are a little stubborn tonight. It is late. We had better go to bed.” + 

He helps her up, leads her to her room, puts his lips to her forehead, then returns to his study and flings himself into an armchair. It is a curious thing that his liver attack has subsided⁠—but he feels shattered. He sits with his head in his hands, too sad to cry.⁠ ⁠… He does not hear a knock at the door, but at the noise the door makes in opening, he raises his head⁠—his son Charles! + 

“I came to say good night to you.” + 

He comes up. He wants to convey to his father that he has understood everything. He would like to manifest his pity, his tenderness, his devotion, but⁠—who would think it of an advocate?⁠—he is extraordinarily awkward at expressing himself⁠—or perhaps he becomes awkward precisely when his feelings are sincere. He kisses his father. The way in which he lays his head upon his shoulder, and leans and lingers there, convinces Profitendieu that his son has understood. He has understood so thoroughly that, raising his head a little, he asks in his usual clumsy fashion⁠—but his heart is so anxious that he cannot refrain from asking: + 

“And Caloub?” + 

The question is absurd, for Caloub’s looks are as strikingly like his family’s as Bernard’s are different. + 

Profitendieu pats Charles on the shoulder: + 

“No, no; it’s all right. Only Bernard.” + 

Then Charles begins pompously: + 

“God has driven the intruder away.⁠ ⁠…” + 

But Profitendieu stops him. He has no need of such words. + 

“Hush!” + 

Father and son have no more to say to each other. Let us leave them. It is nearly eleven o’clock. Let us leave Madame Profitendieu in her room, seated on a small, straight, uncomfortable chair. She is not crying; she is not thinking. She too would like to run away. But she will not. When she was with her lover⁠—Bernard’s father (we need not concern ourselves with him)⁠—she said to herself: “No, no; try as I may, I shall never be anything but an honest woman.” She was afraid of liberty, of crime, of ease⁠—so that after ten days, she returned repentant to her home. Her parents were right when they said to her: “You never know your own mind.” Let us leave her. Cécile is already asleep. Caloub is gazing in despair at his candle; it will never last long enough for him to finish the storybook, with which he is distracting himself from thoughts of Bernard. I should be curious to know what Antoine can have told his friend the cook. But it is impossible to listen to everything. This is the hour appointed for Bernard to go to Olivier. I am not sure where he dined that evening⁠—or even whether he dined at all. He has passed the porter’s room without hindrance; he gropes his way stealthily up the stairs.⁠ ⁠… + 

Olivier had got into bed to receive his mother, who was in the habit of coming every evening to kiss her two younger sons good night before they went to sleep. He might have got up and dressed again to receive Bernard, but he was still uncertain whether he would come and was afraid of doing anything to rouse his younger brother’s suspicions. George as a rule went to sleep early and woke up late; perhaps he would never notice that anything unusual was going on. When he heard a gentle scratching outside, Olivier sprang from his bed, thrust his feet hastily into his bedroom slippers, and ran to open the door. He did not light a candle; the moon gave light enough; there was no need for any other. Olivier hugged Bernard in his arms: + 

“How I was longing for you! I couldn’t believe you would really come,” said Olivier, and in the dimness he saw Bernard shrug his shoulders. “Do your parents know you are not sleeping at home tonight?” + 

Bernard looked straight in front of him into the dark. + 

“You think I ought to have asked their leave, eh?” + 

His tone of voice was so coldly ironical that Olivier at once felt the absurdity of his question. He had not yet grasped that Bernard had left “for good”; he thought that he only meant to sleep out that one night and was a little perplexed as to the reason of this escapade. He began to question: When did Bernard think of going home?⁠—Never! + 

Light began to dawn on Olivier. He was very anxious to be equal to the occasion and not to be surprised at anything; nevertheless an exclamation broke from him: + 

“What a tremendous decision!” + 

Bernard was by no means unwilling to astonish his friend a little; he was particularly flattered by the admiration which these words betrayed, but he shrugged his shoulders once more. Olivier took hold of his hand and asked very gravely and anxiously: + 

“But why are you leaving?” + 

“That, my dear fellow, is a family matter. I can’t tell you.” And in order not to seem too serious he amused himself by trying to jerk off with the tip of his shoe the slipper that Olivier was swinging on his bare toes⁠—for they were sitting down now on the side of the bed. There! Off it goes! + 

“Then where do you mean to live?” + 

“I don’t know.” + 

“And how?” + 

“That remains to be seen.” + 

“Have you any money?” + 

“Enough for breakfast tomorrow.” + 

“And after that?” + 

“After that I shall look about me. Oh, I’m sure to find something. You’ll see. I’ll let you know.” + 

Olivier admires his friend with immense fervour. He knows him to be resolute; but he cannot help doubting; when he is at the end of his resources, and feeling, as soon he must, the pressure of want, won’t he be obliged to go back? Bernard reassures him⁠—he will do anything in the world rather than return to his people. And as he repeats several times over more and more savagely⁠—“anything in the world!”⁠—Olivier’s heart is stabbed with a pang of terror. He wants to speak but dares not. At last with downcast head and unsteady voice, he begins: + 

“Bernard, all the same, you’re not thinking of⁠ ⁠…” but he stops. His friend raises his eyes and, though he cannot see him very distinctly, perceives his confusion. + 

“Of what?” he asks. “What do you mean? Tell me. Of stealing?” + 

Olivier shakes his head. No, that’s not it! Suddenly he bursts into tears and clasping Bernard convulsively in his arms: + 

“Promise me that you won’t.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Bernard kisses him, then pushes him away laughing. He has understood. + 

“Oh! yes! I promise.⁠ ⁠… But all the same you must admit it would be the easiest way out.” But Olivier feels reassured; he knows that these last words are an affectation of cynicism. + 

“Your exam?” + 

“Yes; that’s rather a bore. I don’t want to be ploughed. I think I’m ready all right. It’s more a question of feeling fit on the day. I must manage to get something fixed up very quickly. It’s touch and go; but I shall manage. You’ll see.” + 

They sit for a moment in silence. The second slipper has fallen. + 

Then Bernard: “You’ll catch cold. Get back into bed.” + 

“No; you must get into bed.” + 

“You’re joking. Come along! quick!” and he forces Olivier to get into the bed which he has already lain down in and which is all tumbled. + 

“But you? Where are you going to sleep?” + 

“Anywhere. On the floor. In a corner. I must get accustomed to roughing it.” + 

“No. Look here! I want to tell you something, but I shan’t be able to unless I feel you close to me. Get into my bed.” And when Bernard, after undressing himself in a twinkling, has got in beside him: + 

“You know⁠ ⁠… what I told you the other day⁠ ⁠… well, it’s come off. I went.” + 

There was no need to say more for Bernard to understand. He pressed up against his friend. + 

“Well! it’s disgusting⁠ ⁠… horrible.⁠ ⁠… Afterwards I wanted to spit⁠—to be sick⁠—to tear my skin off⁠—to kill myself.” + 

“You’re exaggerating.” + 

“To kill her.” + 

“Who was it? You haven’t been imprudent, have you?” + 

“No; it’s some creature Dhurmer knows. He introduced me. It was her talk that was the most loathsome. She never once stopped jabbering. And oh! the deadly stupidity of it! Why can’t people hold their tongues at such moments, I wonder? I should have liked to strangle her⁠—to gag her.” + 

“Poor old Olivier! You didn’t think that Dhurmer could get hold of anybody but an idiot, did you? Was she pretty, anyway?” + 

“D’you suppose I looked at her?” + 

“You’re a donkey! You’re a darling!⁠ ⁠… Let’s go to sleep.⁠ ⁠… But⁠ ⁠… did you bring it off all right?” + 

“God! That’s the most disgusting thing about it. I was able to, in spite of everything⁠ ⁠… just as if I’d desired her.” + 

“Well, it’s magnificent, my dear boy.” + 

“Oh, shut up! If that’s what they call love⁠—I’m fed up with it.” + 

“What a baby you are!” + 

“What would you have been, pray?” + 

“Oh, you know, I’m not particularly keen; as I’ve told you before, I’m biding my time. In cold blood, like that, it doesn’t appeal to me. All the same if I⁠—” + 

“If you⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

“If she.⁠ ⁠… Nothing! Let’s go to sleep.” + 

And abruptly he turns his back, drawing a little away so as not to touch Olivier’s body, which he feels uncomfortably warm. But Olivier, after a moment’s silence, begins again: + 

“I say, do you think Barrès will get in?” + 

“Heavens! does that worry you?” + 

“I don’t care a damn! I say, just listen to this a minute.” He presses on Bernard’s shoulder, so as to make him turn round⁠—“My brother has got a mistress.” + 

“George?” + 

The youngster, who is pretending to be asleep, but who has been listening with all his might in the dark, holds his breath when he hears his name. + 

“You’re crazy. I mean Vincent.” (Vincent is a few years older than Olivier and has just finished his medical training.) + 

“Did he tell you?” + 

“No. I found out without his suspecting. My parents know nothing about it.” + 

“What would they say if they knew?” + 

“I don’t know. Mamma would be in despair. Papa would say he must break it off or else marry her.” + 

“Of course. A worthy bourgeois can’t understand how one can be worthy in any other fashion than his own. How did you find out?” + 

“Well, for some time past Vincent has been going out at night after my parents have gone to bed. He goes downstairs as quietly as he can, but I recognize his step in the street. Last week⁠—Tuesday, I think, the night was so hot I couldn’t stop in bed. I went to the window to get a breath of fresh air. I heard the door downstairs open and shut, so I leant out and, as he was passing under a lamp post, I recognized Vincent. It was past midnight. That was the first time⁠—I mean the first time I noticed anything. But since then, I can’t help listening⁠—oh! without meaning to⁠—and nearly every night I hear him go out. He’s got a latchkey and our parents have arranged our old room⁠—George’s and mine⁠—as a consulting room for him when he has any patients. His room is by itself on the left of the entrance; the rest of our rooms are on the right. He can go out and come in without anyone knowing. As a rule I don’t hear him come in, but the day before yesterday⁠—Monday night⁠—I don’t know what was the matter with me⁠—I was thinking of Dhurmer’s scheme for a review.⁠ ⁠… I couldn’t go to sleep. I heard voices on the stairs. I thought it was Vincent.” + 

“What time was it?” asks Bernard, more to show that he is taking an interest than because he wants to know. + 

“Three in the morning, I think. I got up and put my ear to the door. Vincent was talking to a woman. Or rather, it was she who was talking.” + 

“Then how did you know it was he? All the people who live in the flat must pass by your door.” + 

“And a horrid nuisance it is, too. The later it is, the more row they make. They care no more about the people who are asleep than.⁠ ⁠… It was certainly he. I heard the woman calling him by his name. She kept saying.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I can’t bear repeating it. It makes me sick.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Go on.” + 

“She kept saying: ‘Vincent, my love⁠—my lover.⁠ ⁠… Oh, don’t leave me!’ ” + 

“Did she say ‘you’ to him and not ‘thou’?” + 

“Yes; isn’t it odd?” + 

“Tell us some more.” + 

“ ‘You have no right to desert me now. What is to become of me? Where am I to go? Say something to me! Oh, speak to me!’⁠ ⁠… And she called him again by his name, and went on repeating: ‘My lover! My lover!’ And her voice became sadder and sadder and lower and lower. And then I heard a noise (they must have been standing on the stairs), a noise like something falling. I think she must have flung herself on her knees.” + 

“And didn’t he answer anything? Nothing at all?” + 

“He must have gone up the last steps; I heard the door of the flat shut. And after that, she stayed a long time quite near⁠—almost up against my door. I heard her sobbing.” + 

“You should have opened the door.” + 

“I didn’t dare. Vincent would be furious if he thought I knew anything about his affairs. And then I was afraid it might embarrass her to be found crying. I don’t know what I could have said to her.” + 

Bernard had turned towards Olivier: + 

“In your place I should have opened.” + 

“Oh, you! You’re never afraid of anything. You do everything that comes into your head.” + 

“Is that a reproach?” + 

“Oh, no. It’s envy.” + 

“Have you any idea who the woman is?” + 

“How on earth should I know? Good night.” + 

“I say, are you sure George hasn’t heard us?” whispers Bernard in Olivier’s ear. They listen a moment with bated breath. + 

“No,” Olivier goes on in his ordinary voice. “He’s asleep. And besides, he wouldn’t understand. Do you know what he asked Papa the other day⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

At this, George can contain himself no longer. He sits up in his bed and breaks into his brother’s sentence. + 

“You ass!” he cries. “Didn’t you see I was doing it on purpose?⁠ ⁠… Good Lord, yes! I’ve heard every word you’ve been saying. But you needn’t excite yourselves. I’ve known all about Vincent for ever so long. And now, my young friends, talk a little lower please, because I’m sleepy⁠—or else hold your tongues.” + 

Olivier turns toward the wall. Bernard, who cannot sleep, looks out into the room. It seems bigger in the moonlight. As a matter of fact, he hardly knows it. Olivier was never there during the daytime; the few times that Bernard had been to see him, it was in the flat upstairs. But it was after school hours, when they came out of the lycée, that the two friends usually met. The moonlight has reached the foot of the bed in which George has at last gone to sleep; he has heard almost everything that his brother has said. He has matter for his dreams. Above George’s bed Bernard can just make out a little bookcase with two shelves full of schoolbooks. On a table near Olivier’s bed, he sees a larger sized book; he puts out his hand and takes it to look at the title⁠—Tocqueville; but as he is putting it back on the table, he drops it and the noise wakes Olivier up. + 

“Are you reading Tocqueville now?” + 

“Dulac lent it me.” + 

“Do you like it?” + 

“It’s rather boring, but some of it’s very good.” + 

“I say, what are you doing tomorrow?” + 

Tomorrow is Thursday and there is no school. Bernard thinks he may meet his friend somewhere. He does not mean to go back to the lycée; he thinks he can do without the last lectures and finish preparing for his examination by himself. + 

“Tomorrow,” says Olivier, “I’m going to St. Lazare railway station at 11:30 to meet my Uncle Edouard, who is arriving from Le Havre, on his way from England. In the afternoon, I’m engaged to go to the Louvre with Dhurmer. The rest of the time I’ve got to work.” + 

“Your Uncle Edouard?” + 

“Yes. He’s a half brother of Mamma’s. He’s been away for six months and I hardly know him; but I like him very much. He doesn’t know I’m going to meet him and I’m rather afraid I mayn’t recognize him. He’s not in the least like the rest of the family; he’s somebody quite out of the common.” + 

“What does he do?” + 

“He writes. I’ve read nearly all his books; but he hasn’t published anything for a long time.” + 

“Novels?” + 

“Yes; kind of novels.” + 

“Why have you never told me about them?” + 

“Because you’d have wanted to read them; and if you hadn’t liked them.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, finish your sentence.” + 

“Well, I should have hated it. There!” + 

“What makes you say that he’s out of the common?” + 

“I don’t exactly know. I told you I hardly know him. It’s more of a presentiment. I feel that he’s interested in all sorts of things that don’t interest my parents and that there’s nothing that one couldn’t talk to him about. One day⁠—it was just before he went away⁠—he had been to lunch with us; all the time he was talking to Papa I felt he kept looking at me and it began to make me uncomfortable; I was going to leave the room⁠—it was the dining-room⁠—where we had stayed on after coffee, but then he began to question Papa about me, which made me more uncomfortable than ever; and suddenly Papa got up and went to fetch some verses I had written and which I had been idiotic enough to show him.” + 

“Verses of yours?” + 

“Yes; you know⁠—that poem you said you thought was like Le Balcon. I knew it wasn’t any good⁠—or hardly any⁠—and I was furious with Papa for bringing it out. For a minute or two, while Papa was fetching the poem, we were alone together, Uncle Edouard and I, and I felt myself blushing horribly. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I looked away⁠—so did he, for that matter; he began by rolling a cigarette and lighting it and then to put me at my ease, no doubt, for he certainly saw I was blushing, he got up and went and looked out of the window. He was whistling. Then he suddenly said, ‘I feel far more embarrassed than you do, you know.’ But I think it was just kindness. At last Papa came back again; he handed my verses to Uncle Edouard, and he began to read them. I was in such a state that I think if he had paid me compliments, I should have insulted him. Evidently Papa expected him to⁠—pay me compliments⁠—and as my uncle said nothing, he asked him what he thought of them. But Uncle Edouard answered him, laughing, ‘I can’t speak to him comfortably about them before you.’ Then Papa laughed too and went out. And when we were alone again, he said he thought my verses were very bad, but I liked hearing him say so; and what I liked still more was that suddenly he put his finger down on two lines⁠—the only two I cared for in the whole thing; he looked at me and said, ‘That’s good!’ Wasn’t it nice? And if you only knew the tone in which he said it! I could have hugged him. Then he said my mistake was to start from an idea, and that I didn’t allow myself to be guided sufficiently by the words. I didn’t understand very well at first; but I think I see now what he meant⁠—and that he was right. I’ll explain it to you another time.” + 

“I understand now why you want to go and meet him.” + 

“Oh, all that’s nothing and I don’t know why I’ve told you about it. We said a great deal more to one another.” + 

“At 11:30 did you say? How do you know he’s coming by that train?” + 

“Because he wrote and told Mamma on a postcard; and then I looked it up in the timetable.” + 

“Will you have lunch with him?” + 

“Oh, no. I must be back here by twelve. I shall just have time to shake hands with him. But that’s enough for me.⁠ ⁠… Oh, one thing more before I go to sleep. When shall I see you again?” + 

“Not for some days. Not before I’ve got something fixed up.” + 

“All the same.⁠ ⁠… Couldn’t I help you somehow⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

“You? Help me? No. It wouldn’t be fair play. I should feel as if I were cheating. Good night.” + 

No, it was not to see his mistress that Vincent Molinier went out every evening. Quickly as he walks, let us follow him. He goes along the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, at the further end of which he lives, until he reaches the Rue Placide, which is its prolongation; then he turns down the Rue du Bac, where there are still a few belated passersby. In the Rue de Babylone, he stops in front of a porte-cochère which swings open to let him in. The Comte de Passavant lives here. If Vincent were not in the habit of coming often, he would enter this sumptuous mansion with a less confident air. The footman who comes to the door knows well enough how much timidity this feigned assurance hides. Vincent, with a touch of affectation, instead of handing him his hat, tosses it on to an armchair. + 

It is only recently that Vincent has taken to coming here. Robert de Passavant, who now calls himself his friend, is the friend of a great many people. I am not very sure how he and Vincent became acquainted. At the lycée, I expect⁠—though Robert de Passavant is perceptibly older than Vincent; they had lost sight of each other for several years and then, quite lately, had met again one evening when, by some unusual chance, Olivier had gone with his brother to the theatre; during the entr’acte Passavant had invited them both to take an ice with him; he had learnt that Vincent had just finished his last medical examinations and was undecided as to whether he should take a place as house physician in a hospital; science attracted him more than medicine, but the necessity of earning his living⁠ ⁠… in short, Vincent accepted with pleasure the very remunerative offer Robert de Passavant had made him a little later of coming every evening, to attend his old father, who had lately undergone a very serious operation; it was a matter of bandages, of injections, of soundings⁠—in fact, of whatever delicate services you please, which necessitate the ministrations of an expert hand. + 

But, added to this, the Vicomte had secret reasons for wishing a nearer acquaintance with Vincent; and Vincent had still others for consenting. Robert’s secret reason we shall try to discover later on. As for Vincent’s⁠—it was this: he was urgently in need of money. When your heart is in the right place and a wholesome education has early instilled into you a sense of your responsibilities, you don’t get a woman with child, without feeling yourself more or less bound to her⁠—especially when the woman has left her husband to follow you. + 

Up till then, Vincent had lived on the whole virtuously. His adventure with Laura appeared to him alternately, according to the moment of the day in which he thought of it, as either monstrous or perfectly natural. It very often suffices to add together a quantity of little facts which, taken separately, are very simple and very natural, to arrive at a sum which is monstrous. He said all this to himself over and over again as he walked along, but it didn’t get him out of his difficulties. No doubt, he had never thought of taking this woman permanently under his protection⁠—of marrying her after a divorce, or of living with her without marrying; he was obliged to confess to himself that he had no very violent passion for her; but he knew she was in Paris without means of subsistence; he was the cause of her distress; at the very least he owed her that first precarious aid which he felt himself less and less able to give her⁠—less today than yesterday. For last week he still possessed the five thousand francs which his mother had patiently and laboriously saved to give him a start in his profession; those five thousand francs would have sufficed, no doubt, to pay for his mistress’s confinement, for her stay in a nursing home, for the child’s first necessaries. To what demon’s advice then had he listened? What demon had hinted to him one evening that this sum which he had as good as given to Laura, which he had laid by for her, pledged to her⁠—that this sum would be insufficient? No, it was not Robert de Passavant; Robert had never said anything of the kind; but his proposal to take Vincent with him to a gambling club fell out precisely the same evening. And Vincent had accepted. + 

The hell in question was a particularly treacherous one, inasmuch as the habitués were all people in society and the whole thing took place on a friendly footing. Robert introduced his friend Vincent to one and another. Vincent, who was taken unawares, was not able to play high that first evening. He had hardly anything on him and refused the notes which the Vicomte offered to advance him. But as he began by winning, he regretted not being able to stake more and promised to go back the next night. + 

“Everybody knows you now; there’s no need for me to come with you again,” said Robert. + 

These meetings took place at Pierre de Brouville’s, commonly known as Pedro. After this first evening Robert de Passavant had put his car at his friend’s disposal. Vincent used to look in about eleven o’clock, smoke a cigarette with Robert, and after chatting for ten minutes or so, go upstairs. His stay there was more or less lengthy according to the Count’s patience, temper or requirements; after this he drove in the car to Pedro’s in the Rue St. Florentin, whence about an hour later the car took him back⁠—not actually to his own door, for he was afraid of attracting attention, but to the nearest corner. + 

The night before last, Laura Douviers, seated on the steps which led to the Moliniers’ flat, had waited for Vincent till three o’clock in the morning; it was not till then that he had come in. As a matter of fact, Vincent had not been at Pedro’s that night. Two days had gone by since he had lost every penny of the five thousand francs. He had informed Laura of this; he had written that he could do nothing more for her; that he advised her to go back to her husband or her father⁠—to confess everything. But things had gone so far, that confession seemed impossible to Laura and she could not contemplate it with any sort of calm. Her lover’s objurgations merely aroused indignation in her⁠—an indignation which only subsided to leave her a prey to despair. This was the state in which Vincent had found her. She had tried to keep him; he had torn himself from her grasp. Doubtless, he had to steel himself to do it, for he had a tender heart; but he was more of a pleasure-seeker than a lover and he had easily persuaded himself that duty itself demanded harshness. He had answered nothing to all her entreaties and lamentations, and as Olivier, who had heard them, told Bernard afterwards, when Vincent shut the door against her, she had sunk down on the steps and remained for a long time sobbing in the dark. + 

More than forty hours had gone by since that night. The day before, Vincent had not gone to Robert de Passavant’s, whose father seemed to be recovering; but that evening a telegram had summoned him. Robert wished to see him. When Vincent entered the room in which Robert usually sat⁠—a room which he used as his study and smoking-room and which he had been at some pains to decorate and fit up in his own fashion⁠—Robert carelessly held out his hand to him over his shoulder, without rising. + 

Robert is writing. He is sitting at a bureau littered with books. Facing him the French window which gives on to the garden, stands wide open in the moonlight. He speaks without turning round. + 

“Do you know what I am writing? But you won’t mention it, will you? You promise, eh?⁠—a manifesto for the opening number of Dhurmer’s review. I shan’t sign it, of course⁠—especially as I puff myself in it.⁠ ⁠… And then as it’ll certainly come out in the long run that I’m financing it, I don’t want it known too soon that I write for it. So mum’s the word! But it’s just occurred to me⁠—didn’t you say that young brother of yours wrote? What’s his name again?” + 

“Olivier,” says Vincent. + 

“Olivier! Yes; I had forgotten. Don’t stay standing there like that! Sit down in that armchair. You’re not cold? Shall I shut the window?⁠ ⁠… It’s poetry he writes, isn’t it? He ought to bring me something to see. Of course, I don’t promise to take it.⁠ ⁠… But, all the same, I should be surprised if it were bad. He looks an intelligent boy. And then he’s obviously au courant. I should like to talk to him. Tell him to come and see me, eh? Mind, I count on it. A cigarette?” And he holds out his silver cigarette-case. + 

“With pleasure.” + 

“Now then, Vincent, listen to me. I must speak to you very seriously. You behaved like a child the other evening⁠ ⁠… so did I, for that matter. I don’t say it was wrong of me to take you to Pedro’s, but I feel responsible, a little, for the money you’ve lost. I don’t know if that’s what’s meant by remorse, but, upon my word, it’s beginning to disturb my sleep and my digestion. And then, when I think of that unhappy woman you told me about.⁠ ⁠… But that’s another story. We won’t speak of that. It’s sacred. What I want to say is this⁠—that I wish⁠—yes, I’m absolutely determined to put at your disposal a sum of money equivalent to what you’ve lost. It was five thousand francs, wasn’t it? And you’re to risk it again. Once more, I repeat, I consider myself the cause of your losing this money⁠—I owe it to you⁠—there’s no need to thank me. You’ll pay me back if you win. If not⁠—worse luck! We shall be quits. Go back to Pedro’s this evening, as if nothing had happened. The car will take you there; then it’ll come back here to take me to Lady Griffith’s, where I’ll ask you to join me later on. I count upon it, eh? The car will fetch you from Pedro’s.” + 

