The Immoralist/Part 2, 2

It was in S… Street, near Passy, that we took up our residence. The apartment, which had been found for us by one of Marceline's brothers, and which we had visited when we had last passed through Paris, was much bigger than the one my father had left me, and Marceline was a little uneasy, not only at the increased rent, but at all the other expenses we should certainly be led into. I countered all her fears by pretending I had a horror of anything temporary; I forced myself to believe in this feeling and deliberately exaggerated it. Certainly, the cost of furnishing and arranging the apartment would exceed our income for the present year, but our fortune, which was already large, was sure to increase still further; I counted on my lectures for this, on the publication of my book and, such was my folly, on the profits from my new farms. In consequence, I stopped short at no expense, telling myself at each ​new one that here was another tie and thinking also that by these means I should suppress every vagabond inclination I felt—or feared I might feel—within me.

For the first few days, our time was taken up from morning to night by shopping and other business of the sort; and though eventually, Marceline's brother very obligingly offered to do as much as he could for us, it was not long before Marceline felt thoroughly tired out. Then, as soon as we were settled in, instead of resting as she should have done, she felt obliged to receive visitors; they flocked to see us now because we had been absent from Paris during the first days of our marriage, and Marceline, who had become unused to society, was incapable of getting rid of them quickly or of shutting her doors altogether. When I came home in the evening, I found her exhausted, and, though her fatigue, which seemed only natural, caused me no anxiety, I did my best to lessen it; often receiving visits in her stead, which was very little to my taste, and sometimes paying them—which was still less so.

I have never been a brilliant talker; the frivolity, the wit, the spirit of fashionable drawing-rooms, were things in which I could take no pleasure; yet ​in old days I had frequented some of these salons—but how long ago that seemed! What had happened since then? In other people's company, I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring.… By a singular piece of ill-luck, you, whom I considered my only real friends, were absent from Paris and not expected back for long. Should I have been able to speak to you more openly? Would you have perhaps understood me better than I did myself? But what did I know at that time of all that was growing up within me, of all I am now telling you about? The future seemed to me absolutely assured and I had never thought myself more master of it.

And even if I had been more perspicacious, what help against myself should I have found in Hubert, Didier or Maurice, or in all the others whom you know and judge as I do? I very soon discovered, alas, the impossibility of their understanding me. In our very first conversations, I found myself forced to impersonate a false character, to resemble the man they imagined I still was; and for convenience' sake, I pretended to have the thoughts and tastes with which they credited me. One cannot both be sincere and seem so.

​I was rather more willing to renew my acquaintance with the people of my own profession—archaeologist and philologists—but I found very little more pleasure and no more emotion in talking to them than in consulting a good dictionary. I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live—contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing I could not blame them for it; and I do not affirm that the mistake was not mine.… As to that, what did I mean by 'living'? That is exactly what I wanted to find out. One and another talked cleverly of the different events of life—never of what is at the back of them.

As for the few philosophers whose business it should have been to instruct me, I had long known what to expect of them; whether mathematicians or neo-kantians, they kept as far away as possible from the disturbing reality and had no more concern for it than the algebraist has for the existence of the quantities he measures.

​When I got back to Marceline, I did not conceal from her how tedious I found all these acquaintances.

"They are all alike," I said to her. "When I talk to one, I feel as if I were talking to the whole lot."

"But, my dear," said Marceline, "you can't expect each of them to be different from all the others."

"The greater their likeness to each other, the more unlike they are to me."

And then I went on with a sigh, "Not one of them has managed to be ill. They are alive—they seem to be alive, and yet not to know they are alive. For that matter, since I have been in their company, I have ceased to be alive myself. Today, amongst other days, what have I done? I had to leave you about nine o'clock. I had just a bare moment for a little reading before I went out; it was the only satisfactory moment of the day. Your brother was waiting for me at the solicitor's, and after the solicitor's, he insisted on sticking to me; I had to see the upholsterer with him; he was really a nuisance at the cabinet-maker's and I only got rid of him at Gaston's; I had lunch in the neighbourhood with Philip and then I met Louis at a café and went with him to Theodore's absurd lecture, and paid him compliments when it was over; then, in order to get out of ​his invitation for Sunday, I had to go with him to Arthur's; then to a water-colour exhibition with Arthur; then left cards on Albertine and Julie.… I came in thoroughly exhausted and found you as tired as myself, after visits from Adeline, Marthe, Jeanne and Sophie.… And now, in the evening, as I look back on my day, it seems to me so vain and so empty, that I long to have it back and live it over again hour by hour—and the thought of it makes me inclined to weep."

And yet I should not have been able to say what I meant by 'living,' nor whether the very simple secret of my trouble was not that I had acquired a taste for a more spacious, breezier life, one that was less hemmed in, less regardful of others; the secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who has known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave. And at first I merely felt rather painfully out of my element; but soon I became aware of a very different feeling. I had known no pride, I repeat, when the publication of my Essay had brought me such praise. Was it pride now? Perhaps; but at any rate there was no trace of vanity mixed with it. It was rather, for the ​first time, the consciousness of my own worth. What separated me—distinguished me—from other people was crucial; what no-one said, what no-one could say but myself, that it was my task to say.