He opens a drawer and takes out five notes which he hands to Vincent. + 

“Be off with you, now.” + 

“But your father?” + 

“Oh, yes; I forgot to tell you: he died about.⁠ ⁠…” He pulls out his watch and exclaims: “By Jove! how late it is! Nearly midnight.⁠ ⁠… You must make haste. Yes, about four hours ago.” + 

All this is said without any quickening of his voice, on the contrary with a kind of nonchalance. + 

“And aren’t you going to stay to.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“To watch by the body?” interrupts Robert. “No, that’s my young brother’s business. He is up there with his old nurse, who was on better terms with the deceased than I was.” + 

Then as Vincent remains motionless, he goes on: + 

“Look here, my dear fellow, I don’t want to appear cynical, but I have a horror of reach-me-down sentiments. In my early days I cut out my filial love according to the pattern I had in my heart; but I soon saw that my measurements had been too ample, and I was obliged to take it in. The old man never in his life occasioned me anything but trouble and vexation and constraint. If he had any tenderness left, it was certainly not to me that he showed it. My first impulses of affection towards him, in the days before I knew how to behave, brought me nothing but snubs⁠—and I learnt my lesson. You must have seen for yourself when you were attending him.⁠ ⁠… Did he ever thank you? Did you ever get the slightest look, the smallest smile from him? He always thought everything his due. Oh, he was what people call a character! I think he must have made my mother very unhappy, and yet he loved her⁠—that is, if he ever really loved anyone. I think he made everyone who came near him suffer⁠—his servants, his dogs, his horses, his mistresses; not his friends, for he had none. A general sigh of relief will go up at his death. He was, I believe, a man of great distinction in ‘his line,’ as people say; but I have never been able to discover what it was. He was very intelligent, undoubtedly. At heart, I had⁠—I still have⁠—a certain admiration for him⁠—but as for making play with a handkerchief⁠—as for wringing tears out⁠ ⁠… no, thank you, I’m no longer child enough for that. Be off with you now! And join me in an hour’s time at Lilian’s. What! you’re not dressed? Absurd! What does it matter? But if it’ll make you more comfortable, I’ll promise not to change either. Agreed! Light a cigar before you go and send the car back quickly⁠—it’ll fetch you again afterwards.” + 

He watched Vincent go out, shrugged his shoulders, then went into his dressing-room to change into his dress suit, which was ready laid out for him on a sofa. + 

In a room on the first floor, the old count is lying on his deathbed. Someone has placed a crucifix on his breast, but has omitted to fold his hands over it. A beard of some days’ growth softens the stubborn angle of his chin. Beneath his grey hair, which is brushed up en brosse, the wrinkles that line his forehead seem less deeply graven, as though they were relaxed. His eye is sunk beneath the arch of the brow and the shaggy growth of the eyebrow. I know that we shall never see him again, and that is the reason that I take a long look at him. Beside the head of the bed is an armchair, in which is seated the old nurse Séraphine. But she has risen. She goes up to a table where an old-fashioned lamp is dimly lighting the room; it needs turning up. A lampshade casts the light on to the book young Gontran is reading.⁠ ⁠… + 

“You’re tired, Master Gontran. You had better go to bed.” + 

The glance that Gontran raises from his book to rest upon Séraphine is very gentle. His fair hair, a lock of which he pushes back from his forehead, waves loosely over his temples. He is fifteen years old, and his face, which is still almost girlish, expresses nothing as yet but tenderness and love. + 

“And you?” he says. “It is you who ought to go to bed, you poor old Fine. Last night, you were on your feet nearly the whole time.” + 

“Oh, I’m accustomed to sitting up. And besides I slept during the daytime⁠—but you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“No, I’m all right. I don’t feel tired; and it does me good to stay here thinking and reading. I knew Papa so little; I think I should forget him altogether if I didn’t take a good look at him now. I will sit beside him till daylight. How long is it, Fine, since you came to us?” + 

“I came the year before you were born, and you’re nearly sixteen.” + 

“Do you remember Mamma quite well?” + 

“Do I remember your Mamma? What a question! You might as well ask me if I remember my own name. To be sure, I remember your Mamma.” + 

“I remember her too⁠—a little.⁠ ⁠… But not very well.⁠ ⁠… I was only five when she died. Used Papa to talk to her much?” + 

“It depended on his mood. Your Papa was never a one to talk much, and he didn’t care to be spoken to first. All the same in those days he was a little more talkative than he has been of late.⁠ ⁠… But there now! What’s past is past, and it’s better not to stir it up again. There’s One above who’s a better judge of these things than we are.” + 

“Do you really think that He concerns Himself about such things, dear Fine?” + 

“Why, if He doesn’t, who should then?” + 

Gontran puts his lips on Séraphine’s red, roughened hand. “You really ought to go to bed now. I promise to wake you as soon as it is light, and then I’ll take my turn to rest. Please!” + 

As soon as Séraphine has left him, Gontran falls upon his knees at the foot of the bed; he buries his head in the sheets, but he cannot succeed in weeping. No emotion stirs his heart; his eyes remain despairingly dry. Then he gets up and looks at the impassive face on the bed. At this solemn moment, he would like to have some rare, sublime experience⁠—hear a message from the world beyond⁠—send his thought flying into ethereal regions, inaccessible to mortal senses. But no! his thought remains obstinately grovelling on the earth; he looks at the dead man’s bloodless hands and wonders for how much longer the nails will go on growing. The sight of the unclasped hands grates on him. He would like to join them, to make them hold the crucifix. What a good idea! He thinks of Séraphine’s astonishment when she sees the dead hands folded together; the thought of Séraphine’s astonishment amuses him; and then he despises himself for being amused. Nevertheless he stoops over the bed. He seizes the arm which is farthest from him. The arm is stiff and will not bend. Gontran tries to force it, but the whole body moves with it. He seizes the other arm, which seems a little less rigid. Gontran almost succeeds in putting the hand in the proper place. He takes the crucifix and tries to slip it between the fingers and the thumb, but the contact of the cold flesh turns him sick. He thinks he is going to faint. He has a mind to call Séraphine back. He gives up everything⁠—the crucifix, which drops aslant on the tumbled sheet, and the lifeless arm, which falls back again into its first position; then, through the depths of the funereal silence, he suddenly hears a rough and brutal “God damn!” which fills him with terror, as if someone else.⁠ ⁠… He turns round⁠—but no! he is alone. It was from his own lips, from his own heart, that that resounding curse broke forth⁠—his, who until today has never uttered an oath! Then he sits down and plunges again into his reading. + 

Lilian half sat up and put the tips of her fingers on Robert’s chestnut hair. “Take care, my dear. You are hardly thirty yet and you’re beginning to get thin on the top. Baldness wouldn’t be at all becoming to you. You take life too seriously.” + 

Robert raised his face and looked at her, smiling. “Not when I am with you, I assure you.” + 

“Did you tell Molinier to come?” + 

“Yes, as you asked me to.” + 

“And⁠ ⁠… you lent him money?” + 

“Five thousand francs, as I told you⁠ ⁠… and he’ll lose it, like the rest.” + 

“Why should he lose it?” + 

“He’s bound to. I saw him the first evening. He plays anyhow.” + 

“He’s had time to learn.⁠ ⁠… Will you make a bet that tonight he’ll win?” + 

“If you like.” + 

“Oh, please don’t take it as a penance. I like people to do what they do willingly.” + 

“Don’t be cross. Agreed then. If he wins, he’ll pay the money back to you. But if he loses, it’s you who’ll pay me. Is that all right?” + 

She pressed a bell. + 

“Bring a bottle of Tokay and three glasses, please.⁠ ⁠… And if he comes back with the five thousand and no more⁠—he shall keep it, eh? If he neither loses nor wins.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“That’s unheard of. It’s odd what an interest you take in him.” + 

“It’s odd that you don’t think him interesting.” + 

“You think him interesting because you’re in love with him.” + 

“Yes, my dear boy, that’s true. One doesn’t mind admitting that to you. But that’s not the reason he interests me. On the contrary⁠—as a rule, when my head’s attracted, the rest of me turns cold.” + 

A servant came in with wine and glasses on a tray. + 

“First of all let’s seal our bet, and afterwards we’ll have another glass in honour of the winner.” + 

The servant poured out the wine and they drank to each other. + 

“Personally, I think your Vincent a bore.” + 

“Oh, ‘my Vincent’!⁠ ⁠… As if it hadn’t been you who brought him here! And then, I advise you not to go repeating everywhere that you think him a bore. Your reason for frequenting him would be too obvious.” + 

Robert turned a little to put his lips on Lilian’s bare foot; she drew it away quickly and covered it with her fan. + 

“Must I blush?” said he. + 

“It’s not worth while trying as far as I am concerned. You couldn’t succeed.” + 

She emptied her glass, and then: + 

“D’you know what, my dear friend? You have all the qualities of a man of letters⁠—you are vain, hypocritical, fickle, selfish.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You are too flattering!” + 

“Yes; that’s all very charming⁠—but you’ll never be a good novelist.” + 

“Because?” + 

“Because you don’t know how to listen.” + 

“It seems to me I’m listening admirably.” + 

“Pooh! He isn’t a writer and he listens a great deal better. But when we are together, I am the one to listen.” + 

“He hardly knows how to speak.” + 

“That’s because you never stop talking yourself.” + 

“I know everything he’s going to say beforehand.” + 

“You think so? Do you know the story of his affair with that woman?” + 

“Oh! Love affairs! The dullest things in the world!” + 

“And then I like it when he talks about natural history.” + 

“Natural history is even duller than love affairs. Does he give you lectures then?” + 

“If I could only repeat what he says.⁠ ⁠… It’s thrilling, my dear friend. He tells me all sorts of things about the deep seas. I’ve always been particularly curious about creatures that live in the sea. You know that in America they make boats with glass let into the sides, so that you can go to the bottom of the sea and look all round you. They say that the sights are simply marvellous⁠—live coral and⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠… what do you call them?⁠ ⁠… madrepores, and sponges, and seaweeds, and great shoals of fish. Vincent says that there are certain kinds of fish which die according as the water becomes more salt or less, and that there are others, on the contrary, which can live in any degree of salt water; and that they swim about on the edge of the currents, where the water becomes less salt, so as to prey on the others when their strength fails them. You ought to get him to talk to you about it.⁠ ⁠… I assure you it’s most curious. When he talks about things like that, he becomes extraordinary. You wouldn’t recognize him.⁠ ⁠… But you don’t know how to get him to talk.⁠ ⁠… It’s like when he tells me about his affair with Laura Douviers⁠—yes, that’s her name.⁠ ⁠… Do you know how he got to know her?” + 

“Did he tell you?” + 

“People tell me everything. You know they do, you shocking creature!” And she stroked his face with the feathers of her closed fan. + 

“Did you suspect that he had been to see me every single day since the evening you first brought him?” + 

“Every day? No, really! I didn’t suspect that.” + 

“On the fourth, he couldn’t resist any longer; he came out with the whole thing. But on every day following, he kept adding details.” + 

“And it didn’t bore you? You’re a wonder!” + 

“I told you, my dear, that I love him.” And she seized his arm emphatically. + 

“And he⁠ ⁠… loves the other woman?” + 

Lilian laughed. + 

“He did love her. Oh, I had to pretend at first to be deeply interested in her. I even had to weep with him. And all the time I was horribly jealous. I’m not any more now. Just listen how it began. They were at Pau together in the same home⁠—a sanatorium, where they had been sent because they were supposed to be tuberculous. In reality, they weren’t, either of them. But they thought they were very ill. They were strangers, and the first time they saw each other was on the terrace in the garden, where they were lying side by side on their deck chairs; and all round them were other patients, who spend the whole day lying out of doors in the sun to get cured. As they thought they were doomed to die an early death, they persuaded themselves that nothing they did would be of any consequence. He kept repeating all the time that they neither of them had more than a month to live⁠—and it was the springtime. She was there all alone. Her husband is a little French professor in England. She left him to go to Pau. She had been married six months. He had to pinch and starve to send her there. He used to write to her every day. She’s a young woman of very good family⁠—very well brought up⁠—very reserved⁠—very shy. But once there⁠—I don’t exactly know what he can have said to her, but on the third day she confessed that though she lay with her husband and belonged to him, she did not know the meaning of the word ‘pleasure.’ ” + 

“And what did he say then?” + 

“He took her hand, as it hung down beside her chair, and pressed a long kiss upon it.” + 

“And when he told you that, what did you say?” + 

“I? Oh, frightful! Only fancy! I went off into a fou rire. I couldn’t prevent myself, and once I had begun, I couldn’t stop.⁠ ⁠… It’s not so much what he said that made me laugh⁠—it was the air of interest and consternation which I thought it necessary to take, in order to encourage him to go on. I was afraid of seeming too much amused. And then, in reality, it was all very beautiful and touching. You can’t imagine how moved he was when he told me about it. He had never spoken of it to anyone before. Of course his parents know nothing about it.” + 

“You are the person who ought to write novels.” + 

“Parbleu, mon cher, if only I knew what language to write them in!⁠ ⁠… But what with Russian, English and French, I should never be able to choose.⁠—Well, the following night he went to his new friend’s room and there taught her what her husband had never been able to teach⁠—and I expect he made a very good master. Only as they were convinced that they had only a short time to live, they naturally took no precautions, and, naturally, after a little while, with the help of love, they both began to get much better. When she realized she was enceinte, they were in a terrible state. It was last month. It was beginning to get hot. Pau in the summer is intolerable. They came back to Paris together. Her husband thinks she is with her parents, who have a boarding school near the Luxembourg; but she didn’t dare to go to them. Her parents, on the other hand, think she is still in Pau; but it must all come out soon. Vincent swore at first not to abandon her; he proposed going away with her⁠—anywhere⁠—to America⁠—to the Pacific. But they had no money. It was just at that moment that he met you and began to play.” + 

“He didn’t tell me any of all this.” + 

“Whatever happens, don’t let him know that I’ve told you.” She stopped and listened a moment. + 

“I thought I heard him.⁠ ⁠… He told me that, during the railway journey from Pau to Paris, he thought she was going mad. She had only just begun to realize she was going to have a child. She was sitting opposite him in the railway carriage; they were alone. She hadn’t spoken to him the whole morning; he had had to make all the arrangements for the journey by himself⁠—she was absolutely inert⁠—she seemed not to know what was going on. He took her hands, but she looked straight in front of her with haggard eyes, as if she didn’t see him, and her lips kept moving. He bent towards her. She was saying: ‘A lover! A lover! I’ve got a lover!’ She kept on repeating it in the same tone; and still the same word kept coming from her over and over again, as if it were the only one she remembered. I assure you, Robert, that when he told me that, I didn’t feel in the least inclined to laugh any more. I’ve never in my life heard anything more pathetic. But all the same, I felt that as he was speaking he was detaching himself more and more from the whole thing. It was as though his feeling were passing away in the same breath as his words; it was as though he were grateful to my emotion for coming to relay his own.” + 

“I don’t know how you would say it in Russian or English, but I assure you that, in French, you do it exceedingly well.” + 

“Thanks. I’m aware of it.⁠—It was after that, that he began to talk to me about natural history; and I tried to persuade him that it would be monstrous to sacrifice his career to his love.” + 

“In other words, you advised him to sacrifice his love. And is it your intention to take the place of that love?” + 

Lilian remained silent. + 

“This time, I think it really is he,” went on Robert, rising. “Quick! one word before he comes in. My father died this evening.” + 

“Ah!” she said simply. + 

“You haven’t a fancy to become Comtesse de Passavant, have you?” + 

At this Lilian flung herself back with a burst of laughter. + 

“Oh, oh, my dear friend! The fact is I have a vague recollection that I’ve mislaid a husband somewhere or other in England. What! I never told you?” + 

“Not that I remember.” + 

“You might have guessed it; as a rule a Lady’s accompanied by a Lord.” + 

The Comte de Passavant, who had never had much faith in the authenticity of his friend’s title, smiled. She went on: “Is it to cloak your own life, that you’ve taken it into your head to propose such a thing to me? No, my dear friend, no. Let’s stay as we are. Friends, eh?” And she held out her hand, which he kissed. + 

“Ah! Ah! I thought as much,” cried Vincent, as he came into the room. “The traitor! He has dressed!” + 

“Yes, I had promised not to change, so as to keep him in countenance,” said Robert. “I’m sorry, my dear fellow, but I suddenly remembered I was in mourning.” + 

Vincent held his head high. An air of triumph and of joy breathed from his whole person. At his arrival, Lilian had sprung to her feet. She looked him up and down for a moment, then rushed joyously at Robert and began belabouring his back with her fists, jumping, dancing and exclaiming as she did so. (Lilian irritates me rather when she puts on this affectation of childishness.) + 

“He has lost his bet! He has lost his bet!” + 

“What bet?” asked Vincent. + 

“He had bet that you would lose your money again tonight. Tell us! Quickly! You’ve won. How much?” + 

“I have had the extraordinary courage⁠—and virtue⁠—to leave off at fifty thousand and come away.” + 

Lilian gave a roar of delight. + 

“Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” she cried. Then she flung her arms round Vincent’s neck. From head to foot, he felt her glowing, lissom body, with its strange perfume of sandalwood, pressed against his own; and Lilian kissed him on the forehead, on the cheeks, on the lips. Vincent staggered and freed himself. He took a bundle of banknotes out of his pocket. + 

“Here! take back what you advanced me,” he said, holding out five of them to Robert. + 

“No,” answered Robert. “It is to Lady Lilian that you owe them now.” And he handed her the notes, which she flung on to the divan. She was panting. She went out on the terrace to breathe. It was that ambiguous hour when night is drawing to an end, and the devil casts up his accounts. Outside not a sound was to be heard. Vincent had seated himself on the divan. Lilian turned towards him: + 

“And now, what do you mean to do?” she asked; and for the first time she called him “thou.” + 

He put his head between his hands and said with a kind of sob: + 

“I don’t know.” + 

Lilian went up to him and put her hand on his forehead; he raised it and his eyes were dry and burning. + 

“In the meantime, we’ll drink each other’s health,” said she, and she filled the three glasses with Tokay. After they had drunk: + 

“Now you must go. It’s late and I’m tired out.” She accompanied them into the antechamber and then, as Robert went out first, she slipped a little metal object into Vincent’s hand. “Go out with him,” she whispered, “and come back in a quarter of an hour.” + 

In the antechamber a footman was dozing. She shook him by the arm. + 

“Light these gentlemen downstairs,” she said. + 

The staircase was dark. It would have been a simple matter, no doubt, to make use of electric light, but she made it a point that her visitors should always be shown out by a servant. + 

The footman lighted the candles in a big candelabra, which he held high above him and preceded Robert and Vincent downstairs. Robert’s car was waiting outside the door, which the footman shut behind them. + 

“I think I shall walk home. I need a little exercise to steady my nerves,” said Vincent, as the other opened the door of the motor and signed to him to get in. + 

“Don’t you really want me to take you home?” And Robert suddenly seized Vincent’s left hand, which he was holding shut. “Open your hand! Come! Show us what you’ve got there!” + 

Vincent was simpleton enough to be afraid of Robert’s jealousy. He blushed as he loosened his fingers and a little key fell on to the pavement. Robert picked it up at once, looked at it and gave it back to Vincent with a laugh. + 

“Ho! Ho!” he said and shrugged his shoulders. Then as he was getting into his car, he turned back to Vincent, who was standing there looking a little foolish: + 

“It’s Thursday morning. Tell your brother that I expect him this afternoon at four o’clock.” And he shut the door of the carriage quickly without giving Vincent time to answer. + 

The car went off. Vincent walked a few paces along the quay, crossed the Seine, and went on till he reached the part of the Tuileries which lies outside the railings; going up to the little fountain, he soaked his handkerchief in the water and pressed it on to his forehead and his temples. Then, slowly, he walked back towards Lilian’s house. There let us leave him, while the devil watches him with amusement as he noiselessly slips the little key into the keyhole.⁠ ⁠… + 

It is at this same hour that Laura, his yesterday’s mistress, is at last dropping off to sleep in her gloomy little hotel room, after having long wept, long bemoaned herself. On the deck of the ship which is bringing him back to France, Edouard, in the first light of the dawn, is rereading her letter⁠—the plaintive letter in which she appeals for help. The gentle shores of his native land are already in sight, though scarcely visible through the morning mist to any but a practised eye. Not a cloud is in the heavens, where the glance of God will soon be smiling. The horizon is already lifting a rosy eyelid. How hot it is going to be in Paris! It is time to return to Bernard. Here he is, just awaking in Olivier’s bed. + 

Bernard has had an absurd dream. He doesn’t remember his dream. He doesn’t try to remember his dream, but to get out of it. He returns to the world of reality to feel Olivier’s body pressing heavily against him. Whilst they were asleep (or at any rate while Bernard was asleep) his friend had come close up to him⁠—and, for that matter, the bed was too narrow to allow of much distance; he had turned over; he is sleeping on his side now and Bernard feels Olivier’s warm breath tickling his neck. Bernard has nothing on but his short day-shirt; one of Olivier’s arms is flung across him, weighing oppressively and indiscreetly on his flesh. For a moment Bernard is not sure that Olivier is really asleep. He frees himself gently. He gets up without waking Olivier, dresses and then lies down again on the bed. It is still too early to be going. Four o’clock. The night is only just beginning to dwindle. One more hour of rest, one more hour for gathering strength to start the coming day valiantly. But there is no more sleep for him. Bernard stares at the glimmering window pane, at the grey walls of the little room, at the iron bedstead where George is tossing in his dreams. + 

“In a moment,” he says to himself, “I shall be setting out to meet my fate. Adventure! What a splendid word! The advent of destiny! All the surprising unknown that awaits me! I don’t know if everyone is like me, but as soon as I am awake, I like despising the people who are asleep. Olivier, my friend, I shall go off without waiting for your goodbye. Up! valorous Bernard! The time has come!” + 

He rubs his face with the corner of a towel dipped in water, brushes his hair, puts on his shoes and leaves the room noiselessly. Out at last! + 

Ah! the morning air that has not yet been breathed, how life-giving it seems to body and soul! Bernard follows the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens, goes down the Rue Bonaparte, reaches the Quays, crosses the Seine. He thinks of the new rule of life which he has only lately formulated: “If I don’t do it, who will? If I don’t do it at once, when shall I?” He thinks: “Great things to do!” He feels that he is going towards them. “Great things!” he repeats to himself, as he walks along. If only he knew what they were!⁠ ⁠… In the meantime he knows that he is hungry; here he is at the Halles. He has eight sous in his pocket⁠—not a sou more! He goes into a public house and takes a roll and coffee, standing at the bar. Price six sous. He has two sous left; he gallantly leaves one on the counter and holds out the other to a ragamuffin who is grubbing in a dustbin. Charity? Swagger? What does it matter? He feels as happy as a king. He has nothing left⁠—and the whole world is his! + 

“I expect anything and everything from Providence,” thinks he. “If only it sets a handsome helping of roast beef before me at lunch time, I shall be willing to strike a bargain”⁠—for last night he had gone without his dinner. The sun has risen long ago. Bernard is back again on the quays now. He feels all lightness. When he runs he feels as though he were flying. His thoughts leap through his brain with delicious ease. He thinks: + 

“The difficulty in life is to take the same thing seriously for long at a time. For instance, my mother’s love for the person I used to call my father⁠—I believed in it for fifteen years. I still believed in it yesterday. She wasn’t able to take her love seriously, either. I wonder whether I despise her or esteem her the more for having made her son a bastard.⁠ ⁠… But in reality, I don’t wonder as much as all that. The feelings one has for one’s progenitors are among the things that it’s better not go into too deeply. As for Mr. Cuckold, it’s perfectly simple⁠—for as far back as I can remember, I’ve always hated him; I must admit now that I didn’t deserve much credit for it⁠—and that’s the only thing I regret. To think that if I hadn’t broken open that drawer I might have gone on all my life believing that I harboured unnatural feelings in my breast towards a father! What a relief to know!⁠ ⁠… All the same I didn’t exactly break open the drawer; I never even thought of opening it.⁠ ⁠… And there were extenuating circumstances: first of all I was horribly bored that day. And that curiosity of mine⁠—that ‘fatal curiosity’ as Fénelon calls it, it’s certainly the surest thing I’ve inherited from my real father, for the Profitendieus haven’t an ounce of it in their composition. I have never met anyone less curious than the gentleman who is my mother’s husband⁠—unless perhaps it’s the children he has produced. I must think about them later on⁠—after I have dined.⁠ ⁠… To lift up a marble slab off the top of a table and to see a drawer underneath is really not the same thing as picking a lock. I’m not a burglar. It might happen to anyone to lift the marble slab off a table. Theseus must have been about my age when he lifted the stone. The difficulty in the case of a table is the clock as a rule.⁠ ⁠… I shouldn’t have dreamt of lifting the marble slab off the table if I hadn’t wanted to mend the clock.⁠ ⁠… What doesn’t happen to everyone is to find arms underneath⁠—or guilty love-letters. Pooh! The important thing was that I should learn the facts. It isn’t everyone who can indulge in the luxury of a ghost to reveal them, like Hamlet. Hamlet! It’s curious how one’s point of view changes according as one is the offspring of crime or legitimacy. I’ll think about that later on⁠—after I have dined.⁠ ⁠… Was it wrong of me to read those letters!⁠ ⁠… No, I should be feeling remorseful! And if I hadn’t read the letters, I should have had to go on living in ignorance and falsehood and submission. Oh, for a draught of air! Oh, for the open sea! ‘Bernard! Bernard, that green youth of yours⁠ ⁠…’ as Bossuet says. Seat your youth on that bench, Bernard. What a beautiful morning! There really are days when the sun seems to be kissing the earth. If I could get rid of myself for a little, there’s not a doubt but I should write poetry.” + 

And as he lay stretched on the bench, he got rid of himself so effectually that he fell asleep. + 

VII + 

Lilian and Vincent + 

The sun, already high in the heavens, caresses Vincent’s bare foot on the wide bed, where he is lying beside Lilian. She sits up and looks at him, not knowing that he is awake, and is astonished to see a look of anxiety on his face. + 

It is possible that Lady Griffith loved Vincent; but what she loved in him was success. Vincent was tall, handsome, slim, but he did not know how to hold himself, how to sit down or get up. He had an expressive face, but he did his hair badly. Above all she admired the boldness and robustness of his intellect; he was certainly highly educated, but she thought him uncultivated. With the instinct of a mistress and a mother, she hung over this big boy of hers and made it her task to form him. He was her creation⁠—her statue. She taught him to polish his nails, to part his hair on one side instead of brushing it back, so that his brow, when it was half hidden by a stray lock, looked all the whiter and loftier. And then instead of the modest little ready-made bows he used to wear, she gave him really becoming neckties. Decidedly Lady Griffith loved Vincent; but she could not put up with him when he was silent or “moody,” as she called it. + 

She gently passes a finger over Vincent’s forehead, as though to efface a wrinkle⁠—those two deep vertical furrows which start from his eyebrows, and give his face a look almost of suffering. + 

“If you are going to bring me regrets, anxieties, remorse,” she murmurs, as she leans over him, “it would be better never to come back.” + 

Vincent shuts his eyes as though to shut out too bright a light. The jubilation in Lilian’s face dazzles him. + 

“You must treat this as if it were a mosque⁠—take your shoes off before you come in, so as not to bring in any mud from the outside. Do you suppose I don’t know what you are thinking of?” Then, as Vincent tries to put his hand on her mouth, she defends herself with the grace of a naughty child. + 

“No! Let me speak to you seriously. I have reflected a great deal about what you said the other day. People always think that women aren’t capable of reflection, but you know, it depends upon the woman.⁠ ⁠… That thing you said the other day about the products of cross breeding⁠ ⁠… and that it isn’t by crossing that one gets satisfactory results so much as by selection.⁠ ⁠… Have I remembered your lesson, eh? Well, this morning I think you have bred a monster⁠—a perfectly ridiculous creature⁠—you’ll never rear it! A cross between a bacchante and the Holy Ghost! Haven’t you now?⁠ ⁠… You’re disgusted with yourself for having chucked Laura. I can tell it from the lines on your forehead. If you want to go back to her, say so at once and leave me; I shall have been mistaken in you and I shan’t mind in the least. But if you mean to stay with me, then get rid of that funereal countenance. You remind me of certain English people⁠—the more emancipated their opinions, the more they cling to their morality; so that there are no severer Puritans than their freethinkers.⁠ ⁠… You think I’m heartless? You’re wrong. I understand perfectly that you are sorry for Laura. But then, what are you doing here?” + 

Then, as Vincent turned his head away: + 

“Look here! You must go to the bathroom now and try and wash your regrets off in the shower-bath. I shall ring for breakfast, eh? And when you come back, I’ll explain something that you don’t seem to understand.” + 

He had got up. She sprang after him. + 

“Don’t dress just yet. In the cupboard on the right hand side of the bath, you’ll find a collection of burnouses and haiks and pyjamas. Take anything you like.” + 

Vincent appeared twenty minutes later dressed in a pistachio coloured silk jellabah. + 

“Oh, wait a minute⁠—wait! Let me arrange you!” cried Lilian in delight. She pulled out of an oriental chest two wide purple scarves; wound the darker of the two as a sash round Vincent’s waist, and the other as a turban round his head. + 

“My thoughts are always the same colour as my clothes,” she said. (She had put on crimson and silver lamé pyjamas.) “I remember once, when I was quite a little girl at San Francisco, I was put into black because a sister of my mother’s had died⁠—an old aunt whom I had never seen. I cried the whole day long. I was terribly, terribly sad; I thought that I was very unhappy and that I was grieving deeply for my aunt’s death⁠—all because I was in black. Nowadays, if men are more serious than women, it’s because their clothes are darker. I’ll wager that your thoughts are quite different from what they were a little while ago. Sit down there on the bed; and when you’ve drunk a glass of vodka and a cup of tea and eaten two or three sandwiches, I’ll tell you a story. Say when I’m to begin.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She settled down on the rug beside the bed, crouching between Vincent’s legs like an Egyptian statue, with her chin resting on her knees. When she had eaten and drunk, she began: + 

“I was on the Bourgogne, you know, on the day of the wreck. I was seventeen, so now you know how old I am. I was a very good swimmer, and to show you that I’m not hard-hearted, I’ll tell you that if my first thought was to save myself, my second was to save someone else. I’m not quite sure even whether it wasn’t my first. Or rather, I don’t think I thought of anything; but nothing disgusts me so much in such moments as the people who only think of themselves⁠—oh, yes⁠—the women who scream. There was a first boatload, chiefly of women and children, and some of them yelled to such an extent that it was enough to make anyone lose his head. The boat was so badly handled that instead of dropping down on to the sea straight, it dived nose foremost and everyone in it was flung out before it even had time to fill with water. The whole scene took place by the light of torches and lanterns and searchlights. You can’t imagine how ghastly it was. The waves were very big and everything that was not in the light was lost in darkness on the other side of the hill of water. + 

“I have never lived more intensely; but I was as incapable of reflection as a Newfoundland dog, I suppose, when he jumps into the water. I can’t even understand now what happened; I only know that I had noticed a little girl in the boat⁠—a darling thing of about five or six; and when I saw the boat overturn, I immediately made up my mind that it was her I would save. She was with her mother, but the poor woman was a bad swimmer; and as usual in such cases, her skirts hampered her. As for me, I expect I undressed mechanically; I was called to take my place in the second boatload. I must have got in; and then I no doubt jumped straight into the sea out of the boat; all I can remember is swimming about for a long time with the child clinging to my neck. It was terrified and clutched me so tight that I couldn’t breathe. Luckily the people in the boat saw us and either waited for us or rowed towards us. But that’s not why I’m telling you this story. The recollection which remains most vividly with me and which nothing will ever efface from my mind and my heart is this.⁠—There were about forty or so of us in the boat, all crowded together, for a number of swimmers had been picked up at the last gasp like me. The water was almost on a level with the edge of the boat. I was in the stern and I was holding the little girl I had just saved tightly pressed against me to warm her⁠—and to prevent her from seeing what I couldn’t help seeing myself⁠—two sailors, one armed with a hatchet and the other with a kitchen chopper. And what do you think they were doing?⁠ ⁠… They were hacking off the fingers and hands of the swimmers who were trying to get into our boat. One of these two sailors (the other was a Negro) turned to me, as I sat there, my teeth chattering with cold and fright and horror, and said, ‘If another single one gets in we shall be bloody well done for. The boat’s full.’ And he added that it was a thing that had to be done in all shipwrecks, but that naturally one didn’t mention it. + 

“I think I fainted then; at any rate, I can’t remember anything more, just as one remains deaf for a long time after a noise that has been too tremendous. + 

“And when I came to myself on board the X, which picked us up, I realized that I was no longer the same, that I never could again be the same sentimental young girl I had been before; I realized that a part of myself had gone down with the Bourgogne; that henceforth there would be a whole heap of delicate feelings whose fingers and hands I should hack away to prevent them from climbing into my heart and wrecking it.” + 

She looked at Vincent out of the corner of her eye and, with a backward twist of her body, went on: “It’s a habit one must get into.” + 

Then, as her hair, which she had pinned up loosely, was coming down and falling over her shoulders, she rose, went up to a mirror and began to rearrange it, talking as she did so: + 

“When I left America a little later, I felt as if I were the golden fleece starting off in search of a conqueror. I may sometimes have been foolish⁠ ⁠… I may sometimes have made mistakes⁠—perhaps I am making one now in talking to you like this⁠—but you, on your side, don’t imagine that because I have given myself to you, you have won me. Make certain of this⁠—I abominate mediocrity and I can love no one who isn’t a conqueror. If you want me, it must be to help you to victory; if it’s only to be pitied and consoled and made much of⁠ ⁠… no, my dear boy⁠—I’d better say so at once⁠—I’m not the person you need⁠—it’s Laura.” + 

She said all this without turning round and while she was continuing to arrange her rebellious locks, but Vincent caught her eye in the glass. + 

“May I give you my answer this evening?” he said, getting up and taking off his oriental garments to get into his day clothes. “I must go home quickly now so as to catch my brother Olivier before he goes out. I’ve got something to say to him.” + 

He said it by way of apology, to give colour to his departure; but when he went up to Lilian, she turned round to him smiling, and so lovely that he hesitated. + 

“Unless I leave a line for him to get at lunch time,” he added. + 

“Do you see a great deal of him?” + 

“Hardly anything. No, it’s an invitation for this afternoon, which I’ve got to pass on to him.” + 

“From Robert?⁠ ⁠… Oh! I see!⁠ ⁠…” she said, smiling oddly. “That’s a person, too, I must talk to you about.⁠ ⁠… All right! Go at once. But come back at six o’clock, because at seven his car is coming to take us out to dinner in the Bois.” + 

Vincent walks home, meditating as he goes; he realizes that from the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair. + 

Edouard, as he sits in the Paris express, is reading Passavant’s new book, The Horizontal Bar, which he has just bought at the Dieppe railway station. No doubt he will find the book waiting for him when he gets to Paris, but Edouard is impatient. People are talking of it everywhere. Not one of his own books has ever had the honour of figuring on station bookstalls. He has been told, it is true, that it would be an easy matter to arrange, but he doesn’t care to. He repeats to himself that he hasn’t the slightest desire to see his books in railway stations⁠—but it is the sight of Passavant’s book that makes him feel the need of repeating it. Everything that Passavant does, and everything that other people do round about him, rubs Edouard up the wrong way: the newspaper articles, for instance, in which his book is praised up to the skies. It’s as if it were a wager; in every one of the three papers that he buys on landing, there is a eulogy of The Horizontal Bar. In the fourth there is a letter from Passavant, complaining of an article which had recently appeared in the same paper and which had been a trifle less flattering than the others. Passavant writes defending and explaining his book. This letter irritates Edouard even more than the articles. Passavant pretends to enlighten public opinion⁠—in reality he cleverly directs it. None of Edouard’s books has ever given rise to such a crop of articles; but, for that matter, Edouard has never made the slightest attempt to attract the favour of the critics. If they turn him the cold shoulder, it is a matter of indifference to him. But as he reads the articles on his rival’s book, he feels the need of assuring himself again that it is a matter of indifference. + 

Not that he detests Passavant. He has met him occasionally and has thought him charming. Passavant, moreover, has always been particularly amiable to him. But he dislikes Passavant’s books. He thinks Passavant not so much an artist as a juggler. Enough of Passavant! + 

Edouard takes Laura’s letter out of his coat pocket⁠—the letter he was reading on the boat; he reads it again: + 

Dear friend, + 

The last time I saw you⁠—(do you remember?⁠—it was in St. James’s Park, on the 2nd of April, the day before I left for the South?) you made me promise to write to you if ever I was in any difficulty. I am keeping my promise. To whom can I appeal but you? I cannot ask for help from those to whom I should most like to turn; it is just from them that I must hide my trouble. Dear friend, I am in very great trouble. Some day perhaps, I will tell you the story of my life after I parted from Felix. He took me out to Pau and then he had to return to Cambridge for his lectures. What came over me, when I was left out there all by myself⁠—the spring⁠—my convalescence⁠—my solitude?⁠ ⁠… Dare I confess to you what it is impossible to tell Felix? The time has come when I ought to go back to him⁠—but oh! I am no longer worthy to. The letters which I have been writing to him for some time past have been lying letters, and the ones he writes to me speak of nothing but his joy at hearing that I am better. I wish to heaven I had remained ill! I wish to heaven I had died out there!⁠ ⁠… My friend, the fact must be faced: I am expecting a child and it is not his. I left Felix more than three months ago; there’s no possibility of blinding him at any rate. I dare not go back to him. I cannot. I will not. He is too good. He would forgive me, no doubt, and I don’t deserve⁠—I don’t want his forgiveness. I daren’t go back to my parents either. They think I am still at Pau. My father⁠—if he knew, if he understood⁠—is capable of cursing me. He would turn me away. And how could I face his virtue, his horror of evil, of lying, of everything that is impure? I am afraid too of grieving my mother and my sister. As for⁠ ⁠… but I will not accuse him; when he was in a position to help me, he promised to do so. Unfortunately, however, in order to be better able to help me, he took to gambling. He has lost the money which should have served to keep me until after my confinement. He has lost it all. I had thought at first of going away with him somewhere⁠—anywhere; of living with him at any rate for a short time, for I didn’t mean to hamper him⁠—to be a burden to him; I should have ended by finding some way of earning my living, but I can’t just yet. I can see that he is unhappy at having to abandon me and that it is the only thing that he can do. I don’t blame him⁠—but all the same he is abandoning me. I am here in Paris without any money. I am living on credit in a little hotel, but it can’t go on much longer. I don’t know what is to become of me. To think that ways so sweet should lead only to such depths as these! I am writing to the address in London which you gave me. But when will this letter reach you? And I who longed so to have a child! I do nothing but cry all day long. Advise me. You are the only hope I have left. Help me if you can, and if you can’t.⁠ ⁠… Oh! in other days I should have had more courage, but now it is not I alone who will die. If you don’t come⁠—if you write that you can do nothing for me, I shall have no word or thought of reproach for you. In bidding you goodbye, I shall try and not regret life too much, but I think that you never quite understood that the friendship you gave me is still the best thing in my life⁠—never quite understood that what I called my friendship for you went by another name in my heart. + 

Edouard had received this letter on the morning of the day he had left England. That is to say he had decided to leave as soon as he received it. In any case he had not intended to stay much longer. I don’t mean to insinuate that he would have been incapable of returning to Paris specially to help Laura; I merely say that he is glad to return. He has been kept terribly short of pleasure lately in England; and the first thing he means to do when he gets to Paris is to go to a house of ill-fame; and as he doesn’t wish to take his private papers with him, he reaches his portmanteau down from the rack and opens it, so as to slip in Laura’s letter. + 

The place for this letter is not among coats and shirts; he pulls out from beneath the clothes a cloth-bound MS. book, half filled with his writing; turns to the very beginning of the book, looks up certain pages which were written last year and rereads them; it is between these that Laura’s letter will find its proper place. + 

Oct. 18th.⁠—Laura does not seem to suspect her power; but I, who can unravel the secrets of my own heart, know well enough that up till now I have never written a line that has not been indirectly inspired by her. I feel her still a child beside me, and all the skill of my discourse is due only to my constant desire to instruct, to convince, to captivate her. I see nothing⁠—I hear nothing without asking myself what she would think of it. I forsake my own emotion to feel only hers. And I think that if she were not there to give definition to my personality, it would vanish in the excessive vagueness of its contours. It is only round her that I concentrate and define myself. By what illusion have I hitherto believed that I was fashioning her to my likeness, when, on the contrary, I was bending myself to hers? And I never noticed it! Or rather⁠—the influence of love, by a curious action of give and take, made us both reciprocally alter our natures. Involuntarily⁠—unconsciously⁠—each one of a pair of lovers fashions himself to meet the other’s requirements⁠—endeavours by a continual effort to resemble that idol of himself which he beholds in the other’s heart.⁠ ⁠… Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity. + 

This was the way in which she deluded me. Her thought everywhere companioned mine. I admired her taste, her curiosity, her culture, and did not realize that it was her love for me which made her take so passionate an interest in everything that I cared for. For she never discovered anything herself. Each one of her admirations⁠—I see it now⁠—was merely a couch on which she could lay her thought alongside of mine; there was nothing in all this that responded to any profound need of her nature. “It was only for you that I adorned and decked myself,” she will say. Yes! But I could have wished that it had been only for her and that she had yielded in doing so to an intimate and personal necessity. But of all these things that she has added to herself for my sake, nothing will remain⁠—not even a regret⁠—not even a sense of something missing. A day comes when the true self, which time has slowly stripped of all its borrowed raiment, reappears, and then, if it was of these ornaments that the other was enamoured, he finds that he is pressing to his heart nothing but an empty dress⁠—nothing but a memory⁠—nothing but grief and despair. + 

Ah! with what virtues, with what perfections I had adorned her! + 

How vexing this question of sincerity is! Sincerity! When I say the word I think only of her. If it is myself that I consider, I cease to understand its meaning. I am never anything but what I think myself⁠—and this varies so incessantly, that often, if I were not there to make them acquainted, my morning’s self would not recognize my evening’s. Nothing could be more different from me than myself. It is only sometimes when I am alone that the substratum emerges and that I attain a certain fundamental continuity; but at such times I feel that my life is slowing down, stopping, and that I am on the very verge of ceasing to exist. My heart beats only out of sympathy; I live only through others⁠—by procuration, so to speak, and by espousals; and I never feel myself living so intensely as when I escape from myself to become no matter who. + 

This anti-egoistical force of decentralization is so great in me, that it disintegrates my sense of property⁠—and, as a consequence, of responsibility. Such a being is not of the kind that one can marry. How can I make Laura understand this? + 

Oct. 26th.⁠—The only existence that anything (including myself) has for me, is poetical⁠—I restore this word its full signification. It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but that I merely imagine I exist. The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality. I am constantly getting outside myself, and as I watch myself act I cannot understand how a person who acts is the same as the person who is watching him act, and who wonders in astonishment and doubt how he can be actor and watcher at the same moment. + 

Psychological analysis lost all interest for me from the moment that I became aware that men feel what they imagine they feel. From that to thinking that they imagine they feel what they feel was a very short step⁠ ⁠… ! I see it clearly in the case of my love for Laura: between loving her and imagining I love her⁠—between imagining I love her less and loving her less⁠—what God could tell the difference? In the domain of feeling, what is real is indistinguishable from what is imaginary. And if it is sufficient to imagine one loves, in order to love, so it is sufficient to say to oneself that when one loves one imagines one loves, in order to love a little less and even in order to detach oneself a little from one’s love, or at any rate to detach some of the crystals from one’s love. But if one is able to say such a thing to oneself, must one not already love a little less? + 

It is by such reasoning as this, that X in my book tries to detach himself from Z⁠—and, still more, tries to detach her from himself. + 

Oct. 28th.⁠—People are always talking of the sudden crystallization of love. Its slow decrystallization, which I never hear talked of, is a psychological phenomenon which interests me far more. I consider that it can be observed, after a longer or shorter period, in all love marriages. There will be no reason to fear this, indeed, in Laura’s case (and so much the better) if she marries Felix Douviers, as reason, and her family, and I myself advise her to do. Douviers is a thoroughly estimable professor, with many excellent points, and very capable in his own line (I hear that he is greatly appreciated by his pupils). In process of time and in the wear of daily life, Laura is sure to discover in him all the more virtues for having had fewer illusions to begin with; when she praises him, indeed, she seems to me really not to give him his due. Douviers is worth more than she thinks. + 

What an admirable subject for a novel⁠—the progressive and reciprocal decrystallization of a husband and wife after fifteen or twenty years of married life. So long as he loves and desires to be loved, the lover cannot show himself as he really is, and moreover he does not see the beloved⁠—but instead, an idol whom he decks out, a divinity whom he creates. + 

So I have warned Laura to be on her guard against both herself and me. I have tried to persuade her that our love could not bring either of us any lasting happiness. I hope I have more or less convinced her. + 

Edouard shrugs his shoulders, slips the letter in between the leaves of his journal, shuts it up and replaces it in his suitcase. He then takes a hundred-franc note out of his pocketbook and puts that too in his suitcase. This sum will be more than sufficient to last him till he can fetch his suitcase from the cloakroom, where he means to deposit it on his arrival. The tiresome thing is that it has got no key⁠—or at any rate he has not got its key. He always loses the keys of his suitcases. Pooh! The cloakroom attendants are too busy during the daytime and never alone. He will fetch it out at about four o’clock and then go to comfort and help Laura; he will try and persuade her to come out to dinner with him. + 

Edouard dozes; insensibly his thoughts take another direction. He wonders whether he would have guessed merely by reading Laura’s letter, that her hair was black. He says to himself that novelists, by a too exact description of their characters, hinder the reader’s imagination rather than help it, and that they ought to allow each individual to picture their personages to himself according to his own fancy. He thinks of the novel which he is planning and which is to be like nothing else he has ever written. He is not sure that The Counterfeiters is a good title. He was wrong to have announced it beforehand. An absurd custom this of publishing the titles of books in advance, in order to whet the reader’s appetite! It whets nobody’s appetite and it ties one. He is not sure either that the subject is a very good one. He is continually thinking of it and has been thinking of it for a long time past; but he has not yet written a line of it. On the other hand, he puts down his notes and reflections in a little notebook. He takes this notebook out of his suitcase and a fountain pen out of his pocket. He writes: + 

I should like to strip the novel of every element that does not specifically belong to the novel. Just as photography in the past freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so much pride in. Outward events, accidents, traumatisms, belong to the cinema. The novel should leave them to it. Even the description of the characters does not seem to me properly to belong to the genre. No; this does not seem to me the business of the pure novel (and in art, as in everything else, purity is the only thing I care about). No more than it is the business of the drama. And don’t let it be argued that the dramatist does not describe his characters because the spectator is intended to see them transposed alive on the stage; for how often on the stage an actor irritates and baffles us because he is so unlike the person our own imagination had figured better without him. The novelist does not as a rule rely sufficiently on the reader’s imagination. + 

What is the station that has just flashed past? Asnières. He puts the notebook back in his suitcase. But, decidedly, the thought of Passavant vexes him. He takes the notebook out again and adds: + 

The work of art, as far as Passavant is concerned, is not so much an end as a means. The artistic convictions which he displays are asserted with so much vehemence merely because they lack depth; no secret exigence of his temperament necessitates them; they are evoked by the passing hour; their mot d’ordre is opportunism. + 

The Horizontal Bar! The things that soonest appear out of date are those that at first strike us as most modern. Every concession, every affectation is the promise of a wrinkle. But it is by these means that Passavant pleases the young. He snaps his fingers at the future. It is the generation of today that he is speaking to⁠—which is certainly better than speaking to that of yesterday. But as what he writes is addressed only to that younger generation, it is in danger of disappearing with it. He is perfectly aware of this and does not build his hopes on surviving. This is the reason that he defends himself so fiercely, and that, not only when he is attacked, but at the slightest restrictions of the critics. If he felt that his work was lasting he would leave it to defend itself and would not so continually seek to justify it. More than that, misunderstanding, injustice, would rejoice him. So much the more food for tomorrow’s critics to use their teeth upon! + 

He looks at his watch: 11:35. He ought to have arrived by now. Curious to know if by any impossible chance Olivier will be at the station to meet him? He hasn’t the slightest expectation of it. How can he even suppose that his postcard has come to Olivier’s notice⁠—that postcard on which he informed Olivier’s parents of his return, and incidentally, carelessly, absentmindedly to all appearance, mentioned the day and hour of his arrival⁠ ⁠… as one takes a pleasure in stalking⁠—in setting a trap for fate itself. + 

The train is stopping. Quick! A porter! No! His suitcase is not very heavy, nor the cloakroom very far.⁠ ⁠… Even supposing he were there, would they recognize each other in all this crowd? They have seen so little of each other. If only he hasn’t grown out of recognition!⁠ ⁠… Ah! Great Heavens! Can that be he? + 

IX + 

Edouard and Olivier + 

We should have nothing to deplore of all that happened later if only Edouard’s and Olivier’s joy at meeting had been more demonstrative; but they both had a singular incapacity for gauging their credit in other people’s hearts and minds; this now paralysed them; so that each, believing his emotion to be unshared, absorbed in his own joy, and half ashamed at finding it so great, was completely preoccupied by trying to hide its intensity from the other. + 

It was for this reason that Olivier, far from helping Edouard’s joy by telling him with what eagerness he had come to meet him, thought fit to speak of some job or other which he had had to do in the neighbourhood that very morning, as if to excuse himself for having come. His conscience, scrupulous to excess, cunningly set about persuading him that he was perhaps in Edouard’s way. The lie was hardly out of his mouth when he blushed. Edouard surprised the blush, and as he had at first seized Olivier’s arm and passionately pressed it, he thought (scrupulous he, too) that it was this that had made him blush. + 

He had begun by saying: + 

“I tried to force myself to believe that you wouldn’t come, but in reality I was certain that you would.” + 

Then it came over him that Olivier thought these words presumptuous. When he heard him answer in an offhand way: “I had a job to do in this very neighbourhood,” he dropped Olivier’s arm and his spirits fell from their heights. He would have liked to ask Olivier whether he had understood that the postcard which he had addressed to his parents, had been really intended for him; as he was on the point of putting the question, his heart failed him. Olivier, who was afraid of boring Edouard or of being misunderstood if he spoke of himself, kept silent. He looked at Edouard and was astonished at the trembling of his lip; then he dropped his eyes at once. Edouard was both longing for the look and afraid that Olivier would think him too old. He kept rolling a bit of paper nervously between his fingers. It was the ticket he had just been given at the cloakroom, but he did not think of that. + 

“If it was his cloakroom ticket,” thought Olivier, as he watched him crumple it up and throw it absentmindedly away, “he wouldn’t throw it away like that.” And he glanced round for a second to see the wind carry it off along the pavement far behind them. If he had looked longer he might have seen a young man pick it up. It was Bernard, who had been following them ever since they had left the station.⁠ ⁠… In the mean while Olivier was in despair at finding nothing to say to Edouard, and the silence between them became intolerable. + 

“When we get opposite Condorcet,” he kept repeating to himself, “I shall say, ‘I must go home now; goodbye.’ ” + 

Then, when they got opposite the Lycée, he gave himself till as far as the corner of the Rue de Provence. But Edouard, on whom the silence was weighing quite as heavily, could not endure that they should part in this way. He drew his companion into a café. Perhaps the port wine which he ordered would help them to get the better of their embarrassment. + 

They drank to each other. + 

“Good luck to you!” said Edouard, raising his glass. “When is the examination?” + 

“In ten days.” + 

“Do you feel ready?” + 

Olivier shrugged his shoulders. “One never knows. If one doesn’t happen to be in good form on the day.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He didn’t dare answer “yes,” for fear of seeming conceited. He was embarrassed, too, because he wanted and yet was afraid to say “thou” to Edouard. He contented himself by giving his sentences an impersonal turn, so as to avoid at any rate saying “you”; and by so doing he deprived Edouard of the opportunity of begging him to say “thou”⁠—which Edouard longed for him to do and which he remembered well enough he had done a few days before his leaving for England. + 

“Have you been working?” + 

“Pretty well, but not as well as I might have.” + 

“People who work well always think they might work better,” said Edouard rather pompously. + 

He said it in spite of himself and then thought his sentence ridiculous. + 

“Do you still write poetry?” + 

“Sometimes.⁠ ⁠… I badly want a little advice.” He raised his eyes to Edouard. “Your advice,” he wanted to say⁠—“thy advice.” And his look, in default of his voice, said it so plainly that Edouard thought he was saying it out of deference⁠—out of amiability. But why should he have answered⁠—and so brusquely too⁠ ⁠… ? + 

“Oh, one must go to oneself for advice, or to companions of one’s own age. One’s elders are no use.” + 

Olivier thought: “I didn’t ask him. Why is he protesting?” + 

Each of them was vexed with himself for not being able to utter a word that didn’t sound curt and stiff; and each of them, feeling the other’s embarrassment and irritation, thought himself the cause and object of them. Such interviews lead to no good unless something comes to the rescue. Nothing came. + 

Olivier had begun the morning badly. When, on waking up, he had found that Bernard was no longer beside him, that he had left him without saying goodbye, his heart had been filled with unhappiness; though he had forgotten it for an instant in the joy of seeing Edouard, it now surged up in him anew like a black wave and submerged every other thought in his mind. He would have liked to talk about Bernard, to tell Edouard everything and anything, to make him interested in his friend. + 

But Edouard’s slightest smile would have wounded him; and as the passionate and tumultuous feelings which were shaking him could not have been expressed without the risk of seeming exaggerated, he kept silence. He felt his features harden; he would have liked to fling himself into Edouard’s arms and cry. Edouard misunderstood this silence of Olivier’s and the look of sternness on his face; he loved him far too much to be able to behave with any ease. He hardly dared look at Olivier, whom he longed to take in his arms and fondle like a child, and when he met his eyes and saw their dull and lifeless expression: + 

“Of course!” he said to himself. “I bore him⁠—I bore him to death. Poor child! He’s just waiting for a word from me to escape.” And irresistibly Edouard said the word⁠—out of sheer pity: “You’d better be off now. Your people are expecting you for lunch, I’m sure.” + 

Olivier, who was thinking the same things, misunderstood in the same way. He got up in a desperate hurry and held out his hand. At least he wanted to say to Edouard: “Shall I see you⁠—thee⁠—again soon? Shall we see each other again soon?”⁠ ⁠… Edouard was waiting for these words. Nothing came but a commonplace “Goodbye!” + 

X + 

The Cloakroom Ticket + 

The sun woke Bernard. He rose from his bench with a violent headache. His gallant courage of the morning had left him. He felt abominably lonely and his heart was swelling with something brackish and bitter which he would not call unhappiness, but which brought the tears to his eyes. What should he do? Where should he go?⁠ ⁠… If his steps turned towards St. Lazare Station at the time that he knew Olivier was due there, it was without any definite purpose and merely with the wish to see his friend again. He reproached himself for having left so abruptly that morning; perhaps Olivier had been hurt?⁠ ⁠… Was he not the creature in the world he liked best?⁠ ⁠… When he saw him arm in arm with Edouard a peculiar feeling made him follow the pair and at the same time not show himself; painfully conscious of being de trop, he would yet have liked to slip in between them. He thought Edouard looked charming; only a little taller than Olivier and with a scarcely less youthful figure. It was he whom he made up his mind to address; he would wait until Olivier left him. But address him? Upon what pretext? + 

It was at this moment that he caught sight of the little bit of crumpled paper as it escaped from Edouard’s hand. He picked it up, saw that it was a cloakroom ticket⁠ ⁠… and, by Jove, here was the wished-for pretext! + 

He saw the two friends go into a café, hesitated a moment in perplexity, and then continued his monologue: + 

“Now a normal fathead would have nothing better to do than to return this paper at once,” he said to himself. + 

“ ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable + 

Seem to me all the uses of this world!’ + 

as I have heard Hamlet remark. Bernard, Bernard, what thought is this that is tickling you? It was only yesterday that you were rifling a drawer. On what path are you entering? Consider, my boy, consider.⁠ ⁠… Consider that the cloakroom attendant who took Edouard’s luggage will be gone to his lunch at twelve o’clock, and that there will be another one on duty. And didn’t you promise your friend to stick at nothing?” + 

He reflected, however, that too much haste might spoil everything. The attendant might be surprised into thinking this haste suspicious; he might consult the entry book and think it unnatural that a piece of luggage deposited in the cloakroom a few minutes before twelve, should be taken out immediately after. And besides, suppose some passerby, some busybody, had seen him pick up the bit of paper.⁠ ⁠… Bernard forced himself to walk to the Place de la Concorde without hurrying⁠—in the time it would have taken another person to lunch. It is quite usual, isn’t it, to put one’s luggage in the cloakroom whilst one is lunching and to take it out immediately after.⁠ ⁠… His headache had gone. As he was passing by a restaurant terrace, he boldly took a toothpick from one of the little bundles that were set out on the tables, and stood nibbling it at the cloakroom counter, in order to give himself the air of having lunched. He was lucky to have in his favour his good looks, his well-cut clothes, his distinction, the frankness of his eyes and smile, and that indefinable something in the whole appearance which denotes those who have been brought up in comfort and want for nothing. (But all this gets rather draggled by sleeping on benches.)⁠ ⁠… + 

He had a horrible turn when the attendant told him there were ten centimes to pay. He had not a single sou left. What should he do? The suitcase was there, on the counter. The slightest sign of hesitation would give the alarm⁠—so would his want of money. But the demon is watching over him; he slips between Bernard’s anxious fingers, as they go searching from pocket to pocket with a pretence of feigned despair, a fifty-centime bit, which had lain forgotten since goodness knows when in his waistcoat pocket. Bernard hands it to the attendant. He has not shown a sign of his agitation. He takes up the suitcase, and in the simplest, honestest fashion pockets the forty centimes change. Heavens! How hot he is! Where shall he go now? His legs are beginning to fail him and the suitcase feels heavy. What shall he do with it?⁠ ⁠… He suddenly remembers that he has no key. No! No! Certainly not! He will not break open the lock; what the devil, he isn’t a thief!⁠ ⁠… But if he only knew what was in it. His arm is aching and he is perspiring with the heat. He stops for a moment and puts his burden down on the pavement. Of course he has every intention of returning the wretched thing to its owner; but he would like to question it first. He presses the lock at a venture.⁠ ⁠… Oh miracle! The two shells open and disclose a pearl⁠—a pocketbook, which in its turn discloses a bundle of banknotes. Bernard seizes the pearl and shuts up the oyster. + 

And now that he has the wherewithal⁠—quick! a hotel. He knows of one close by in the Rue d’Amsterdam. He is dying of hunger. But before sitting down to table, he must put his suitcase in safety. A waiter carries it upstairs before him; three flights; a passage; a door which he locks upon his treasure. He goes down again. + 

Sitting at table in front of a beefsteak, Bernard did not dare examine the pocketbook. (One never knows who may be watching you.) But his left hand amorously caressed it, lying snug in his inside pocket. + 

“How to make Edouard understand that I’m not a thief⁠—that’s the trouble. What kind of fellow is Edouard? Perhaps the suitcase may shed a little light upon that. Attractive⁠—so much is certain. But there are heaps of attractive fellows who have no taste for practical joking. If he thinks his suitcase has been stolen, no doubt he’ll be glad to see it again. If he’s the least decent he’ll be grateful to me for bringing it back to him. I shall easily rouse his interest. Let’s eat the sweet quickly and then go upstairs and examine the situation. Now for the bill and a soul-stirring tip for the waiter.” + 

A minute or two later he was back again in his room. + 

“Now, suitcase, a word with you!⁠ ⁠… A morning suit, not more than a trifle too big for me, I expect. The material becoming and in good taste. Linen; toilet things. I’m not very sure that I shall give any of all this back. But what proves that I’m not a thief is that these papers interest me a great deal more than anything else. We’ll begin by reading this.” + 

This was the notebook into which Edouard had slipped Laura’s melancholy letter. We have already seen the first pages; this is what followed. + 

XI + 

Edouard’s Journal: George Molinier + 

Nov. 1st.⁠—A fortnight ago⁠ ⁠… + 

—it was a mistake not to have noted it down at once. It was not so much that I hadn’t time as that my heart was still full of Laura⁠—or, to be more accurate, I did not wish to distract my thoughts from her; moreover, I do not care to note anything here that is casual or fortuitous, and at that time I did not think that what I am going to relate could lead to anything, or be, as people say, of any consequence; at any rate, I would not admit it to myself and it was, in a way, to prove the unimportance of this incident that I refrained from mentioning it in my journal. But I feel more and more⁠—it would be vain to deny it⁠—that it is Olivier’s figure that has now become the magnet of my thoughts, that their current sets towards him and that without taking him into account I shall be able neither to explain nor to understand myself properly. + 

I was coming back that morning from Perrin’s, the publisher’s, where I had been seeing about the press copies of the fresh edition of my old book. As the weather was fine, I was dawdling back along the quays until it should be time for lunch. + 

A little before getting to Vanier’s, I stopped in front of a secondhand bookseller’s. It was not so much the books that interested me as a small schoolboy, about thirteen years old, who was rummaging the outside shelves under the placid eye of a shop assistant, who sat watching on a rush-bottomed chair in the doorway. I pretended to be examining the bookstall, but I too kept a watch on the youngster out of the corner of my eye. He was dressed in a threadbare overcoat, the sleeves of which were too short and showed his other sleeves below them. Its side pocket was gaping, though it was obviously empty; a corner of the stuff had given way. I reflected that this coat must have already seen service with several elder brothers and that his brothers and he must have been in the habit of stuffing a great many, too many, things into their pockets. I reflected too that his mother must be either very neglectful or very busy not to have mended it. But just then the youngster turned round a little and I saw that the pocket on the other side was coarsely darned with stout black thread. And I seemed to hear the maternal exhortations: “Don’t put two books at a time into your pocket; you’ll ruin your overcoat. Your pocket’s all torn again. Next time, I warn you, I shan’t darn it. Just look what a sight you are!⁠ ⁠…” Things which my own poor mother used to say to me, too, and to which I paid no more attention than he. The overcoat was unbuttoned and my eye was attracted by a kind of decoration, a bit of ribbon, or rather a yellow rosette which he was wearing in the buttonhole of his inside coat. I put all this down for the sake of discipline and for the very reason that it bores me to put it down. + 

At a certain moment the man on the chair was called into the shop; he did not stay more than a second and came back to his chair at once, but that second was enough to allow the boy to slip the book he was holding into his pocket; then he immediately began scanning the shelves again as if nothing had happened. At the same time he was uneasy; he raised his head, caught me looking at him and understood that I had seen him. At any rate, he said to himself that I might have seen him; he was probably not quite certain; but in his uncertainty he lost all his assurance, blushed and started a little performance in which he tried to appear quite at his ease, but which, on the contrary, showed extreme embarrassment. I did not take my eyes off him. He took the purloined book out of his pocket, thrust it back again, walked away a few steps, pulled out of his inside pocket a wretched little pocketbook, in which he pretended to look for some imaginary money; made a face, a kind of theatrical grimace, aimed at me, and signifying, “Drat! Not enough!” and with a little shade of surprise in it as well, “Odd! I thought I had enough!” The whole thing slightly exaggerated, slightly overdone, as when an actor is afraid of not being understood. Finally, under the pressure of my look, I might almost say, he went back to the shelf, pulled the book, this time decidedly, out of his pocket and put it back in its place. It was done so naturally that the assistant noticed nothing. Then the boy raised his head again, hoping that at last he would be rid of me. But not at all; my look was still upon him, like the eye that watched Cain⁠—only my eye was a smiling one. I determined to speak to him and waited until he should have left the bookstall before going up to him; but he didn’t budge and still stood planted in front of the books, and I understood that he wouldn’t budge as long as I kept gazing at him. So, as at Puss in the Corner, when one tries to entice the pretence quarry to change places, I moved a little away as if I had seen enough and he started off at once in his own direction; but he had no sooner got into the open than I caught him up. + 

“What was that book?” I asked him out of the blue, at the same time putting as much amenity as I could into my voice and expression. + 

He looked me full in the face and I felt all his suspicions drop from him. He was not exactly handsome, perhaps, but what charming eyes he had! I saw every kind of feeling wavering in their depths like water weeds at the bottom of a stream. + 

“It’s a guidebook for Algeria. But it’s too dear. I’m not rich enough.” + 

“How much?” + 

“Two francs fifty.” + 

“All the same, if you hadn’t seen me, you’d have made off with the book in your pocket.” + 

The little fellow made a movement of indignation. He expostulated in a tone of extreme vulgarity: + 

“Well, I never! What d’you take me for? A thief?” But he said it with such conviction that I almost began to doubt my own eyes. I felt that I should lose my hold over him if I went on. I took three coins out of my pocket: + 

“All right! Go and buy it. I’ll wait for you.” + 

Two minutes later he came back turning over the pages of the coveted work. I took it out of his hands. It was an old guidebook of the year 1871. + 

“What’s the good of that?” I said as I handed it back to him. “It’s too old. It’s of no use.” + 

He protested that it was⁠—that, besides, recent guidebooks were much too dear, and that for all he should do with it the maps of this one were good enough. I don’t attempt to quote his words, which would lose their savour without the extraordinarily vulgar accent with which he said them and which was all the more amusing because his sentences were not turned without a certain elegance. + 

This episode must be very much shortened. Precision in the reader’s imagination should be obtained not by accumulating details but by two or three touches put in exactly the right places. I expect for that matter that it would be a better plan to make the boy tell the story himself; his point of view is of more signification than mine. He is flattered and at the same time made uncomfortable by the attention I pay him. But the weight of my look makes him deviate a little from his own real direction. A personality which is over tender and still too young to be conscious of itself, takes shelter behind an attitude. Nothing is more difficult to observe than creatures in the period of formation. One ought to look at them only sideways⁠—in profile. + 

The youngster suddenly declared that what he liked best was geography! I suspected that an instinct for vagabonding was concealed behind this liking. + 

“You’d like to go to those parts?” I asked. + 

“Wouldn’t I?” he answered, shrugging his shoulders. + 

The idea crossed my mind that he was unhappy at home. I asked him if he lived with his parents. “Yes.” Didn’t he get on with them? He protested rather lukewarmly that he did. He seemed afraid that he had given himself away by what he had just said. He added: + 

“Why do you ask that?” + 

“Oh, for nothing,” I answered, and then, touching the yellow ribbon in his buttonhole, “What’s that?” + 

“It’s a ribbon. Can’t you see?” + 

My questions evidently annoyed him. He turned towards me abruptly and almost vindictively, and in a jeering, insolent voice of which I should never have thought him capable and which absolutely turned me sick: + 

“I say⁠ ⁠… do you often go about picking up schoolboys?” Then as I was stammering out some kind of a confused answer, he opened the satchel he was carrying under his arm to slip his purchase into it. It held his lesson books and one or two copybooks, all covered with blue paper. I took one out; it was a history notebook. Its small owner had written his name on it in large letters. My heart gave a jump as I recognized that it was my nephew’s: + 

George Molinier. + 

(Bernard’s heart gave a jump too as he read these lines and the whole story began to interest him prodigiously.) + 

It will be difficult to get it accepted that the character who stands for me in The Counterfeiters can have kept on good terms with his sister and yet not have known her children. I have always had the greatest difficulty in tampering with real facts. Even to alter the colour of a person’s hair seems to me a piece of cheating which must lessen the verisimilitude of the truth. Everything hangs together and I always feel such a subtle interdependence between all the facts life offers me, that it seems to me impossible to change a single one without modifying the whole. And yet I can hardly explain that this boy’s mother is only my half-sister by a first marriage of my father’s; that I never saw her during the whole time my parents were alive; that we were brought into contact by business relating to the property they left.⁠ ⁠… All this is indispensable, however, and I don’t see what else I can invent in order to avoid being indiscreet. I knew that my half-sister had three sons; I had met the eldest⁠—a medical student⁠—but I had caught only a sight even of him, as he has been obliged to interrupt his studies on account of a threatening of tuberculosis and has gone to some place in the South for treatment. The two others were never there when I went to see Pauline; the one who was now before me was certainly the youngest. I showed no trace of astonishment, but, taking an abrupt leave of young George after learning that he was going home to lunch, I jumped into a taxi in order to get to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs before him. I expected that at this hour of the morning Pauline would keep me to lunch⁠—which was exactly what happened; I had brought away a copy of my book from Perrin’s, and made up my mind to present it to her as an excuse for my unexpected visit. + 

It was the first time I had taken a meal at Pauline’s. I was wrong to fight shy of my brother-in-law. I can hardly believe that he is a very remarkable jurist, but when we are together he has the sense to keep off his shop as much as I off mine, so that we get on very well. + 

Naturally when I got there that morning I did not breathe a word of my recent meeting: + 

“It will give me an opportunity, I hope, of making my nephews’ acquaintance,” I said, when Pauline asked me to stay to lunch. “For, you know, there are two of them I have never met.” + 

“Olivier will be a little late,” she said; “he has a lesson; we will begin lunch without him. But I’ve just heard George come in, I’ll call him.” And going to the door of the adjoining room, “George,” she said, “come and say ‘how-do-you-do’ to your uncle.” + 

The boy came up and held out his hand. I kissed him⁠ ⁠… children’s power of dissembling fills me with amazement⁠—he showed no surprise; one would have supposed he did not recognize me. He simply blushed deeply; but his mother must have thought it was from shyness. I suspected he was embarrassed at this meeting with the morning’s “tec,” for he left us almost immediately and went back to the next room⁠—the dining-room, which I understood is used by the boys as a schoolroom between meals. He reappeared, however, shortly after, when his father came into the room, and took advantage of the moment when we were going into the dining-room, to come up to me and seize hold of my hand without his parents’ seeing. At first I thought it was a sign of good fellowship which amused me, but no! He opened my hand as I was clasping his, slipped into it a little note which he had obviously just written, then closed my fingers over it and gave them a tight squeeze. Needless to say I played up to him; I hid the little note in my pocket and it was not till after lunch that I was able to take it out. This is what I read: + 

“If you tell my parents the story of the book, I shall” (he had crossed out “detest you”) “say that you solicited me.” + 

And at the bottom of the page: + 

“I come out of school every morning at 10 o’clock.” + 

Interrupted yesterday by a visit from X. His conversation upset me considerably. + 

Have been reflecting a great deal on what X said. He knows nothing about my life, but I gave him a long account of the plan of my Counterfeiters. His advice is always salutary, because his point of view is different from mine. He is afraid that my work may be too factitious, that I am in danger of letting go the real subject for the shadow of the subject in my brain. What makes me uneasy is to feel that life (my life) at this juncture is parting company from my work, and my work moving away from my life. But I couldn’t say that to him. Up till now⁠—as is right⁠—my tastes, my feelings, my personal experiences have all gone to feed my writings; in my best contrived phrases I still felt the beating of my heart. But henceforth the link is broken between what I think and what I feel. And I wonder whether this impediment which prevents my heart from speaking is not the real cause that is driving my work into abstraction and artificiality. As I was reflecting on this, the meaning of the fable of Apollo and Daphne suddenly flashed upon me: happy, thought I, the man who can clasp in one and the same embrace the laurel and the object of his love. + 

I related my meeting with George at such length that I was obliged to stop at the moment when Olivier came on the scene. I began this tale only to speak of him and I have managed to speak only of George. But now that the moment has come to speak of Olivier I understand that it was desire to defer that moment which was the cause of all my slowness. As soon as I saw him that first day, as soon as he sat down to the family meal, at my first look⁠—or rather at his first look⁠—I felt that look of his take possession of me wholly, and that my life was no longer mine to dispose of. + 

Pauline presses me to go and see her oftener. She begs me urgently to interest myself in her boys. She gives me to understand that their father knows very little about them. The more I talk to her, the more charming I think her. I cannot understand how I can have been so long without seeing more of her. The children have been brought up as Catholics; but she remembers her early Protestant training, and though she left our father’s home at the time my mother entered it, I discover many points of resemblance between her and me. She sends her boys to school with Laura’s parents, with whom I myself boarded for so long. This school (half a school and half a boarding house) was founded by old Monsieur Azai’s (a friend of my father’s) who is still the head of it. Though he started life as a pastor, he prides himself on keeping his school free from any denominational tendency⁠—in my time there were even Turks there. + 

Pauline says she has good news from the sanatorium where Vincent is staying; he has almost completely recovered. She tells me that she writes to him about me and that she wishes I knew him better; for I have barely seen him. She builds great hopes on her eldest son; the family is stinting itself in order to enable him to set up for himself shortly⁠—that is, to have rooms of his own where he can receive his patients. In the meantime she has managed to set aside a part of their small apartment for him, by putting Olivier and George on the floor below in a room that happened to be vacant. The great question is whether the state of Vincent’s health will oblige him to give up being house-physician. + 

To tell the truth I take very little interest in Vincent, and if I talk to his mother about him, it is really to please her and so that we can then go on to talk about Olivier at greater length. As for George, he fights shy of me, hardly answers when I speak to him, and gives me a look of indescribable suspicion when we happen to pass each other. He seems unable to forgive me for not having gone to meet him outside the lycée⁠—or to forgive himself for his advances to me. + 

I don’t see much of Olivier either. When I visit his mother, I don’t dare go into the room where I know he is at work; if I meet him by chance, I am so awkward and shy that I find nothing to say to him, and that makes me so unhappy that I prefer to call on his mother at the times when I know he will be out. + 

XII + 

Edouard’s Journal: Laura’s Wedding + 

Nov. 2nd.⁠—Long conversation with Douviers. We met at Laura’s parents’, and he left at the same time as I and walked across the Luxembourg Gardens with me. He is preparing a thesis on Wordsworth, but from the few words he let fall, I feel certain that he misses the most characteristic points of Wordsworth’s poetry; he had better have chosen Tennyson. There is something or other inadequate about Douviers⁠—something abstract and simple-minded and credulous. He always takes everything⁠—people and things⁠—for what they set out to be. Perhaps because he himself never sets out to be anything but what he is. + 

“I know,” he said to me, “that you are Laura’s best friend. No doubt I ought to be a little jealous of you. But I can’t be. On the contrary everything she has told me about you has made me understand her better herself and wish to become your friend. I asked her the other day if you didn’t bear me too much of a grudge for marrying her. She answered on the contrary, that you had advised her to.” (I really think he said it just as flatly as that.) “I should like to thank you for it, and I hope you won’t think it ridiculous, for I really do so most sincerely,” he added, forcing a smile but with a trembling voice and tears in his eyes. + 

I didn’t know what to answer him, for I felt far less moved than I should have been, and incapable of reciprocating his effusion. He must have thought me a little stony; but he irritated me. Nevertheless I pressed his hand as warmly as I could when he held it out to me. These scenes, when one of the parties offers more of his heart than the other wants, are always painful. No doubt he thought he should capture my sympathy. If he had been a little more perspicacious he would have felt he was being cheated; but I saw that he was both overcome by gratitude for his own nobility and persuaded that he had raised a response to it in me. As for me I said nothing, and as my silence perhaps made him feel uncomfortable: “I count,” he added, “on her being transplanted to Cambridge, to prevent her from making comparisons which might be disadvantageous to me.” + 

What did he mean by that? I did my best not to understand. Perhaps he wanted me to protest. But that would only have sunk us deeper into the bog. He is one of those shy people who cannot endure silences and who think they must fill them by being exaggeratedly forthcoming⁠—the people who say to you afterwards, “I have always been open with you.” The deuce they have! But the important thing is not so much to be open oneself as to allow the other person to be so. He ought to have realized that his openness was the very thing that prevented mine. + 

But if I cannot be a friend of his, at any rate I think he will make Laura an excellent husband; for in reality what I am reproaching him with are his qualities. We went on to talk of Cambridge, where I have promised to pay them a visit. + 

What absurd need had Laura to talk to him about me? + 

What an admirable thing in women is their need for devotion! The man they love is as a rule a kind of clothes-peg on which to hang their love. How easily and sincerely Laura has effected the transposition! I understand that she should marry Douviers; I was one of the first to advise it. But I had the right to hope for a little grief. + 

Some reviews of my book to hand. The qualities which people are the most willing to grant me are just the very ones I most detest. Was I right to republish this old stuff? It responds to nothing that I care for at present. But it is only at present that I see it does not. I don’t so much think that I have actually changed, as that I am only just beginning to be aware of myself. Up till now I did not know who I was. Is it possible that I am always in need of another being to act as a plate-developer? This book of mine had crystallized according to Laura; and that is why I will not allow it to be my present portrait. + 

An insight, composed of sympathy, which would enable us to be in advance of the seasons⁠—is this denied us? What are the problems which will exercise the minds of tomorrow? It is for them that I desire to write. To provide food for curiosities still unformed, to satisfy requirements not yet defined, so that the child of today may be astonished tomorrow to find me in his path. + 

How glad I am to feel in Olivier so much curiosity, so much impatient want of satisfaction with the past.⁠ ⁠… + 

I sometimes think that poetry is the only thing that interests him. And I feel as I reread our poets through his eyes, how few there are who have let themselves be guided by a feeling for art rather than by their hearts or minds. The odd thing is that when Oscar Molinier showed me some of Olivier’s verses, I advised the boy to let himself be guided by the words rather than force them into submission. And now it seems to me that it is I who am learning it from him. + 

How depressingly, tiresomely and ridiculously sensible everything that I have hitherto written seems to be today! + 

Nov. 5th.⁠—The wedding ceremony is over. It took place in the little chapel in Rue Madame, to which I have not been for a long time past. The whole of the Vedel-Azaïs families were present.⁠—Laura’s grandfather, father and mother, her two sisters, her young brother, besides quantities of uncles, aunts and cousins. The Douviers family was represented by three aunts in deep mourning (they would have certainly been nuns if they had been Catholics). They all three live together, and Douviers, since his parents’ death, has lived with them. Azaïs’s pupils sat in the gallery. The rest of the chapel was filled with the friends of the family. From my place near the door I saw my sister with Olivier. George, I suppose, was in the gallery with his schoolfellows. Old La Pérouse was at the harmonium. His face has aged, but finer, nobler than ever⁠—though his eye had lost that admirable fire and spirit I found so infectious in the days when he used to give me piano lessons. Our eyes met and there was so much sadness in the smile he gave me that I determined not to let him leave without speaking to him. Some persons moved and left an empty place beside Pauline. Olivier at once beckoned to me, and pushed his mother aside so that I might sit next him; then he took my hand and held it for a long time in his. It is the first time he has been so friendly with me. He kept his eyes shut during the whole of the minister’s interminable address, so that I was able to take a long look at him; he is like the sleeping shepherd in a bas-relief in the Naples Museum, of which I have a photograph on my writing desk. I should have thought he was asleep himself, if it hadn’t been for the quivering of his fingers. His hand fluttered in mine like a captured bird. + 

The old pastor thought it his duty to retrace the whole of the Azaïs family history, beginning with the grandfather, with whom he had been at school in Strasburg before the war, and who had also been a fellow-student of his later on at the faculty of theology. I thought he would never get to the end of a complicated sentence in which he tried to explain that in becoming the head of a school and devoting himself to the education of young children, his friend had, so to speak, never left the ministry. Then the next generation had its turn. He went on to speak with equal edification of the Douviers family, though he didn’t seem to know much about them. The excellence of his sentiments palliated the deficiency of his oratory and I heard several members of the congregation blowing their noses. I should have liked to know what Olivier was thinking; I reflected that as he had been brought up a Catholic, the Protestant service must be new to him and that this was probably his first visit to the chapel. The singular faculty of depersonalization which I possess and which enables me to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own, compelled me, as it were, to enter into Olivier’s feelings⁠—those that I imagined him to be experiencing; and though he kept his eyes shut, or perhaps for that very reason, I felt as if, like him, I were seeing for the first time the bare walls, the abstract and chilly light which fell upon the congregation, the relentless outline of the pulpit on the background of the white wall, the straightness of the lines, the rigidity of the columns which support the gallery, the whole spirit of this angular and colourless architecture and its repellent want of grace, its uncompromising inflexibility, its parsimony. It can only be because I have been accustomed to it since childhood, that I have not felt all this sooner.⁠ ⁠… I suddenly found myself thinking of my religious awakening and my first fervours; of Laura and the Sunday school where we used to meet and of which we were both monitors, of our zeal and our inability, in the ardour which consumed all that was impure in us, to distinguish the part which belonged to the other and the part that was God’s. And then I fell to regretting that Olivier had never known this early starvation of the senses which drives the soul so perilously far beyond appearances⁠—that his memories were not like mine; but to feel him so distant from the whole thing, helped me to escape from it myself. I passionately pressed the hand which he had left in mine, but which just then he withdrew abruptly. He opened his eyes to look at me, and then, with a boyish smile of roguish playfulness, which mitigated the extraordinary gravity of his brow, he leant towards me and whispered⁠—while just at that moment the minister was reminding all Christians of their duties, and lavishing advice, precepts and pious exhortations upon the newly married couple: + 

“I don’t care a damn about any of it. I’m a Catholic.” + 

Everything about him is attractive to me⁠—and mysterious. + 

At the sacristy door, I came across old La Pérouse. He said, a little sadly but without any trace of reproach: “You’ve almost forgotten me, I think.” + 

I mentioned some kind of occupation or other as an excuse for having been so long without going to see him and promised to go the day after tomorrow. I tried to persuade him to come back with me to the reception, which the Azaïses were giving after the ceremony and to which I was invited; but he said he was in too sombre a mood and was afraid of meeting too many people to whom he ought to speak, and would not be able to. + 

Pauline went away with George and left me with Olivier. + 

“I trust him to your care,” she said, laughing; but Olivier seemed irritated and turned away his face. + 

He drew me out into the street. “I didn’t know you knew the Azaïses so well.” + 

He was very much surprised when I told him that I had boarded with them for two years. + 

“How could you do that rather than live independently⁠—anywhere else?” + 

“It was convenient,” I answered vaguely, for I couldn’t say that at that time Laura was filling my thoughts and that I would have put up with the worst disagreeables for the pleasure of bearing them in her company. + 

“And weren’t you suffocated in such a hole?” Then, as I didn’t answer: “For that matter, I can’t think how I bear it myself⁠—nor why in the world I am there.⁠ ⁠… But I’m only a half-boarder. Even that’s too much.” + 

I explained to him the friendship that had existed between his grandfather and the master of the “hole,” and that his mother’s choice was no doubt guided by that. + 

“Oh well,” he went on, “I have no points of comparison; I dare say all these cramming places are the same, and, most likely, from what people say, the others are worse. I shouldn’t have gone there at all if I hadn’t had to make up the time I lost when I was ill. And now, for a long time past, I have only gone there for the sake of Armand.” + 

Then I learnt that this young brother of Laura’s was his schoolfellow. I told Olivier that I hardly knew him. + 

“And yet he’s the most intelligent and the most interesting of the family.” + 

“That’s to say the one who interests you most.” + 

“No, no, I assure you, he’s very unusual. If you like we’ll go and see him in his room. I hope he won’t be afraid to speak before you.” + 

We had reached the pension. + 

The Vedel-Azaïses had substituted for the traditional wedding breakfast a less costly tea. Pastor Vedel’s reception room and study had been thrown open to the guests. Only a few intimate friends were allowed into the pastoress’s minute private sitting-room; but in order to prevent it from being overrun, the door between it and the reception room had been locked⁠—which made Armand answer, when people asked him how they could get to his mother: “Through the chimney!” + 

The place was crowded and the heat suffocating. Except for a few “members of the teaching body,” colleagues of Douviers’, the society was exclusively Protestant. The odour of Puritanism is peculiar to itself. In a meeting of Catholics or Jews, when they let themselves go in each other’s company, the emanation is as strong, and perhaps even more stifling; but among Catholics you find a self-appreciation, and among Jews a self-depreciation, of which Protestants seem to me very rarely capable. If Jews’ noses are too long, Protestants’ are bunged up; no doubt of it. And I myself, all the time I was plunged in their atmosphere, didn’t perceive its peculiar quality⁠—something ineffably alpine and paradisaical and foolish. + 

At one end of the room was a table set out as a buffet; Rachel, Laura’s elder sister, and Sarah, her younger, were serving the tea with a few of their young lady friends to help them.⁠ ⁠… + 

As soon as Laura saw me, she drew me into her father’s study, where a considerable number of people had already gathered. We took refuge in the embrasure of a window, and were able to talk without being overheard. In the days gone by, we had written our two names on the window frame. + 

“Come and see. They are still there,” she said. “I don’t think anybody has ever noticed them. How old were you then?” + 

Underneath our names we had written the date. I calculated: + 

“Twenty-eight.” + 

“And I was sixteen. Ten years ago.” + 

The moment was not very suitable for awakening these memories; I tried to turn the conversation, while she with a kind of uneasy insistence continually brought me back to it; then suddenly, as though she were afraid of growing emotional, she asked me if I remembered Strouvilhou? + 

Strouvilhou in those days was an independent boarder who was a great nuisance to her parents. He was supposed to be attending lectures, but when he was asked which ones, or what examinations he was studying for, he used to answer negligently: + 

“I vary.” + 

At first people pretended to take his insolences for jokes, in an attempt to make them appear less cutting, and he would himself accompany them by a loud laugh; but his laugh soon became more sarcastic, and his witticisms more aggressive, and I could never understand why or how the pastor could put up with such an individual as boarder, unless it were for financial reasons, or because he had a feeling that was half affection, half pity, for Strouvilhou, and perhaps a vague hope that he might end by persuading⁠—I mean converting⁠—him. I couldn’t understand either why Strouvilhou stayed on at the pension, when he might so easily have gone elsewhere; for he didn’t appear to have any sentimental reason, like me; perhaps it was because of the evident pleasure he took in his passages with the poor pastor, who defended himself badly and always got the worst of it. + 

“Do you remember one day when he asked Papa if he kept his coat on underneath his gown, when he preached?” + 

“Yes, indeed. He asked him so insinuatingly that your poor father was completely taken in. It was at table. I can remember it all as if.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And Papa ingenuously answered that his gown was rather thin and that he was afraid of catching cold without his coat.” + 

“And then Strouvilhou’s air of deep distress! And how he had to be pressed before he ended by saying, that of course it was of ‘very little importance,’ but that when your father gesticulated in preaching, the sleeves of his coat showed underneath his gown and that it had rather an unfortunate effect on some of the congregation.” + 

“And after that, poor Papa preached a whole sermon with his arms glued to his sides, so that none of his oratorical effects came off.” + 

“And the Sunday after that he came home with a bad cold, because he had taken his coat off. Oh! and the discussion about the barren fig-tree in the Gospel and about trees that don’t bear fruit.⁠ ⁠… ‘I’m not a fruit-tree. What I bear is shade. Monsieur le Pasteur, I cast you into the shade.’ ” + 

“He said that too at table.” + 

“Of course. He never appeared except at meals.” + 

“And he said it in such a spiteful way too. It was that that made grandfather turn him out. Do you remember how he suddenly rose to his feet, though he usually sat all the time with his nose in his plate, and pointed to the door with his outstretched arm, and shouted: ‘Leave the room!’ ” + 

“He looked enormous⁠—terrifying; he was enraged. I really believe Strouvilhou was frightened.” + 

“He flung his napkin on to the table and disappeared. He went off without paying us; we never saw him again.” + 

“I wonder what has become of him.” + 

“Poor grandfather!” Laura went on rather sadly. “How I admired him that day! He’s very fond of you, you know. You ought to go up and pay him a little visit in his study. I am sure you would give him a great deal of pleasure.” + 

I write down the whole of this at once, as I know by experience how difficult it is to recall the tone of a dialogue after any interval. But from that moment I began to listen to Laura less attentively. I had just noticed⁠—some way off, it is true⁠—Olivier, whom I had lost sight of when Laura drew me into her father’s study. His eyes were shining and his face extraordinarily animated. I heard afterwards that Sarah had been amusing herself by making him drink six glasses of champagne, in succession. Armand was with him, and they were both following Sarah and an English girl of the same age as Sarah, who has been boarding with the family for over a year⁠—pursuing them from group to group. At last Sarah and her friend left the room, and through the open door I saw the two boys rush upstairs after them. In my turn, I was on the point of leaving the room in response to Laura’s request, when she made a movement towards me: + 

“Wait, Edouard, there’s one thing more⁠ ⁠…” and her voice suddenly became very grave. “It’ll probably be a long time before we see each other again. I should like you to say⁠ ⁠… I should like to know whether I may still count on you⁠ ⁠… as a friend.” + 

Never did I feel more inclined to embrace her than at that moment⁠—but I contented myself with kissing her hand tenderly and impetuously, and with murmuring: “Come what come may.” And then, to hide the tears which I felt rising to my eyes, I hurried off to find Olivier. + 

He was sitting on the stairs with Armand, watching for me to come out. He was certainly a little tipsy. He got up and pulled me by the arm: + 

“Come along,” he said. “We’re going to have a cigarette in Sarah’s room. She’s expecting you.” + 

“In a moment. I must first go up and see Monsieur Azaïs. But I shall never be able to find the room.” + 

“Oh, yes. You know it very well. It’s Laura’s old room,” cried Armand. “As it was one of the best rooms in the house, it was given to the parlour-boarder, but as she doesn’t pay much, she shares it with Sarah. They put in two beds for form’s sake⁠—not that there was much need.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Don’t listen to him,” said Olivier, laughing and giving him a shove, “he’s drunk.” + 

“And what about you?” answered Armand. “Well then, you’ll come, won’t you? We shall expect you.” + 

I promised to rejoin them. + 

Now that he has cut his hair en brosse, old Azaïs doesn’t look like Walt Whitman any more. He has handed over the first and second floors of the house to his son-in-law. From the windows of his study (mahogany, rep and horsehair furniture) he can look over the playground and keep an eye on the pupils’ goings and comings. + 

“You see how spoilt I am,” he said, pointing to a huge bouquet of chrysanthemums which was standing on the table, and which a mother of one of the pupils⁠—an old friend of the family’s⁠—had just left for him. The atmosphere of the room was so austere that it seemed as if any flower must wither in it at once. “I have left the party for a moment. I’m getting old and all this noisy talk tires me. But these flowers will keep me company. They have their own way of talking and tell the glory of God better than men” (or some such stuff). + 

The worthy man has no conception how much he bores his pupils with remarks of this kind; he is so sincere in making them, that one hasn’t the heart to be ironical. Simple souls like his are certainly the ones I find it most difficult to understand. If one is a little less simple oneself, one is forced into a kind of pretence; not very honest, but what is one to do? It is impossible either to argue or to say what one thinks; one can only acquiesce. If one’s opinions are the least bit different from his, Azaïs forces one to be hypocritical. When I first used to frequent the family, the way in which his grandchildren lied to him made me indignant. I soon found myself obliged to follow suit. + 

Pastor Prosper Vedel is too busy; Madame Vedel, who is rather foolish, lives plunged in a religio-poetico daydream, in which she loses all sense of reality; the young people’s moral bringing-up, as well as their education, has been taken in hand by their grandfather. Once a month at the time when I lived with them, I used to assist at a stormy scene of explanations, which would end up by effusive and pathetic appeals of this kind: + 

“Henceforth we will be perfectly frank and open with one another.” (He likes using several words to say the same thing⁠—an odd habit, left him from the time of his pastorship.) “There shall be no more concealments, we won’t keep anything back in the future, will we? Everything is to be above board. We shall be able to look each other straight in the face. That’s a bargain, isn’t it?” + 

After which they sank deeper than ever into their bog⁠—he of blindness⁠—and the children of deceit. + 

These remarks were chiefly addressed to a brother of Laura’s, a year younger than she; the sap of youth was working in him and he was making his first essays of love. (He went out to the colonies and I have lost sight of him.) One evening when the old man had been talking in this way, I went to speak to him in his study; I tried to make him understand that the sincerity which he demanded from his grandson was made impossible by his own severity. Azaïs almost lost his temper: + 

“He has only to do nothing of which he need be ashamed,” he exclaimed in a tone of voice which allowed of no reply. + 

All the same he is an excellent man⁠—a paragon of virtue, and what people call a heart of gold; but his judgments are childish. His great esteem for me comes from the fact that, as far as he knows, I have no mistress. He did not conceal from me that he had hoped to see me marry Laura; he is afraid Douviers may not be the right husband for her, and he repeated several times: “I am surprised at her choice”; then he added, “Still he seems to me an excellent fellow.⁠ ⁠… What do you think?⁠ ⁠…” + 

To which I answered, “Certainly.” + 

The deeper the soul plunges into religious devotion, the more it loses all sense of reality, all need, all desire, all love for reality. I have observed the same thing in Vedel upon the few occasions that I have spoken to him. The dazzling light of their faith blinds them to the surrounding world and to their own selves. As for me, who care for nothing so much as to see the world and myself clearly, I am amazed at the coils of falsehood in which devout persons take delight. + 

I tried to get Azaïs to speak of Olivier, but he takes more interest in George. + 

“Don’t let him see that you know what I am going to tell you,” he began; “for that matter, it’s entirely to his credit. Just fancy! your nephew with a few of his schoolfellows has started a kind of little society⁠—a little mutual emulation league; the ones who are allowed into it must show themselves worthy and furnish proofs of their virtue⁠—a kind of children’s Legion of Honour. Isn’t it charming? They all wear a little ribbon in their button hole⁠—not very noticeable, certainly, but all the same I noticed it. I sent for the boy to my study and when I asked him the meaning of this badge, he began by being very much embarrassed. The dear little chap thought I was going to reprove him. Then with a great deal of confusion and many blushes, he told me about the starting of this little club. It’s the kind of thing, you see, one must be very careful not to smile at; one might hurt all sorts of delicate feelings.⁠ ⁠… I asked him why he and his friends didn’t do it openly, in the light of day? I told him what a wonderful power of propaganda, or proselytism, they would have, what fine things they might do!⁠ ⁠… But at that age, one likes mysteries.⁠ ⁠… To encourage his confidence, I told him that in my time⁠—that’s to say, when I was his age⁠—I had been a member of a society of the same kind, and that we went by the grand name of Knights of Duty; the President of the society gave us each a notebook, in which we set down with absolute frankness our failures and our shortcomings. He smiled and I could see that the story of the notebooks had given him an idea; I didn’t insist, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he introduced the system of notebooks among his companions. You see, these children must be taken in the right way; and in the first place, they must see that one understands them. I promised him not to breathe a word of all this to his parents; though, at the same time, I advised him to tell his mother all about it, as it would make her so happy. But it seems that the boys had given their word of honour to say nothing about it. It would have been a mistake to insist. But before he left me we joined together in a prayer for God to bless their society.” + 

Poor, dear old Azaïs! I am convinced the little rascal was pulling his leg and that there wasn’t a word of truth in the whole thing. But what else could he have said?⁠ ⁠… I must try and find out what it’s all about. + 

I did not at first recognize Laura’s room. It has been repapered; its whole atmosphere is changed. And Sarah too seemed to me unrecognizable. Yet I thought I knew her. She has always been exceedingly confidential with me. All her life I have been a person to whom one could say anything. But I had let a great many months go by without seeing the Vedels. Her neck and arms were bare. She seemed taller, bolder. She was sitting on one of the two beds beside Olivier and right up against him; he was lying down at full length and seemed to be asleep. He was certainly drunk; and as certainly I suffered at seeing him so, but I thought him more beautiful than ever. In fact they were all four of them more or less drunk. The English girl was bursting with laughter at Armand’s ridiculous remarks⁠—a shrill laughter which hurt my ears. Armand was saying anything that came into his head; he was excited and flattered by the girl’s laughter and trying to be as stupid and vulgar as she was; he pretended to light his cigarette at the fire of his sister’s and Olivier’s flaming cheeks, and to burn his fingers, when he had the effrontery to seize their heads and pull them together by force. Olivier and Sarah lent themselves to his tomfoolery, and it was extremely painful to me. But I am anticipating.⁠ ⁠… + 

Olivier was still pretending to be asleep when Armand abruptly asked me what I thought of Douviers. I had sat down in a low armchair, and was feeling amused, excited and, at the same time, embarrassed to see their tipsiness and their want of restraint; and for that matter, flattered too, that they had invited me to join them, when it seemed so evident that it was not my place to be there. + 

“The young ladies here present⁠ ⁠…” he continued, as I found nothing to answer and contented myself with smiling blandly, so as to appear up to the mark. Just then, the English girl tried to prevent him from going on and ran after him to put her hand over his mouth. He wriggled away from her and called out: “The young ladies are indignant at the idea of Laura’s going to bed with him.” + 

The English girl let go of him and exclaimed in pretended fury: + 

“Oh, you mustn’t believe what he says. He’s a liar!” + 

“I have tried to make them understand,” went on Armand, more calmly, “that with only twenty thousand francs for a dot, one could hardly look for anything better, and that, as a true Christian, she ought first of all to take into account his spiritual qualities, as our father the pastor would say. Yes, my children. And then, what would happen to the population, if nobody was allowed to marry who wasn’t an Adonis⁠ ⁠… or an Olivier, shall we say? to refer to a more recent period?” + 

“What an idiot!” murmured Sarah. “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he is saying.” + 

“I’m saying the truth.” + 

I had never heard Armand speak in this way before. I thought him⁠—I still think him⁠—a delicate, sensitive nature; his vulgarity seemed to me entirely put on⁠—due in part to his being drunk, and still more to his desire to amuse the English girl. She was pretty enough, but must have been exceedingly silly to take any pleasure in such fooling; what kind of interest could Olivier find in all this?⁠ ⁠… I determined not to hide my disgust, as soon as we should be alone. + 

“But you,” went on Armand, turning suddenly towards me, “you, who don’t care about money and who have enough to indulge in fine sentiments, will you consent to tell us why you didn’t marry Laura?⁠—when it appears you were in love with her, and when, to common knowledge, she was pining away for you?” + 

Olivier, who up to that moment had been pretending to be asleep, opened his eyes; they met mine and if I did not blush, it must certainly have been that not one of the others was in a fit state to observe me. + 

“Armand, you’re unbearable,” said Sarah, as though to put me at my ease, for I found nothing to answer. She had hitherto been sitting on the bed, but at that point she lay down at full length beside Olivier, so that their two heads were touching. Upon which, Armand leapt up, seized a large screen which was standing folded against the wall, and with the antics of a clown spread it out so as to hide the couple; then, still clowning, he leant towards me and said without lowering his voice: + 

“Perhaps you didn’t know that my sister was a whore?” + 

It was too much. I got up and pushed the screen roughly aside. Olivier and Sarah immediately sat up. Her hair had come down. Olivier rose, went to the washhand stand and bathed his face. + 

“Come here,” said Sarah, taking me by the arm, “I want to show you something.” + 

She opened the door of the room and drew me out on to the landing. + 

“I thought it might be interesting to a novelist. It’s a notebook I found accidentally⁠—Papa’s private diary. I can’t think how he came to leave it lying about. Anybody might have read it. I took it to prevent Armand from seeing it. Don’t tell him about it. It’s not very long. You can read it in ten minutes and give it back to me before you go.” + 

“But, Sarah,” said I, looking at her fixedly, “it’s most frightfully indiscreet.” + 

She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, if that’s what you think, you’ll be disappointed. There’s only one place in which it gets interesting⁠—and even that⁠—Look here; I’ll show it you.” + 

She had taken out of her bodice a very small memorandum book, about four years old. She turned over its pages for a moment, and then gave it to me, pointing to a passage as she did so. + 

“Read it quickly.” + 

Under the date and in quotation marks, I first of all saw the Scripture text: “He who is faithful in small things will be faithful also in great.” Then followed: “Why do I always put off till tomorrow my resolution to stop smoking? If only not to grieve Mélanie” (the pastor’s wife). “Oh, Lord! give me strength to shake off the yoke of this shameful slavery.” (I quote it, I think exactly.) Then came notes of struggles, beseeching, prayers, efforts⁠—which were evidently all in vain, as they were repeated day after day. Then I turned another page and there was no more mention of the subject. + 

“Rather touching, isn’t it?” asked Sarah with the faintest touch of irony, when I had done reading. + 

“It’s much odder than you think,” I couldn’t help saying, though I reproached myself for it. “Just think, I asked your father only ten days ago if he had ever tried to give up smoking. I thought I was smoking a good deal too much myself and.⁠ ⁠… Anyway, do you know what he answered? First of all he said that the evil effects of tobacco were very much exaggerated, and that as far as he was concerned he had never felt any; and as I insisted: ‘Yes,’ said he, at last. ‘I have made up my mind once or twice to give it up for a time.’ ‘And did you succeed?’ ‘Naturally,’ he answered, as if it followed as a matter of course⁠—‘since I made up my mind to.’⁠—It’s extraordinary! Perhaps, after all, he didn’t remember,” I added, not wishing to let Sarah see the depths of hypocrisy I suspected. + 

“Or perhaps,” rejoined Sarah, “it proves that ‘smoking’ stood for something else.” + 

Was it really Sarah who spoke in this way? I was struck dumb. I looked at her, hardly daring to understand.⁠ ⁠… At that moment Olivier came out of the room. He had combed his hair, arranged his collar and seemed calmer. + 

“Suppose we go,” he said, paying no attention to Sarah, “it’s late.” + 

“I am afraid you may mistake me,” he said, as soon as we were in the street. “You might think that I’m in love with Sarah. But I’m not.⁠ ⁠… Oh! I don’t detest her⁠ ⁠… only I don’t love her.” + 

I had taken his arm and pressed it without speaking. + 

“You mustn’t judge Armand either from what he said today,” he went on. “It’s a kind of part he acts⁠ ⁠… in spite of himself. In reality he’s not in the least like that.⁠ ⁠… I can’t explain. He has a kind of desire to spoil everything he most cares for. He hasn’t been like that long. I think he’s very unhappy and that he jokes in order to hide it. He’s very proud. His parents don’t understand him at all. They wanted to make a pastor of him.” + 

Memo.⁠—Motto for a chapter of The Counterfeiters: + 

“La famille⁠ ⁠… cette cellule sociale.” + 

Paul Bourget (passim). + 

Title of the chapter: The Cellular System. + 

True, there exists no prison (intellectual, that is) from which a vigorous mind cannot escape; and nothing that incites to rebellion is definitively dangerous⁠—although rebellion may in certain cases distort a character⁠—driving it in upon itself, turning it to contradiction and stubbornness, and impiously prompting it to deceit; moreover the child who resists the influence of his family, wears out the first freshness of his energy in the attempt to free himself. But also the education which thwarts a child strengthens him by the very fact of hampering. The most lamentable victims of all are the victims of adulation. What force of character is needed to detest the things that flatter us! How many parents I have seen (the mother in especial) who delight in encouraging their children’s silliest repugnances, their most unjust prejudices, their failures to understand, their unreasonable antipathies.⁠ ⁠… At table: “You’d better leave that; can’t you see, it’s a bit of fat? Don’t eat that skin. That’s not cooked enough.⁠ ⁠…” Out of doors, at night: “Oh, a bat!⁠ ⁠… Cover your head quickly; it’ll get into your hair.” Etc., etc.⁠ ⁠… According to them, beetles bite, grasshoppers sting, earthworms give spots⁠ ⁠… and suchlike absurdities in every domain, intellectual, moral, etc. + 

In the suburban train the day before yesterday, as I was coming back from Auteuil, I heard a young mother whispering to a little girl of ten, whom she was petting: + 

“You and me, darling, me and you⁠—the others may go hang!” + 

(Oh, yes! I knew they were working people, but the people too have a right to our indignation. The husband was sitting in the corner of the carriage reading the paper⁠—quiet, resigned, not even a cuckold, I dare say.) + 

Is it possible to conceive a more insidious poison? + 

It is to bastards that the future belongs. How full of meaning is the expression “a natural child!” The bastard alone has the right to be natural. + 

Family egoism⁠ ⁠… hardly less hideous than personal egoism. + 

Nov. 6th.⁠—I have never been able to invent anything. But I set myself in front of reality like a painter, who should say to his model: “Take up such and such an attitude; put on such and such an expression.” I can make the models which society furnishes me act as I please, if I am acquainted with their springs; or at any rate I can put such and such problems before them to solve in their own way, so that I learn my lesson from their reactions. It is my novelist’s instinct that is constantly pricking me on to intervene⁠—to influence the course of their destiny. If I had more imagination, I should be able to spin invention intrigues; as it is, I provoke them, observe the actors, and then work at their dictation. + 

Nov. 7th.⁠—Nothing that I wrote yesterday is true. Only this remains⁠—that reality interests me inasmuch as it is plastic, and that I care more⁠—infinitely more⁠—for what may be than for what has been. I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality. + 

Here Bernard was obliged to pause. His eyes were blurred. He was gasping as if the eagerness with which he read had made him forget to breathe. He opened the window and filled his lungs before taking another plunge. His friendship for Olivier was no doubt very great; he had no better friend and there was no one in the world he loved so much, now that he could no longer love his parents; and indeed he clung to this affection in a manner that was almost excessive; but Olivier and he did not understand friendship quite in the same way. Bernard, as he progressed in his reading, felt with more and more astonishment and admiration, though with a little pain too, what diversity this friend he thought he knew so well, was capable of showing. Olivier had never told him anything of what the journal recounted. He hardly knew of the existence of Armand and Sarah. How different Olivier was with them to what he was with him!⁠ ⁠… In that room of Sarah’s, on that bed, would Bernard have recognized his friend? There mingled with the immense curiosity which drove him on to read so precipitately, a queer feeling of discomfort⁠—disgust or pique. He had felt a little of this pique a moment before, when he had seen Olivier on Edouard’s arm⁠—pique at being out of it. This kind of pique may lead very far and may make one commit all sorts of follies⁠—like every kind of pique for that matter. + 

Well, we must go on. All this that I have been saying is only to put a little air between the pages of this journal. Now that Bernard has got his breath back again, we will return to it. He dives once more into its pages. + 

Nov. 8th.⁠—Old Monsieur and Madame de la Pérouse have changed houses again. Their new apartment, which I had never seen so far, is an entresol in the part of the Faubourg St. Honoré which makes a little recess before it cuts across the Boulevard Haussmann. I rang the bell. La Pérouse opened the door. He was in his shirt sleeves and was wearing a sort of yellowish whitish nightcap on his head, which I finally made out to be an old stocking (Madame de La Pérouse’s no doubt) tied in a knot, so that the foot dangled on his cheek like a tassel. He was holding a bent poker in his hand. I had evidently caught him at some domestic job, and as he seemed rather confused: + 

“Would you like me to come back later?” I asked. + 

“No, no.⁠ ⁠… Come in here.” And he pushed me into a long, narrow room with two windows looking on to the street, just on a level with the street lamp. “I was expecting a pupil at this very moment” (it was six o’clock); “but she has telegraphed to say she can’t come. I am so glad to see you.” + 

He laid his poker down on a small table, and, as though apologizing for his appearance: + 

“Madame de La Pérouse’s maidservant has let the stove go out. She only comes in the morning; I’ve been obliged to empty it.” + 

“Shall I help you light it?” + 

“No, no; it’s dirty work.⁠ ⁠… Will you excuse me while I go and put my coat on?” + 

He trotted out of the room and came back almost immediately dressed in an alpaca coat, with its buttons torn off, its elbows in holes, and its general appearance so threadbare, that one wouldn’t have dared give it to a beggar. We sat down. + 

“You think I’m changed, don’t you?” + 

I wanted to protest, but could hardly find anything to say, I was so painfully affected by the harassed expression of his face, which had once been so beautiful. He went on: + 

“Yes, I’ve grown very old lately. I’m beginning to lose my memory. When I want to go over one of Bach’s fugues, I am obliged to refer to the book.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“There are many young people who would be glad to have a memory like yours.” + 

He replied with a shrug: “Oh, it’s not only my memory that’s failing. For instance, I think I still walk pretty quickly; but all the same everybody in the street passes me.” + 

“Oh,” said I, “people walk much quicker nowadays.” + 

“Yes, don’t they?⁠ ⁠… It’s the same with my lessons⁠—my pupils think that my teaching keeps them back; they want to go quicker than I do. I’m losing them.⁠ ⁠… Everyone’s in a hurry nowadays.” + 

He added in a whisper so low that I could hardly hear him: “I’ve scarcely any left.” + 

I felt that he was in such great distress that I didn’t dare question him. + 

“Madame de La Pérouse won’t understand. She says I don’t set about it in the right way⁠—that I don’t do anything to keep them and still less to get new ones.” + 

“The pupil you were expecting just now.⁠ ⁠…” I asked awkwardly. + 

“Oh, she! I’m preparing her for the Conservatoire. She comes here to practise every day.” + 

“Which means she doesn’t pay you.” + 

“Madame de La Pérouse is always reproaching me with it. She can’t understand that those are the only lessons that interest me; yes, the only lessons I really care about⁠ ⁠… giving. I have taken to reflecting a great deal lately. Here! there’s something I should like to ask you. Why is it there is so little about old people in books?⁠ ⁠… I suppose it’s because old people aren’t able to write themselves and young ones don’t take any interest in them. No one’s interested in an old man.⁠ ⁠… And yet there are a great many curious things that might be said about them. For instance: there are certain acts in my past life which I’m only just beginning to understand. Yes, I’m just beginning to understand that they haven’t at all the meaning I attached to them in the old days when I did them.⁠ ⁠… I’ve only just begun to understand that I have been a dupe during the whole of my life. Madame de La Pérouse has fooled me; my son has fooled me; everybody has fooled me; God has fooled me.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The evening was closing in. I could hardly make out my old master’s features; but suddenly the light of the street lamp flashed out and showed me his cheeks glittering with tears. I looked anxiously at first at an odd mark on his temple, like a dint, like a hole; but as he moved a little, the spot changed places and I saw that it was only a shadow cast by a knob of the balustrade. I put my hand on his scraggy arm; he shivered. + 

“You’ll catch cold,” I said. “Really, shan’t we light the fire?⁠ ⁠… Come along.” + 

“No, no; one must harden oneself.” + 

“What? Stoicism?” + 

“Yes, a little. It’s because my throat was delicate that I never would wear a scarf. I have always struggled with myself.” + 

“That’s all very well as long as one is victorious; but if one’s body gives way.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“That would be the real victory.” + 

He let go my hand and went on: “I was afraid you would go away without coming to see me.” + 

“Go where?” I asked. + 

“I don’t know. You travel so much. There’s something I wanted to say to you.⁠ ⁠… I expect to be going away myself soon.” + 

“What! are you thinking of travelling?” I asked clumsily, pretending not to understand him, notwithstanding the mysterious solemnity of his voice. He shook his head. + 

“You know very well what I mean.⁠ ⁠… Yes, yes. I know it will soon be time. I am beginning to earn less than my keep; and I can’t endure it. There’s a certain point beyond which I have promised myself not to go.” + 

He spoke in an emotional tone which alarmed me. + 

“Do you think it is wrong? I have never been able to understand why it was forbidden by religion. I have reflected a great deal latterly. When I was young, I led a very austere life; I used to congratulate myself on my force of character every time I refused a solicitation in the street. I didn’t understand, that when I thought I was freeing myself, in reality I was becoming more and more the slave of my own pride. Every one of these triumphs over myself was another turn of the key in the door of my prison. That’s what I meant just now by saying that God had fooled me. He made me take my pride for virtue. He was laughing at me. It amuses him. I think he plays with us as a cat does with a mouse. He sends us temptations which he knows we shan’t be able to resist; but when we do resist he revenges himself still worse. Why does he hate us so? And why.⁠ ⁠… But I’m boring you with these old man’s questions.” + 

He took his head in his hands like a moping child and remained silent so long that I began to wonder whether he had not forgotten my presence. I sat motionless in front of him, afraid of disturbing his meditations. Notwithstanding the noise of the street which was so close, the calm of the little room seemed to me extraordinary, and notwithstanding the glimmer of the street lamp, which shed its fantastic light upon us from down below, like footlights at the theatre, the shadow on each side of the window seemed to broaden, and the darkness round us to thicken, as in icy weather the water of a quiet pool thickens into immobility⁠—till my heart itself thickened into ice too. At last, shaking myself free from the clutch that held me, I breathed loudly and, preparatory to taking my leave, I asked out of politeness and in order to break the spell: + 

“How is Madame de La Pérouse?” + 

The old man seemed to wake up out of a dream. He repeated: + 

“Madame de La Pérouse⁠ ⁠… ?” interrogatively, as if the words were syllables which had lost all meaning for him; then he suddenly leant towards me: + 

“Madame de La Pérouse is in a terrible state⁠ ⁠… most painful to me.” + 

“What kind of state?” I asked. + 

“Oh, no kind,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, as if there were nothing to explain. “She is completely out of her mind. She doesn’t know what to be up to next.” + 

I had long suspected that the old couple were in profound disagreement, but without any hope of knowing anything more definite. + 

“My poor friend,” I said pityingly, “and since when?” + 

He reflected a moment, as if he had not understood my question. + 

“Oh, for a long time⁠ ⁠… ever since I’ve known her.” Then, correcting himself almost immediately: “No; in reality it was over my son’s bringing up that things went wrong.” + 

I made a gesture of surprise, for I had always thought that the La Pérouses had no children. He raised his head, which he had been holding in his hands, and went on more calmly: + 

“I never mentioned my son to you, eh?⁠ ⁠… Well, I’ll tell you everything. You must know all about it now. There’s no one else I can tell.⁠ ⁠… Yes, it was over my son’s bringing up. As you see, it’s a long time ago. The first years of our married life had been delightful. I was very pure when I married Madame de La Pérouse. I loved her with innocence⁠ ⁠… yes, that’s the best word for it, and I refused to allow that she had any faults. But we hadn’t the same ideas about bringing up children. Every time that I wanted to reprove my son, Madame de La Pérouse took his side against me; according to her, he was to be allowed to do anything he liked. They were in league together against me. She taught him to lie.⁠ ⁠… When he was barely twenty he took a mistress. She was a pupil of mine⁠—a Russian girl, with a great talent for music, to whom I was very much attached. Madame de La Pérouse knew all about it; but of course, as usual, everything was kept from me. And of course I didn’t notice she was going to have a baby. Not a thing⁠—I tell you; I never suspected a thing. One fine day, I am informed that my pupil is unwell, that she won’t be able to come for some time. When I speak about going to see her, I am told that she has changed her address⁠—that she is travelling.⁠ ⁠… It was not till long after that I learnt that she had gone to Poland for her confinement. My son joined her there.⁠ ⁠… They lived together for several years, but he died before marrying her.” + 

“And⁠ ⁠… she? did you ever see her again?” + 

He seemed to be butting with his head against some obstacle: + 

“I couldn’t forgive her for deceiving me. Madame de La Pérouse still corresponds with her. When I learnt she was in great poverty, I sent her some money for the child’s sake. But Madame de La Pérouse knows nothing about that. No more does she⁠ ⁠… she doesn’t know the money came from me.” + 

“And your grandson?” + 

A strange smile flitted over his face; he got up. + 

“Wait a moment. I’ll show you his photograph.” And again he trotted quickly out of the room, poking his head out in front of him. When he came back, his fingers trembled as he looked for the picture in a large letter-case. He held it towards me and, bending forward, whispered in a low voice: + 

“I took it from Madame de La Pérouse without her noticing. She thinks she has lost it.” + 

“How old is he?” I asked. + 

“Thirteen. He looks older, doesn’t he? He is very delicate.” + 

His eyes filled with tears once more; he held out his hand for the photograph, as if he were anxious to get it back again as quickly as possible. I leant forward to look at it in the dim light of the street lamp; I thought the child was like him; I recognized old La Pérouse’s high, prominent forehead and dreamy eyes. I thought I should please him by saying so; he protested: + 

“No, no; it’s my brother he’s like⁠—a brother I lost.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The child was oddly dressed in a Russian embroidered blouse. + 

“Where does he live?” + 

“How can I tell?” cried La Pérouse, in a kind of despair. “They keep everything from me, I tell you.” + 

He had taken the photograph, and after having looked at it a moment, he put it back in the letter-case, which he slipped into his pocket. + 

“When his mother comes to Paris, she only sees Madame de La Pérouse; if I question her, she always answers: ‘You had better ask her yourself.’ She says that, but at heart she would hate me to see her. She has always been jealous. She has always tried to take away everything I care for.⁠ ⁠… Little Boris is being educated in Poland⁠—at Warsaw, I believe. But he often travels with his mother.” Then, in great excitement: “Oh, would you have thought it possible to love someone one has never seen?⁠ ⁠… Well, this child is what I care for most in the world.⁠ ⁠… And he doesn’t know!” + 

His words were broken by great sobs. He rose from his chair and threw himself⁠—fell almost⁠—into my arms. I would have done anything to give him some comfort⁠—but what could I do? I got up, for I felt his poor shrunken form slipping to the ground and I thought he was going to fall on his knees. I held him up, embraced him, rocked him like a child. He mastered himself. Madame de La Pérouse was calling in the next room. + 

“She’s coming.⁠ ⁠… You don’t want to see her, do you?⁠ ⁠… Besides, she’s stone deaf. Go quickly.” And as he saw me out on to the landing: + 

“Don’t be too long without coming again.” (There was entreaty in his voice.) “Goodbye; goodbye.” + 

Nov. 9th.⁠—There is a kind of tragedy, it seems to me, which has hitherto almost entirely eluded literature. The novel has dealt with the contrariness of fate, good or evil fortune, social relationships, the conflicts of passions and of characters⁠—but not with the very essence of man’s being. + 

And yet, the whole effect of Christianity was to transfer the drama on to the moral plane. But properly speaking there are no Christian novels. There are novels whose purpose is edification; but that has nothing to do with what I mean. Moral tragedy⁠—the tragedy, for instance, which gives such terrific meaning to the Gospel text: “If the salt have lost his flavour wherewith shall it be salted?”⁠—that is the tragedy with which I am concerned. + 

Nov. 10th.⁠—Olivier’s examination is coming on shortly. Pauline wants him to try for the École Normale afterwards. His career is all mapped out.⁠ ⁠… If only he had no parents, no connections! I would have made him my secretary. But the thought of me never occurs to him; he has not even noticed my interest in him, and I should embarrass him if I showed it. It is because I don’t want to embarrass him that I affect a kind of indifference in his presence, a kind of detachment. It is only when he does not see me that I dare look my full at him. Sometimes I follow him in the street without his knowing it. Yesterday I was walking behind him in this way, when he turned suddenly round before I had time to hide. + 

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” I asked him. + 

“Oh, nowhere particular. I always seem most in a hurry when I have nothing to do.” + 

We took a few steps together, but without finding anything to say to each other. He was certainly put out at having been met. + 

Nov. 12th.⁠—He has parents, an elder brother, school friends.⁠ ⁠… I keep repeating this to myself all day long⁠—and that there is no room for me. I should no doubt be able to make up anything that might be lacking to him, but nothing is. He needs nothing; and if his sweetness delights me, there is nothing in it that allows me for a moment to deceive myself.⁠ ⁠… Oh, foolish words, which I write in spite of myself and which discover the duplicity of my heart.⁠ ⁠… I am leaving for London tomorrow. I have suddenly made up my mind to go away. It is time. + 

To go away because one is too anxious to stay!⁠ ⁠… A certain love of the arduous⁠—a horror of indulgence (towards oneself, I mean) is perhaps the part of my Puritan upbringing which I find it hardest to free myself from. + 

Yesterday, at Smith’s, bought a copybook (English already) in which to continue my diary. I will write nothing more in this one. A new copybook!⁠ ⁠… + 

Ah! if it were myself I could leave behind! + 

It was with Laura’s letter, which Edouard had inserted into his journal, that Bernard’s reading came to an end. The truth flashed upon him; it was impossible to doubt that the woman whose words rang so beseechingly in this letter was the same despairing creature of whom Olivier had told him the night before⁠—Vincent Molinier’s discarded mistress. And it became suddenly evident to Bernard that, thanks to this twofold confidence, Olivier’s, and Edouard’s in his journal, he was as yet the only one to know the two sides of the intrigue. It was an advantage he could not keep long; he must play his cards quickly and skilfully. He made up his mind at once. Without forgetting, for that matter, any of the other things he had read, Bernard now fixed his attention upon Laura. + 

“This morning I was still uncertain as to what I ought to do; now I have no longer any doubt,” he said to himself, as he darted out of the room. “The imperative, as they say, is categorical. I must save Laura. It was not perhaps my duty to take the suitcase, but having taken it, I have certainly found in the suitcase a lively sense of my duty. The important thing is to come upon Laura before Edouard can get to her; to introduce myself and offer my services in such a way that she cannot take me for a swindler. The rest will be easy. At this moment I have enough in my pocketbook to come to the rescue of misfortune as magnificently as the most generous and the most compassionate of Edouards. The only thing which bothers me is how to do it. For Laura is a Vedel, and though she is about to become a mother in defiance of the code, she is no doubt a sensitive creature. I imagine her the kind of woman who stands on her dignity and flings her contempt in your face, as she tears up the banknotes you offer her⁠—with benevolence, but in too flimsy an envelope. How shall I present the notes? How shall I present myself? That’s the rub! As soon as one leaves the high road of legality, in what a tangle one finds oneself! I really am rather young to mix myself up in an intrigue as stiff as this. But, hang it all, youth’s my strong point. Let’s invent a candid confession⁠—a touching and interesting story. The trouble is that it’s got to do for Edouard as well; the same one⁠—and without giving myself away. Oh! I shall think of something. Let’s trust to the inspiration of the moment.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He had reached the address given by Laura, in the Rue de Beaune. The hotel was exceedingly modest, but clean and respectable looking. Following the porter’s directions, he went up three floors. Outside the door of No. 16 he stopped, tried to prepare his entry, to find some words; he could think of nothing; then he made a dash for it and knocked. A gentle, sister-like voice, with, he thought, a touch of fear in it, answered: + 

“Come in!” + 

Laura was very simply dressed, all in black; she looked as if she were in mourning. During the few days she had been in Paris, she had been vaguely waiting for something or somebody to get her out of her straits. She had taken the wrong road, not a doubt of it; she felt completely lost. She had the unfortunate habit of counting on the event rather than on herself. She was not without virtue, but now that she had been abandoned she felt that all her strength had left her. At Bernard’s entrance, she raised one hand to her face, like someone who keeps back a cry or shades his eyes from too bright a light. She was standing, and took a step backwards; then, finding herself close to the window, with her other hand she caught hold of the curtain. + 

Bernard stopped, waiting for her to question him; but she too waited for him to speak. He looked at her; with a beating heart, he tried in vain to smile. + 

“Excuse me, Madame,” he said at last, “for disturbing you in this manner. Edouard X, whom I believe you know, arrived in Paris this morning. I have something urgent to say to him; I thought you might be able to give me his address and⁠ ⁠… forgive me for coming so unceremoniously to ask for it.” + 

Had Bernard not been so young, Laura would doubtless have been frightened. But he was still a child, with eyes so frank, so clear a brow, so timid a bearing, a voice so ill-assured, that fear yielded to curiosity, to interest, to that irresistible sympathy which a simple and beautiful being always arouses. Bernard’s voice gathered a little courage as he spoke. + 

“But I don’t know his address,” said Laura. “If he is in Paris, he will come to see me without delay, I hope. Tell me who you are. I will tell him.” + 

“Now’s the moment to risk everything,” thought Bernard. Something wild flashed across his eyes. He looked Laura steadily in the face. + 

“Who I am?⁠ ⁠… Olivier Molinier’s friend.⁠ ⁠…” He hesitated, still uncertain; but seeing her turn pale at this name, he ventured further: “Olivier, Vincent’s brother⁠—the brother of your lover, who has so vilely abandoned you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He had to stop. Laura was tottering. Her two hands, flung backwards, were anxiously searching for some support. But what upset Bernard more than anything was the moan she gave⁠—a kind of wail which was scarcely human, more like that of some hunted, wounded animal (and the sportsman, suddenly filled with shame, feels himself an executioner); so odd a cry it was, so different from anything that Bernard expected, that he shuddered. He understood all of a sudden that this was a matter of real life, of veritable pain, and everything he had felt up till that moment seemed to him mere show and pretence. An emotion surged up in him so unfamiliar that he was unable to master it. It rose to his throat.⁠ ⁠… What! is he sobbing? Is it possible?⁠ ⁠… He, Bernard!⁠ ⁠… He rushes forward to hold her up, and kneels before her, and murmurs through his sobs: + 

“Oh, forgive me⁠ ⁠… forgive; I have hurt you.⁠ ⁠… I knew that you were in difficulties, and⁠ ⁠… I wanted to help you.” + 

But Laura, gasping for breath, felt that she was fainting. She cast round with her eyes for somewhere to sit down. Bernard, whose gaze was fixed upon her, understood her look. He sprang towards a small armchair at the foot of the bed, with a rapid movement pushed it towards her, and she dropped heavily into it. + 

At this moment there occurred a grotesque incident which I hesitate to relate, but it was decisive of Laura’s and Bernard’s relationship, by unexpectedly relieving them of their embarrassment. I shall therefore not attempt to embellish the scene by any artifices. + 

For the price which Laura paid for her room (I mean, which the hotelkeeper asked her) one could not have expected the furniture to be elegant, but one might have hoped it would be solid. Now the small armchair, which Bernard pushed towards Laura, was somewhat unsteady on its feet; that is to say, it had a great propensity to fold back one of its legs, as a bird does under its wing⁠—which is natural enough in a bird, but unusual and regrettable in an armchair; this one, moreover, hid its infirmity as best it could beneath a thick fringe. Laura was well acquainted with her armchair, and knew that it must be handled with extreme precaution; but in her agitation she forgot this and only remembered it when she felt the chair giving way beneath her. She suddenly gave a little cry⁠—quite different from the long moan she had uttered just before, slipped to one side, and a moment later found herself sitting on the floor, between the arms of Bernard, who had hurried to the rescue. Bashful, but amused, he had been obliged to put one knee on the ground. Laura’s face therefore happened to be quite close to his; he watched her blush. She made an effort to get up; he helped her. + 

“You’ve not hurt yourself?” + 

“No; thanks to you. This armchair is ridiculous; it has been mended once already.⁠ ⁠… I think if the leg is put quite straight, it will hold.” + 

“I’ll arrange it,” said Bernard. “There!⁠ ⁠… Will you try it?” Then, thinking better of it: “No; allow me. It would be safer for me to try it first. Look! It’s all right now. I can move my legs” (which he did, laughing). Then, as he rose: “Sit down now, and if you’ll allow me to stay a moment or two longer, I’ll take this chair. I’ll sit near you, so that I shall be able to prevent you from falling. Don’t be frightened.⁠ ⁠… I wish I could do more for you.” + 

There was so much ardour in his voice, so much reserve in his manners, and in his movements so much grace, that Laura could not forbear a smile. + 

“You haven’t told me your name yet.” + 

“Bernard.” + 

“Yes. But your family name?” + 

“I have no family.” + 

“Well, your parents’ name.” + 

“I have no parents. That is, I am what the child you are expecting will be⁠—a bastard.” + 

The smile vanished from Laura’s face; she was outraged by this insistent determination to force an entrance into her intimacy and to violate the secret of her life. + 

“But how do you know?⁠ ⁠… Who told you?⁠ ⁠… You have no right to know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Bernard was launched now; he spoke loudly and boldly: + 

“I know both what my friend Olivier knows and what your friend Edouard knows. Only each of them as yet knows only half your secret. I am probably the only person besides yourself to know the whole of it.⁠ ⁠… So you see,” he added more gently, “it’s essential that I should be your friend.” + 

“Oh, how can people be so indiscreet?” murmured Laura sadly. “But⁠ ⁠… if you haven’t seen Edouard, he can’t have spoken to you. Has he written to you?⁠ ⁠… Is it he who has sent you?”⁠ ⁠… + 

Bernard had given himself away; he had spoken too quickly and had not been able to resist bragging a little. He shook his head. Laura’s face grew still darker. At that moment a knock was heard at the door. + 

Whether they will or no, a link is created between two creatures who experience a common emotion. Bernard felt himself trapped; Laura was vexed at being surprised in company. They looked at each other like two accomplices. Another knock was heard. Both together said: + 

“Come in.” + 

For some minutes Edouard had been listening outside the door, astonished at hearing voices in Laura’s room. Bernard’s last sentences had explained everything. He could not doubt their meaning; he could not doubt that the speaker was the stealer of his suitcase. His mind was immediately made up. For Edouard is one of those beings whose faculties, which seem benumbed in the ordinary routine of daily life, spring into activity at the call of the unexpected. He opened the door therefore, but remained on the threshold, smiling and looking alternately at Laura and Bernard, who had both risen. + 

“Allow me, my dear Laura,” said he, with a gesture as though to put off any effusions till later. “I must first say a word or two to this gentleman, if he will be so good as to step into the passage for a moment.” + 

His smile became more ironical when Bernard joined him. + 

“I thought I should find you here.” + 

Bernard understood that the game was up. There was nothing for him to do but to put a bold face on it, which he did with the feeling that he was playing his last card: + 

“I hoped I should meet you.” + 

“In the first place⁠—if you haven’t done so already (for I’ll do you the credit of believing that that is what you came for), you will go downstairs to the bureau and settle Madame Douviers’ bill with the money you found in my suitcase and which you must have on you. Don’t come up again for ten minutes.” + 

All this was said gravely but with nothing comminatory in the tone. In the meantime Bernard had recovered his self-possession. + 

“I did in fact come for that. You are not wrong. And I am beginning to think that I was not wrong either.” + 

“What do you mean by that?” + 

“That you really are the person I hoped you would be.” + 

Edouard was trying in vain to look severe. He was immensely entertained. He made a kind of slight mocking bow: + 

“Much obliged. It remains to be seen whether I shall be able to return the compliment. I suppose, since you are here, that you have read my papers?” + 

Bernard, who had endured without flinching the brunt of Edouard’s gaze, smiled in his turn with boldness, amusement, impertinence; and bowing low, “Don’t doubt it,” he said. “I am here to serve you.” + 

Then, quick as an elf, he darted downstairs. + 

When Edouard went back into the room, Laura was sobbing. He went up to her. She put her forehead down on his shoulder. Any manifestation of emotion embarrassed him almost unbearably. He found himself gently patting her on the back as one does a choking child: + 

“My poor Laura,” said he; “come, come, be sensible.” + 

“Oh, let me cry a little; it does me good.” + 

“All the same we’ve got to consider what you are to do.” + 

“What is there I can do? Where can I go? To whom can I speak?” + 

“Your parents.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You know what they are. It would plunge them in despair. And they did everything they could to make me happy.” + 

“Douviers?⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I shall never dare face him again. He is so good. You mustn’t think I don’t love him.⁠ ⁠… If you only knew.⁠ ⁠… If you only knew.⁠ ⁠… Oh, say you don’t despise me too much.” + 

“On the contrary, my dear; on the contrary. How can you imagine such a thing?” And he began patting her on the back again. + 

“Yes; I don’t feel ashamed any more, when I am with you.” + 

“How long have you been here?” + 

“I can’t remember. I have only been living in the hopes that you would come. There were times when I thought I couldn’t bear it. I feel now as if I couldn’t stay here another day.” + 

Her sobs redoubled and she almost screamed out, though in a choking voice: + 

“Take me away! Take me away!” + 

Edouard felt more and more uncomfortable. + 

“Now Laura.⁠ ⁠… You must be calm. That⁠ ⁠… that⁠ ⁠… I don’t even know his name.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Bernard,” murmured Laura. + 

“Bernard will be back in a moment. Come now; pull yourself together. He mustn’t see you in this state. Courage! We’ll think of something, I promise you. Come, come! Dry your eyes. Crying does no good. Look at yourself in the glass. Your face is all swollen. You must bathe it. When I see you crying I can’t think of anything.⁠ ⁠… There! Here he is! I can hear him.” + 

He went to the door and opened it to let in Bernard, while Laura, with her back turned at the dressing-table, set about restoring a semblance of calm to her features. + 

“And now, sir, may I ask when I shall be allowed to get possession of my belongings again?” + 

He looked Bernard full in the face as he spoke, with the same ironical smile on his lips as before. + 

“As soon as you please, sir; but at the same time, I feel obliged to confess that I shall certainly feel the loss of your belongings a good deal more than you do. I am sure you would understand if you only knew my story. But I’ll just say this, that since this morning I am without a roof, without a family and with nothing better to do than throw myself into the river, if I hadn’t met you. I followed you this morning for a long time while you were talking to my friend Olivier. He has spoken to me about you such a lot! I should have liked to go up to you. I was casting about for some excuse to do so, by hook or by crook.⁠ ⁠… When you threw your luggage ticket away, I blessed my stars. Oh, don’t take me for a thief. If I lifted your suitcase, it was more than anything so as to get into touch with you.” + 

Bernard brought all this out almost in a single breath. An extraordinary animation fired his words and features⁠—as though they were aflame with kindness. Edouard, to judge by his smile, thought him charming. + 

“And now⁠ ⁠… ?” asked he. + 

Bernard understood that he was gaining ground. + 

“And now, weren’t you in need of a secretary? I can’t believe I should fill the post badly⁠—it would be with such joy.” + 

This time Edouard laughed outright. Laura watched them both with amusement. + 

“Ho! Ho!⁠ ⁠… We must think about that. Come and see me tomorrow at the same time, and here⁠—if Madame Douviers will allow it⁠—for I have a great many things to settle with her too. You’re staying at a hotel, I suppose? Oh, I don’t want to know where. It doesn’t matter in the least. Till tomorrow.” + 

He held out his hand. + 

“Sir, before I leave you,” said Bernard, “will you allow me to remind you that there is a poor old music-master, called La Pérouse, I think, who is living in the Faubourg St. Honoré, and who would be made very happy by a visit from you?” + 

“Upon my word, that’s not a bad beginning. You have a very fair notion of your future duties.” + 

“Then.⁠ ⁠… Really? You consent?” + 

“We’ll see about it tomorrow. Goodbye.” + 

Edouard, after having stayed a few moments longer with Laura, went to the Moliniers’. He hoped to see Olivier again; he wanted to speak to him about Bernard. He saw only Pauline, though he stayed on and on in desperation. + 

Olivier, that very afternoon, yielding to the pressing invitation passed on to him by his brother, had gone to visit the author of The Horizontal Bar, the Comte de Passavant. + 

XV + 

Olivier Visits the Comte de Passavant + 

“I was afraid your brother hadn’t delivered my message,” said Robert on seeing Olivier come into the room. + 

“Am I late?” he asked, coming forward timidly and almost on tiptoe. He had kept his hat in his hand and Robert took it from him. + 

“Put that down. Make yourself comfortable. Here, in this armchair, I think you’ll be all right. Not late at all, to judge by the clock. But my wish to see you went faster than the time. Do you smoke?” + 

“No, thank you,” said Olivier, waving aside the cigarette case, which the Comte de Passavant held out to him. He refused out of shyness, though he was really longing to try one of the slender, amber-scented cigarettes (Russian, no doubt,) which lay ranged in the proffered case. + 

“Yes, I’m glad you were able to come. I was afraid you might be too much taken up with your examination. When is it?” + 

“The written is in ten days. But I’m not working much. I think I’m ready and I’m more afraid of being fagged when I go up.” + 

“Still, I suppose you’d refuse to undertake any other occupation just now?” + 

“No⁠ ⁠… if it isn’t too absorbing, that is.” + 

“I’ll tell you why I asked you to come. First, for the pleasure of seeing you again. The other night in the foyer, during the entr’acte, we were just getting into a talk. I was exceedingly interested by what you said. I expect you don’t remember?” + 

“Oh yes, I do,” said Olivier, who was under the impression he had said nothing but stupidities. + 

“But today I have something special to say to you.⁠ ⁠… I think you know an individual of the Hebrew persuasion, called Dhurmer? Isn’t he one of your schoolfellows?” + 

“I have just this moment left him.” + 

“Ah! You see a good deal of each other?” + 

“Yes. We met at the Louvre today to talk about a review of which he is to be the editor.” + 

Robert burst into a loud, affected laugh. + 

“Ha! Ha! Ha! the editor!⁠ ⁠… He’s in a deuce of a hurry.⁠ ⁠… Did he really say that to you?” + 

“He has been talking to me about it for ever so long.” + 

“Yes. I have been thinking of it for some time past. The other day I asked him casually whether he’d agree to read over the manuscripts with me; that’s what he at once called becoming editor⁠—not even subeditor; I didn’t contradict him and he immediately.⁠ ⁠… Just like him, isn’t it? What a fellow! He wants taking down a peg or two.⁠ ⁠… Don’t you really smoke?” + 

“After all, I think I will,” said Olivier, this time accepting. “Thank you.” + 

“Well, allow me to say, Olivier⁠ ⁠… you don’t mind my calling you Olivier, do you? I really can’t say Monsieur; you’re too young, and I’m too intimate with your brother Vincent to call you Molinier. Well then, Olivier, allow me to say that I have infinitely more confidence in your taste than in Mr. Solomon Dhurmer’s. Now would you consent to taking the literary direction? Under me a little, of course⁠—at first, at any rate. But I prefer not to have my name on the cover. I’ll tell you why later.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps you’d take a glass of port wine, eh? I’ve got some that’s quite good.” + 

He stretched out his hand to a kind of little sideboard that stood near and took up a bottle of wine and two glasses, which he filled. + 

“Well! What do you think?” + 

“Yes, indeed; first-rate.” + 

“I wasn’t talking of the port,” protested Robert, laughing; “but of what I was saying just now.” + 

Olivier had pretended not to understand. He was afraid of accepting too quickly and of showing his joy too obviously. He blushed a little and stammered with confusion: + 

“My examination wouldn’t.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You have just told me that you weren’t giving much time to it,” interrupted Robert. “And besides, the review won’t come out yet awhile. I am wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to put off launching it till after the holidays. But in any case I had to sound you. We must get several numbers ready before October and we ought to see each other a great deal this summer so as to talk things over. What are you going to do these holidays?” + 

“I don’t know exactly. My people will probably be going to Normandy. They always do in the summer.” + 

“And you will have to go with them?⁠ ⁠… Couldn’t you let yourself be unhitched for a bit?⁠ ⁠…” + 

“My mother would never consent.” + 

“I’m dining tonight with your brother. May I speak to him about it?” + 

“Oh, Vincent won’t be with us.” Then, realizing that this sentence was no answer to the question, he added: “Besides, it wouldn’t do any good.” + 

“Well, but if we find a good reason to give Mamma?” + 

Olivier did not answer. He loved his mother tenderly and the mocking tone in which Robert alluded to her displeased him. Robert understood that he had gone too far. + 

“So you appreciate my port,” he said by way of diversion. “Have another glass?” + 

“No, no, thank you; but it’s excellent.” + 

“Yes, I was struck by the ripeness and sureness of your judgment the other night. Do you mean to go in for criticism?” + 

“No.” + 

“Poetry?⁠ ⁠… I know you write poetry.” + 

Olivier blushed again. + 

“Yes, your brother has betrayed you. And no doubt you know other young men who would be ready to contribute. This review must become a rallying ground for the younger generation. That’s its raison d’être. I should like you to help me draw up a kind of prospectus, a manifesto, which would just give a sketch of the new tendencies without defining them too precisely. We’ll talk it over later on. We must make a choice of two or three telling epithets; they mustn’t be neologisms; no old words that are thoroughly hackneyed; we’ll fill them with a brand new meaning and make the public swallow them. After Flaubert there was ‘cadenced and rhythmic’; after Leconte de Lisle, ‘hieratic and definitive’.⁠ ⁠… Oh! what would you say to ‘vital,’ eh?⁠ ⁠… ‘Unconscious and vital’.⁠ ⁠… No?⁠ ⁠… ‘Elementary, unconscious and vital’?” + 

“I think we might find something better still,” Olivier took courage to say, smiling, though without seeming to approve much. + 

“Come, another glass of port.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Not quite full, please.” + 

“You see, the great weakness of the symbolist school is that it brought nothing but an aesthetic with it; all the other great schools brought with them, besides their new styles, a new ethic, new tables, a new way of looking at things, of understanding love, of behaving oneself in life. As for the symbolist, it’s perfectly simple; he didn’t behave himself at all in life; he didn’t attempt to understand it; he denied its existence; he turned his back on it. Absurd, don’t you think? They were a set of people without greed⁠—without appetites even. Not like us⁠ ⁠… eh?” + 

Olivier had finished his second glass of port and his second cigarette. Reclining in his comfortable armchair, with his eyes half shut, he said nothing, but signified his assent by slightly nodding his head from time to time. At this moment a ring was heard, and almost immediately afterwards a servant entered with a card which he presented to Robert. Robert took the card, glanced at it and put it on his writing desk beside him. + 

“Very well. Ask him to wait a moment.” The servant went out. “Look here, my dear boy, I like you very much and I think we shall get on very well together. But somebody has just come whom I absolutely must see and he wants to speak to me alone.” + 

Olivier had risen. + 

“I’ll show you out by the garden, if you’ll allow me.⁠ ⁠… Ah! whilst I think of it. Would you care to have my new book? I’ve got a copy here, on handmade paper.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I haven’t waited for that to read it,” said Olivier, who didn’t much care for Passavant’s book, and tried his best to be amiable without being fulsome. + 

Did Passavant detect in his tone a certain tincture of disdain? He went on quickly: “Oh, you needn’t say anything about it. If you were to tell me you liked it, I should be obliged to doubt either your taste or your sincerity. No; no one knows better than I do what’s lacking in the book. I wrote it much too quickly. To tell the truth, the whole time I was writing it I was thinking of my next one. Ah! that one is a different matter. I care about that one. Yes, I care about it exceedingly. You’ll see; you’ll see.⁠ ⁠… I’m so very sorry, but you really must leave me now.⁠ ⁠… Unless.⁠ ⁠… No, no; we don’t know each other well enough yet, and your people are certainly expecting you back for dinner. Well, goodbye; au revoir. I’ll write your name in the book; allow me.” + 

He had risen; he went up to his writing desk. While he was stooping to write, Olivier stepped forward and glanced out of the corner of his eye at the card which the servant had just brought in: + 

Victor Strouvilhou + 

The name meant nothing to him. + 

Passavant handed Olivier the copy of The Horizontal Bar, and as Olivier was preparing to read the inscription: + 

“Look at it later,” said Passavant, slipping the book under his arm. + 

It was not till he was in the street that Olivier read the manuscript motto with which the Comte de Passavant had adorned the first page and which he had culled out of the book itself: + 

“Prithee, Orlando, a few steps further. I am not perfectly sure that I dare altogether take your meaning.” + 

Underneath which he had added: + 

To Olivier Molinier + 

from his presumptive friend + 

Comte Robert de Passavant + 

An ambiguous motto, which made Olivier wonder, but which after all he was perfectly free to interpret as he pleased. + 

Olivier got home just after Edouard had left, weary of waiting. + 

XVI + 

Vincent and Lilian + 

Vincent’s education, which had been materialistic in tendency, prevented him from believing in the supernatural⁠—which gave the demon an immense advantage. The demon never made a frontal attack upon Vincent; he approached him crookedly and furtively. One of his cleverest manoeuvres consists in presenting us our defeats as if they were victories. What inclined Vincent to consider his behaviour to Laura as a victory of his will over his affections, was that, being naturally kindhearted, he had been obliged to force himself, to steel himself to be hard to her. + 

Upon a closer examination of the evolution of Vincent’s character in this intrigue, I discover various stages, which I will point out for the reader’s edification: + 

1st.⁠—The period of good motives. Probity. Conscientious need of repairing a wrong action. In actual fact: the moral obligation of devoting to Laura the money which his parents had laboriously saved to meet the initial expenses of his career. Is this not self-sacrifice? Is this motive not respectable, generous, charitable? + 

2nd.⁠—The period of uneasiness. Scruples. Is not the fear that this sum may be insufficient, the first step towards yielding, when the demon dangles before Vincent’s eyes the possibility of increasing it? + 

3rd.⁠—Constancy and fortitude. Need after the loss of this sum to feel himself “above adversity.” It is this “fortitude” which enables him to confess his loss at cards to Laura; and which enables him by the same occasion to break with her. + 

4th.⁠—Renunciation of good motives, regarded as a cheat, in the light of the new ethic which Vincent finds himself obliged to invent in order to legitimize his conduct; for he continues to be a moral being, and the devil will only get the better of him by furnishing him with reasons for self-approval. Theory of immanence, of totality in the moment; of gratuitous, immediate and motiveless joy. + 

5th.⁠—Intoxication of the winner. Contempt of the reserve in hand. Supremacy. + 

After which the demon has won the game. + 

After which the being who believes himself freest is nothing but a tool at his service. The demon will never rest now till Vincent has sold his brother to that creature of perdition⁠—Passavant. + 

And yet Vincent is not bad. All this, do what he will, leaves him unsatisfied, uncomfortable. Let us add a few words more: + 

The name “exoticism” is, I believe, given to those of Maia’s iridescent folds which make the soul feel itself a stranger, which deprive it of points of contact. There are some whose virtue would resist, but that the devil, before attacking it, transplants them. No doubt, if Vincent and Laura had not been under other skies, far from their parents, from their past memories, from all that maintained them in consistency with themselves, she would not have yielded to him, nor he attempted to seduce her. No doubt it seemed to them out there that their act did not enter into the reckoning.⁠ ⁠… A great deal more might be said; but the above is enough as it is to explain Vincent to us better. + 

With Lilian too he felt himself in a foreign land. + 

“Don’t laugh at me, Lilian,” he said to her that same evening. “I know that you won’t understand, and yet I have to speak to you as if you would, for I’m unable now to get you out of my mind.” + 

Lilian was lying on the low divan, and he, half reclining at her feet, let his head rest, lover-like, on his mistress’s knees, while she, lover-like, caressed it. + 

“The thing that was on my mind this morning was⁠ ⁠… yes, I think it was fear. Can you keep serious for a moment? Can you try to understand me so far as to forget for a moment⁠—not what you believe, for you believe in nothing⁠—but just that very fact that you believe in nothing? I didn’t believe in anything either; I believed that I didn’t believe in anything⁠—not in anything but ourselves, in you, in me, in what I am when I am with you, in what, thanks to you, I am going to become.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Robert will be here at seven,” interrupted Lilian. “I don’t want to hurry you; but if you don’t get on a little quicker, he’ll interrupt you just at the very moment you are beginning to get interesting. I don’t suppose you’ll want to go on when he’s here. It’s odd that you should think it necessary to take so many precautions today. You remind me of a blind man, who has first to feel every spot with his stick, before he puts his foot on it. And yet you can see I’m keeping quite serious. Why haven’t you more confidence?” + 

“Ever since I’ve known you, my confidence has become extraordinary,” went on Vincent. “I’m capable of great things, I feel it; and you see that everything I do turns out successful. But that’s exactly what terrifies me. No; be quiet.⁠ ⁠… All day long I’ve kept thinking of what you told me this morning about the wreck of the Bourgogne, and of the people who wanted to get into the boat having their hands cut off. It seems to me that something wants to get into my boat⁠—I’m using your image, so that you may understand me⁠—something that I want to prevent getting in.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And you want me to help you drown it.⁠ ⁠… You old coward!” + 

He went on without looking at her: + 

“Something I keep off, but whose voice I hear⁠ ⁠… a voice you have never heard, that I listened to in my childhood.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And what does your voice say? You don’t dare tell me. I’m not surprised. I bet there’s a dash of the catechism in it, isn’t there?” + 

“Oh, Lilian, try to understand; the only way for me to get rid of these thoughts is to tell them to you. If you laugh at them, I shall keep them to myself and they’ll poison me.” + 

“Tell away then,” said she with an air of resignation. Then, as he kept silent and hid his face like a child in Lilian’s skirts: “Well, what are you waiting for?” + 

She seized him by the hair and forced him to raise his head: + 

“Upon my word, he’s really taking it seriously! Just look at him! He’s quite pale. Now, listen to me, my dear boy; if you mean to behave like a child, it’s not my affair at all. One must have the strength of one’s convictions. And, besides, you know I don’t like people who cheat. When you try on the sly to pull things into your boat which oughtn’t to be there, you’re cheating. I’m willing to play the game with you, but it must be above board; and I warn you my object is to make you succeed. I think you’re capable of becoming somebody important⁠—really important; I feel great intelligence in you, and great strength. I want to help you. There are quite enough women who spoil the careers of the men they fall in love with; I want to do the contrary. You’ve already told me you wanted to give up doctoring in order to work at science and that you were sorry you hadn’t enough money.⁠ ⁠… Now you have just won fifty thousand francs, which isn’t bad to begin with. But you must promise me not to play any more. I’ll put as much money as is necessary at your disposition, on condition that if people say you are being kept, you’ll be strong-minded enough to shrug your shoulders.” + 

Vincent had risen. He went up to the window. Lilian went on: + 

“To begin with, I think one might as well finish up with Laura and send her the five thousand francs you promised her. Now that you’ve got the money, why don’t you keep your word? I don’t like it at all. I detest caddishness. You don’t know how to cut hands off decently. When that’s done, we’ll go and spend the summer where it’ll be most profitable for your work.⁠ ⁠… You mentioned Roskoff; personally, I should prefer Monaco, because I know the Prince, and he might take us for a cruise and perhaps give you a job in his laboratory.” + 

Vincent kept silent. He felt disinclined to say to Lilian (he only told her later) that before coming to see her, he had gone to the hotel, where Laura had waited for him in such despair. Anxious to be at last quit of his debt, he had slipped the notes, on which she no longer counted, into an envelope. He had entrusted the envelope to a waiter, and then waited in the hall until he should hear it had been delivered to her personally. A few moments later the waiter had come downstairs bringing with him the envelope, across which Laura had written: + 

“Too late.” + 

Lilian rang and asked for her cloak. When the maid had left the room: + 

“Oh, I wanted to say to you, before Robert arrives, that if he proposes an investment for your fifty thousand francs⁠—be careful. He is very rich, but he is always in want of money. There! look and see. I think I hear his horn. He’s half an hour before the time; but so much the better.⁠ ⁠… For all we were saying!⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I’m early,” said Robert as he came into the room, “because I thought it would be amusing to go and dine at Versailles. Do you agree?” + 

“No,” said Lady Griffith; “the fountains bore me. I had rather go to Rambouillet; there’s time. We shan’t have such a good dinner, but we shall be able to talk more easily. I want Vincent to tell you his fish stories. He knows some marvellous ones. I don’t know if what he says is true, but it’s more amusing than the best novel in the world.” + 

“That’s not perhaps what a novelist will think,” said Vincent. + 

Robert de Passavant held an evening paper in his hand: + 

“D’you know that Brugnard has just been made assistant-secretary at the Ministry of Justice? Now’s the moment to get your father decorated,” said he, turning to Vincent. Vincent shrugged his shoulders. + 

“My dear Vincent,” went on Passavant, “allow me to say that you’ll very much offend him by not asking this little favour⁠—which he’ll be so delighted to refuse.” + 

“Suppose you were to start by asking it for yourself,” Vincent replied. + 

Robert made an affected little grimace: + 

“No; for my part, my vanity consists in never blushing⁠—not even in my buttonhole.” Then, turning to Lilian: + 

“Do you know it’s rare nowadays to find a man who has reached forty without either the syph or the legion of honour?” + 

Lilian smiled and shrugged her shoulders: + 

“For the sake of a bon mot he actually consents to make himself out older than he is! I say, is it a quotation from your next book? It’ll be tasty.⁠ ⁠… Go on downstairs. I’ll get my cloak and follow you.” + 

“I thought you had given up seeing him,” said Vincent to Robert on the staircase. + 

“Who? Brugnard?” + 

“You said he was so stupid.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“My dear friend,” replied Passavant, pausing on a step and holding up Molinier, for he saw Lady Griffith coming and wanted her to hear: “you must know there’s not a single one of my friends whom I’ve known a certain time, that hasn’t given me unmistakable proofs of imbecility. I assure you that Brugnard resisted the test longer than a great many others.” + 

“Than I, perhaps?” asked Vincent. + 

“Which doesn’t prevent me from being your best friend⁠ ⁠… as you see.” + 

“And that’s what’s called wit in Paris,” said Lilian, who had joined them. “Take care, Robert; there’s nothing fades quicker.” + 

“Don’t be alarmed, dear lady; words only fade when they’re printed.” + 

They took their places in the car and drove off. As their conversation continued to be very witty, it is useless to record it here. They sat down to table on the terrace of a hotel overlooking a garden where the shades of night were gathering. Under cover of the evening, their talk grew slower and graver; urged on by Lilian and Robert, Vincent found himself at last the only speaker. + 

XVII + 

The Evening at Rambouillet + 

“I should take more interest in animals if I were less interested in men,” Robert had said. And Vincent had replied: + 

“Perhaps you think them too different. Every single one of the great discoveries in zoology has left its mark upon the study of man. The whole subject is interlinked and interdependent, and I believe that a novelist who also prides himself upon being a psychologist can never turn aside his eyes from the spectacle of nature and remain ignorant of her laws without paying for it. In the Goncourts’ Journal, which you gave me to read, I fell upon an account of a visit they paid to the Zoological houses in the Jardin des Plantes, in which your charming authors deplore Nature’s⁠—or the Lord’s⁠—lack of imagination. This paltry blasphemy merely serves to show up the stupidity and incomprehension of their small minds. On the contrary, what astonishing diversity! It seems as if Nature had essayed one after the other every possible manner of living and moving, as if she had taken advantage of every permission granted by matter and its laws. What a lesson can be read in the progressive abandonment of certain palaeontological experiments which proved irrational and inelegant; the economy which has enabled some forms to survive explains why the others were abandoned. Botany is instructive, too. When I examine a plant, I observe that at the place where each leaf springs from the stem, a bud lies sheltered, which is capable in its turn of shooting into life the following year. When I remark that out of all these buds, two at most are destined to come to anything, and that by the very fact of their growth they condemn all the others to atrophy, I cannot help thinking that the case is the same with men. The buds which develop naturally are always the terminal buds⁠—that is to say, those that are farthest away from the parent trunk. It is only by pruning or layering that the sap is driven back and so forced to give life to those germs which are nearest the trunk and which would otherwise have lain dormant. And in this manner, the most recalcitrant plants, which, if left to themselves, would no doubt have produced nothing but leaves, are induced to bear fruit. Oh! an orchard or a garden is an excellent school! and a horticulturist would often make the best of pedagogues! There is more to be learnt, if one can use one’s eyes, in a poultry-yard, or a kennel, or an aquarium, or a rabbit warren, or a stable, than in all your books, or even, believe me, in the society of men, where everything is more or less sophisticated.” + 

Then Vincent spoke of selection. He explained how in order to obtain the finest seedlings, the ordinary plan is to choose the most robust specimens; and then he told them of the fantastic experiment of one audacious horticulturist, who, out of a horror of routine⁠—it really seemed almost like a challenge⁠—took it into his head, on the contrary, to select the most weakly⁠—with the result that he obtained blooms of incomparable beauty. + 

Robert, who had at first listened with only half an ear, like a person who merely expects to be bored, now made no attempt to interrupt. His attention delighted Lilian, who took it as a compliment to her lover. + 

“You ought to tell us,” said she, “of what you were saying the other day about fish and their power of accommodation to the different amounts of salt in the sea.⁠ ⁠… That was it, wasn’t it?” + 

“Except for certain regions,” went on Vincent, “the sea’s degree of saltness is pretty constant; and marine fauna as a rule tolerates only very slight variations of density. But the regions I was telling you about are nevertheless not uninhabited; the regions I mean are those which are subject to intense evaporation and in which, therefore, the proportion of water to salt is greatly reduced⁠—or, on the contrary, those where the constant inflow of fresh water dilutes the salt and, so to speak, un-salts the sea⁠—those that are near the mouths of great rivers, or such enormous currents as the Gulf Stream. In such regions the animals called stenohaline grow enfeebled to the point of perishing; and as they become incapable of defending themselves, they inevitably fall a prey to the animals called euryhaline, so that the euryhalines live by choice on the confines of the great currents, where the density of the water varies and where the stenohalines meet their death. You understand, don’t you, that the stenos are those which can exist only in water whose degree of saltness is unvarying; whilst the eurys.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Are the pickles,” interrupted Robert, who always referred everything back to himself, and only took an interest in that part of a theory which he could turn to account. + 

“Most of them are ferocious,” added Vincent gravely. + 

“I told you it was better than any novel!” cried Lilian, ecstatically. + 

Vincent seemed transfigured⁠—indifferent to the impression he was making. He was extraordinarily grave and went on in a lower tone as if he were talking to himself: + 

“The most astonishing discovery of recent times⁠—at any rate the one that has taught me most⁠—is the discovery of the photogenic apparatus of deep-sea creatures.” + 

“Oh, tell us about it!” cried Lilian, letting her cigarette go out and her ice melt on her plate. + 

“You know, no doubt, that the light of day does not reach very far down into the sea. Its depths are dark⁠ ⁠… huge gulfs, which for a long time were thought to be uninhabited; then people began dragging them, and quantities of strange animals were brought up from these infernal regions⁠—animals that were blind, it was thought. What use would the sense of sight be in the dark? Evidently they had no eyes; they wouldn’t, they couldn’t have eyes. Nevertheless, on examination it was found to people’s amazement that some of them had eyes; that they almost all had eyes, and sometimes antennae of extraordinary sensibility into the bargain. Still people doubted and wondered: why eyes with no means of seeing? Eyes that are sensitive⁠—but sensitive to what?⁠ ⁠… And at last it was discovered that each of these animals which people at first insisted were creatures of darkness, gives forth and projects before and around it its own light. Each of them shines, illuminates, irradiates. When they were brought up from the depths at night and turned out on to the ship’s deck, the darkness blazed. Moving, many-coloured fires, glowing, vibrating, changing⁠—revolving beacon-lamps⁠—sparkling of stars and jewels⁠—a spectacle, say those who saw it, of unparalleled splendour.” + 

Vincent stopped. No one spoke for a long time. + 

“Let’s go home,” said Lilian suddenly; “I’m cold.” + 

Lady Lilian took her seat beside the chauffeur, so as to be sheltered by the glass screen. The two men at the back of the open carriage carried on their own conversation. Robert had hardly spoken during the whole of the dinner; he had listened to Vincent talking; now it was his turn. + 

“Fish like us, my dear boy, perish in calm waters,” said he to begin with, giving his friend a thump on the shoulder. He allowed himself a few familiarities with Vincent, but would not have suffered him to reciprocate them; for that matter, Vincent was not disposed to. “Do you know, I think you’re simply splendid! What a lecturer you’d make! Upon my word, you ought to quit doctoring. I really can’t see you prescribing laxatives and having no company but the sick. A chair of comparative biology, or something of that sort is what you want.” + 

“Yes,” said Vincent, “I have sometimes thought so.” + 

“Lilian ought to be able to manage it. She could get her friend the Prince of Monaco to interest himself in your researches. It’s his line, I believe. I must speak to her about it.” + 

“She has suggested it already.” + 

“Oh, so I see there’s no possibility of doing you a service,” said he, pretending to be vexed. “Just as I wanted to ask you one for myself, too.” + 

“It’s your turn to be in my debt. You think I’ve got a very short memory.” + 

“What? You’re still thinking of that five thousand francs? But you’ve paid it back, my dear fellow. You owe me nothing at all now⁠—except a little friendship, perhaps.” He added these words in a voice that was almost tender, and with one hand on Vincent’s arm. “I want to appeal to it now.” + 

“I am listening,” said Vincent. + 

But at that, Passavant immediately protested, as if the impatience were Vincent’s, and not his own: + 

“Goodness me! What a hurry you’re in! Between this and Paris there’s time enough surely.” + 

Passavant was particularly skilful in the art of fathering his own words⁠—and anything else he preferred to disown⁠—on other people. He made a feint of dropping his subject, like an angler who, for fear of startling his trout, makes a long cast with his bait and then draws it in again by imperceptible degrees. + 

“Apropos, thank you for sending me your brother. I was afraid you had forgotten.” + 

Vincent made a gesture and Robert went on: + 

“Have you seen him since?⁠ ⁠… Not had time, eh?⁠ ⁠… Then it’s odd you shouldn’t have asked me yet how the interview went off. At bottom, you don’t in the least care. You don’t take the faintest interest in your brother. What Olivier thinks and feels, what he is, what he wants to be, never concerns you in the least.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Reproaching me?” asked Vincent. + 

“Upon my soul, yes. I can’t understand⁠—I can’t swallow your indifference. When you were ill at Pau, it might pass; you could only think of yourself; selfishness was part of the cure. But now.⁠ ⁠… What! you have growing up beside you a young nature quivering with life, a budding intelligence, full of promise, only waiting for a word of advice, of encouragement.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He forgot as he spoke that he too had a brother. + 

Vincent, however, was no fool; the very exaggeration of this attack showed him that it was not sincere and that his companion’s indignation was merely brought forward to pave the way for something else. He waited in silence. But Robert stopped short suddenly; he had just surprised in the glimmer of Vincent’s cigarette a curious curl of his lip, which he took for irony; now there was nothing in the world he was more afraid of than being laughed at. And yet, was it really that which made him change his tone? I wonder whether the sudden intuition of a kind of connivance between Vincent and himself.⁠ ⁠… He assumed an air of perfect naturalness and started again in the tone of “there’s no need of any pretence with you”: + 

“Well, I had a most delightful conversation with young Olivier. I like the boy exceedingly.” + 

Passavant tried to catch Vincent’s expression (the night was not very dark); but he was looking fixedly in front of him. + 

“And now, my dear Molinier, the service I wished to ask you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

But, here again, he felt the need of marking time, something like an actor who drops his part for a moment with the assurance that he has his audience well in hand, and wishes to prove that he has, both to himself and to them. He bent forward therefore to Lilian, and speaking in a loud voice as if to accentuate the confidential character of what he had been saying, and of what he was going to say: + 

“Are you sure, dear lady, that you aren’t catching cold? We have a rug here that’s doing nothing.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Then, without waiting for an answer, he sank back into the corner of the carriage beside Vincent, and lowering his voice once more: + 

“This is what it is. I want to take your brother away with me this summer. Yes; I tell you so frankly; what’s the use of beating about the bush between us two?⁠ ⁠… I haven’t the honour of being acquainted with your parents and of course they wouldn’t allow Olivier to come away with me unless you were to intervene on my behalf. No doubt you’ll find a way of disposing them in my favour. You know what they’re like, I suppose, and you’ll be able to get round them. You’ll do this for me, won’t you?” + 

He waited a moment, and then, as Vincent kept silent, went on: + 

“Look here, Vincent.⁠ ⁠… I’m leaving Paris soon.⁠ ⁠… I don’t know for where as yet. I absolutely must have a secretary.⁠ ⁠… You know I’m founding a review. I have spoken about it to Olivier. He seems to me to have all the necessary qualities.⁠ ⁠… But I don’t want to look at it merely from my own selfish point of view: I also think that this will be an opportunity for him to show all his qualities. I have offered him the place of editor.⁠ ⁠… Editor of a review at his age!⁠ ⁠… You must admit that it’s unusual.” + 

“So very unusual, that I’m afraid my parents may be rather alarmed by it,” said Vincent at last, turning his eyes on him and looking at him fixedly. + 

“Yes; you’re no doubt right. Perhaps it would be better not to mention that. You might just put forward the interest and advantage it would be for him to go travelling with me, eh? Your parents must understand that at his age one wants to see the world a bit. At any rate, you’ll arrange it with them, won’t you?” + 

He took a breath, lighted another cigarette, and went on without changing his tone: + 

“And since you’re going to be so nice, I’ll try and do something for you. I think I can put you on to a thing which promises to turn out quite exceptionally.⁠ ⁠… A friend of mine in the highest banking circles is keeping it open for a few privileged persons. But please don’t mention it; not a word to Lilian. In any case I can only dispose of a very limited number of shares; I can’t offer them both to her and you⁠ ⁠… Your last night’s fifty thousand francs?⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I have already disposed of them,” answered Vincent rather shortly, for he remembered Lilian’s warning. + 

“All right, all right.⁠ ⁠…” rejoined Robert quickly, as though he were a little piqued; “I’m not insisting.” Then with the air of saying: “I can’t be offended with you,” he added: “If you change your mind, send me word at once⁠ ⁠… because after five o’clock tomorrow evening, it’ll be too late.” + 

Vincent’s admiration for the Comte de Passavant had become much greater since he had ceased to take him seriously. + 

XVIII + 

Edouard’s Journal: Second Visit to La Pérouse + 

Two o’clock. Lost my suitcase. Serves me right. There was nothing in it I cared about but my journal. But I cared about that too much. In reality, very much amused by the adventure. All the same, I should like to have my papers back again. Who will read them?⁠ ⁠… Perhaps now that I have lost them, I exaggerate their importance. The book I have lost came to an end with my journey to England. When I was over there, I used another one, which I shall give up writing in, now that I am back in France. I shall take good care not to lose this one, in which I am writing now. It is my pocket-mirror. I cannot feel that anything that happens to me has any real existence until I see it reflected here. But since my return I seem to be walking in a dream. What a miserable uphill affair my conversation with Olivier was! And I had been looking forward to it with such joy.⁠ ⁠… I hope it has left him as ill-satisfied as it has me⁠—as ill-satisfied with himself as with me. I was no more able to talk than to get him to talk. Oh, how difficult the slightest word is, when it involves the whole assent of the whole being! When the heart comes into play, it numbs and paralyses the brain. + 

Seven o’clock. Found my suitcase; or at any rate the person who took it. The fact that he is Olivier’s most intimate friend makes a link between us which it rests only with me to tighten. The danger is that anything unexpected amuses me so intensely that I lose sight of my goal. + 

Seen Laura. My desire to oblige people becomes more acute if there is a difficulty to be encountered, if a struggle has to be waged with convention, banality and custom. + 

Visit to old La Pérouse. It was Madame de La Pérouse who opened the door to me. I have not seen her for more than two years; she recognized me, however, at once. (I don’t suppose they have many visitors.) She herself for that matter is very little changed; but (is it because I have a prejudice against her?) I thought her features harder, her expression sourer, her smile falser than ever. + 

“I am afraid Monsieur de La Pérouse is in no state to receive you,” said she at once, with the obvious desire of getting me to herself; then, taking advantage of her deafness in order to answer before I had questioned her: + 

“No, no; you’re not disturbing me in the least. Do come in.” + 

She showed me into the room where La Pérouse gives his music lessons, the two windows of which look on to the courtyard. And as soon as she had got me safely inside: + 

“I am particularly glad to have a word with you alone. Monsieur de La Pérouse⁠—I know what an old and faithful friend of his you are⁠—is in a state which causes me great anxiety. Couldn’t you persuade him to take more care of himself? He listens to you; as for me, I might as well talk to the winds.” + 

And thereupon she entered upon an endless series of recriminations: the old gentleman refuses to take care of himself, simply in order to annoy her; he does everything he oughtn’t to do and nothing that he ought; he goes out in all weathers and will never consent to put on a muffler; he refuses to eat at meals⁠—“Monsieur isn’t hungry”⁠—and nothing she can contrive tempts his appetite; but at night, he gets up and turns the kitchen upside down, cooking himself some mess or other. + 

I have no doubt the old lady didn’t invent anything; I could make out from her tale that it was her interpretation alone which gave an offensive meaning to the most innocent little facts and that reality had cast a monstrous shadow on the walls of her narrow brain. But does not her old husband on his side misinterpret all his wife’s attentions? She thinks herself a martyr, while he takes her for a torturer. As for judging them, understanding them, I give it up; or rather, as always happens, the better I understand them, the more tempered my judgment of them becomes. But this remains⁠—that here are two beings tied to each other for life and causing each other abominable suffering. I have often noticed with married couples how intolerably irritating the slightest protuberance of character in the one may be to the other, because in the course of life in common it continually rubs up against the same place. And if the rub is reciprocal, married life is nothing but a hell. + 

Beneath her smoothly parted black wig, which makes the features of her chalky face look harder still, with her long black mittens, from which protrude little claw-like fingers, Madame de La Pérouse has the appearance of a harpy. + 

“He accuses me of spying on him,” she continued. “He has always needed a great deal of sleep; but at night he makes a show of going to bed, and then when he thinks I am fast asleep, he gets up again; he muddles about among his old papers, and sometimes stays up till morning reading his late brother’s letters and crying over them. And he wants me to bear it all without a word!” + 

Then she went on to complain that he wanted to make her go into a home; which would be all the more painful to her, she added, as he was quite incapable of living alone and doing without her care. This was said in a tearful tone, which was only too obviously hypocritical. + 

Whilst she was continuing her grievances, the drawing-room door opened gently behind her and La Pérouse came in, without her hearing him. At his wife’s last words he smiled at me ironically, and touched his head with his hand to signify she was mad. Then, with an impatience⁠—a brutality even⁠—of which I should not have thought him capable, and which seemed to justify the old woman’s accusations (but it was due too to his having to raise his voice to a shout in order to make himself heard): + 

“Come, Madam,” he cried, “you ought to understand that you are tiring this gentleman with your talk. He didn’t come to see you. Leave the room.” + 

The old lady protested that the armchair she was sitting in was her own and that she was not going to quit it. + 

“In that case,” went on La Pérouse with a grim chuckle, “we will leave you.” Then, turning to me, he repeated in gentler tones, “come, let us leave her.” + 

I made a sketchy and embarrassed bow, and followed him into the next room⁠—the same one in which I had paid him my last visit. + 

“I am glad you heard her,” he said; “that’s what it’s like the whole day long.” + 

He shut the window. + 

“There’s such a noise in the street, one can’t hear oneself speak. I spend my time shutting the windows and Madame de La Pérouse spends hers opening them again. She declares she’s stifling. She always exaggerates. She refuses to realize that it’s hotter out of doors than in. And yet I’ve got a little thermometer; but when I show it to her, she says that figures prove nothing. She wants to be right even when she knows she’s wrong. Her main object in life is to annoy me.” + 

He himself, while he was speaking, seemed to me a little off his balance; he went on with growing excitement: + 

“Everything she does amiss in life she sets down as a grievance against me. All her judgments are warped. I’ll just explain to you how it is: You know our impressions of outside images come to us reversed and that there’s an apparatus in our brains which sets them right again. Well, Madame de La Pérouse has no such apparatus for setting them right. In her brain they remain upside down. You can see for yourself how painful it is.” + 

It was certainly a great relief to him to explain himself and I took care not to interrupt him. He went on: + 

“Madame de La Pérouse has always eaten much too much. Well, now she makes out that it’s I who eat too much. If she sees me presently with a bit of chocolate (it’s my chief nourishment) she’ll be certain to mutter, ‘Munching again!⁠ ⁠…’ She spies on me. She accuses me of getting up in the night to eat on the sly, because she once surprised me making myself a cup of chocolate in the kitchen.⁠ ⁠… What am I to do? When I see her opposite me at table, falling ravenously upon her food, as she does, it takes away my appetite entirely. Then she declares I’m pretending to be fastidious just to torment her.” + 

He paused, and then in a sort of lyrical outburst: + 

“Her reproaches amaze me!⁠ ⁠… For instance, when she is suffering from her sciatica, I condole with her. Then she stops me, shrugs her shoulders and says: ‘Don’t pretend you have a heart.’ Everything I do or say is in order to give her pain.” + 

We had seated ourselves, but all the time he was speaking, he kept getting up and sitting down again, in a state of morbid restlessness. + 

“Would you believe that in each of these rooms there are some pieces of furniture which belong to her and others to me? You saw her just now with her armchair. She says to the charwoman, when she’s doing the room, ‘No, that’s Monsieur’s chair; don’t touch that.’ And the other day, when by mistake I put a bound music-book on a little table which belongs to her, Madam knocked it on to the ground. Its corners were broken.⁠ ⁠… Oh, it can’t last much longer.⁠ ⁠… But, listen.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He seized me by the arm, and lowering his voice: + 

“I have taken steps. She is continually threatening me if I ‘go on!’ to take refuge in a home. I have set aside a certain sum of money which ought to be enough to pay for her at Sainte-Périne’s; I hear it’s an excellent place. The few lessons I still give, bring me in hardly anything. In a little time I shall be at the end of my resources; I should be forced to break into this sum⁠—and I’m determined not to. So I have made a resolution.⁠ ⁠… It will be in a little over three months. Yes; I have fixed the date. If you only knew what a relief it is to think that every hour it draws nearer.” + 

He had bent towards me; he bent closer still: + 

“And I have put aside a Government bond. Oh, it’s not much. But I couldn’t do more. Madame de La Pérouse doesn’t know about it. It’s in my bureau in an envelope directed to you, with the necessary instructions. I know nothing about business, but a solicitor whom I consulted, told me that the interest could be paid directly to my grandson, until he is of age, and that then he would have the security. I thought it wouldn’t be too great a tax on your friendship to ask you to see that this is done. I have so little confidence in solicitors!⁠ ⁠… And even, if you wished to make me quite easy, you would take charge of the envelope at once.⁠ ⁠… You will, won’t you?⁠ ⁠… I’ll go and fetch it.” + 

He trotted out in his usual fashion and came back with a large envelope in his hand. + 

“You’ll excuse me for having sealed it; for form’s sake,” said he. “Take it.” + 

I glanced at it and saw under my name the words “To be opened after my death” written in printed letters. + 

“Put it in your pocket quick, so that I may know it’s safe. Thank you.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I was so longing for you to come!⁠ ⁠…” + 

I have often experienced that, in moments as solemn as this, all human emotion is transformed into an almost mystic ecstasy, into a kind of enthusiasm, in which my whole being is magnified, or rather liberated from all selfishness, as though dispossessed of itself and depersonalized. Those who have never experienced this will certainly not understand me. But I felt that La Pérouse understood. Any protestation on my part would have been superfluous, would have seemed unbecoming, I thought, and I contented myself with pressing the hand which he gave me. His eyes were shining with a strange brightness. In his free hand, in which he had at first been holding the envelope, was another piece of paper. + 

“I have written his address down here. For I know now where he is. At Saas-Fée. Do you know it? It’s in Switzerland. I looked for it on the map, but I couldn’t find it.” + 

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a little village near the Matterhorn.” + 

“Is it very far?” + 

“Not so far but that I might perhaps go there.” + 

“Really? Would you really?⁠ ⁠… Oh, how good you are!” said he. “As for me, I’m too old. And besides, I can’t because of his mother.⁠ ⁠… All the same, I think.⁠ ⁠…” He hesitated for a word, then went on: “that I should depart more easily, if only I had been able to see him.” + 

“My poor friend.⁠ ⁠… Everything that is humanly possible to do to bring him to you, I will do. You shall see little Boris, I promise you.” + 

“Thank you!⁠ ⁠… Thank you!” + 

He pressed me convulsively in his arms. + 

“But promise me that you won’t think of⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh, that’s another matter,” said he, interrupting me abruptly. Then immediately and as if he were trying to prevent me from going on by distracting my attention: + 

“What do you think, the other day, the mother of one of my pupils insisted on taking me to the theatre! About a month ago. It was a matinée at the Théâtre Français. I hadn’t been inside a theatre for more than twenty years. They were giving Hernani by Victor Hugo. You know it? It seems that it was very well acted. Everybody was in raptures. As for me, I suffered indescribably. If politeness hadn’t kept me there, I shouldn’t have been able to stay it out.⁠ ⁠… We were in a box. My friends did their best to calm me. I wanted to apostrophize the audience. Oh! how can people? How can people?⁠ ⁠…” + 

Not understanding at first what it was he objected to, I asked: + 

“You thought the actors very bad?” + 

“Of course. But how can people represent such abominations on the stage?⁠ ⁠… And the audience applauded. And there were children in the theatre⁠—children, brought there by their parents, who knew the play.⁠ ⁠… Monstrous! And that, in a theatre subsidized by the State!” + 

The worthy man’s indignation amused me. By now I was almost laughing. I protested that there could be no dramatic art without a portrayal of the passions. In his turn, he declared that the portrayal of the passions must necessarily be an undesirable example. The discussion continued in this way for some time; and as I was comparing this portrayal of the passions to the effect of letting loose the brass instruments in an orchestra: + 

“For instance, the entry of the trombones in such and such a symphony of Beethoven’s which you admire.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But I don’t, I don’t admire the entry of the trombones,” cried he, with extraordinary violence. “Why do you want to make me admire what disturbs me?” + 

His whole body was trembling. The indignant⁠—the almost hostile tone of his voice surprised me and seemed to astonish even himself, for he went on more calmly: + 

“Have you observed that the whole effect of modern music is to make bearable, and even agreeable, certain harmonies which we used to consider discords?” + 

“Exactly,” I rejoined. “Everything must finally resolve into⁠—be reduced to harmony.” + 

“Harmony!” he repeated, shrugging his shoulders. “All that I can see in it is familiarization with evil⁠—with sin. Sensibility is blunted; purity is tarnished; reactions are less vivid; one tolerates; one accepts.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“To listen to you, one would never dare wean a child.” + 

But he went on without hearing me: “If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one’s youth, one’s greatest indignation would be for what one has become.” + 

It was impossible to start on a teleological argument; I tried to bring him back to his own ground: + 

“But you don’t pretend to restrict music to the mere expression of serenity, do you? In that case, a single chord would suffice⁠—a perfect and continuous chord.” + 

He took both my hands in his, and in a burst of ecstasy, his eyes rapt in adoration, he repeated several times over: + 

“A perfect and continuous chord; yes, yes; a perfect and continuous chord.⁠ ⁠… But our whole universe is a prey to discord,” he added sadly. + 

I took my leave. He accompanied me to the door and as he embraced me, murmured again: + 

“Oh! How long shall we have to wait for the resolution of the chord?” + 