My lectures began soon after; the subject was congenial and I poured into the first of them all my newly born passion. Speaking of the later Latin civilization, I depicted artistic culture as welling up in a whole people, like a secretion, which is at first a sign of plethora, of a superabundance of health, but which afterwards stiffens, hardens, forbids the perfect contact of the mind with nature, hides under the persistent appearance of life a diminution of life, turns into an outside sheath, in which the cramped mind languishes and pines, in which at last it dies. Finally, pushing my thought to its logical conclusion, I showed Culture, born of life, as the destroyer of life.

The historians blamed a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.

It was at the end of my lecture that I came across Ménalque again for the first time. I had never seen ​much of him, and shortly before my marriage, he had started on one of those distant voyages of discovery which sometimes kept him from us for over a year. In the old days, I had never much liked him; he seemed proud and he took no interest in my existence. I was therefore astonished to see him at my first lecture. His very insolence, which had at first held me aloof from him, pleased me, and I thought the smile he gave me all the more charming because I knew he smiled rarely. Recently, an absurd—a shameful—lawsuit had caused a scandal and given the newspapers a convenient occasion to drag him through the mud; those whom he had offended by his disdain and superiority seized this pretext to revenge themselves; and what irritated them most was that he appeared not to care.

"One must allow other people to be right," he used to say when he was insulted, "it consoles them for not being anything else."

But 'good society' was indignant and people who, as they say, 'respect themselves,' thought it their duty to turn their backs on him, and so pay him back his contempt. This was an extra encouragement to me; feeling myself attracted by a secret influence, I went up to him and embraced him before everyone.

​When they saw to whom I was talking, the last intruders withdrew; I was left alone with Ménalque.

After the irritating criticisms and inept compliments I had been listening to, his few words on the subject of my lecture were very soothing.

"You are burning what you used to adore," said he. "Very good. It is a little late in the day, but never mind, the fire is all the fiercer. I am not sure whether I altogether understand you. You make me curious. I don't much care about talking, but I should like to talk to you. Come and dine with me tonight."

"Dear Ménalque," I answered, "you seem to forget that I am married."

"Yes," he answered, "quite true. The frank cordiality with which you were not afraid to greet me made me think you might be free."

I was afraid I might have wounded him; still more so of seeming weak, and I told him I would join him after dinner.

Ménalque never did more than pass through Paris on his way to somewhere else; he always stayed in a hotel. On this occasion he had had several rooms fitted up for him as a private apartment; he had his own servants, took his meals apart, lived apart; ​stuffs and hangings of great value which he had brought back from Nepal had been hung on the walls and thrown over the furniture, whose commonplace ugliness was an offence to him. He was dirtying them out, he said, before presenting them to a museum. My haste to rejoin him had been so great, that I found him still at table when I came in; as I excused myself for disturbing his meal:

"But I have no intention of letting you disturb it," he said, "and I expect you to let me finish it. If you had come to dinner, I should have given you some Chiraz—the wine that Hafiz celebrated—but it is too late now; one must only drink it fasting; but you'll take some liqueur, won't you?"

I accepted, thinking he would take some too, and when only one glass was brought in, I expressed astonishment.

"Forgive me," he said, "but I hardly ever drink such things."

"Are you afraid of getting drunk?"

"Oh!" replied he, "on the contrary! But I consider sobriety a more powerful intoxication—in which I keep my lucidity."

"And you pour the drink out for others?"

He smiled.

​"I cannot," said he, "expect everyone to have my virtues. It's good enough to meet with my vices.…"

"You smoke, at any rate?"

"No, not even that. Smoking is an impersonal, negative, too easily achieved kind of drunkenness; what I want from drunkenness is an enhancement not a dimunition of life. But that's enough. Do you know where I have just come from? Biskra. I heard you had been staying there, and I thought I would like to follow up your tracks. What could the blind-folded scholar, the learned bookworm have come to do at Biskra? It's my habit to be discreet only about things that are confided to me; for things that I find out myself. I'll admit that I have an unbounded curiosity. So I searched, poked about, questioned wherever I could. My indiscretion was rewarded, since it has made me wish to meet you again; since instead of the learned man of habit you seemed to be in the old days, I know now that you are … it's for you to tell me what."

I felt myself blushing.

"What did you find out about me, Ménalque?"

"Do you want to know? But there's no need to be alarmed! You know your friends and mine well enough to be sure there is no-one I can talk to about ​you. You saw how well your lecture was understood?"

"But," said I, a little impatiently, "there's nothing yet to prove that I can talk to you better than to them. Come on then! What is it you found out about me?"

"First of all, that you had been ill."

"But there's nothing in that to …"

"Oh, yes! That in itself is very important. Then I was told you liked going out alone, without a book (that's what started me wondering), or, when you were not alone, you preferred the company of children to that of your wife … Don't blush like that, or I shan't go on."

"Go on without looking at me."

"One of the children—his name was Moktir, if I remember right—(I have scarcely ever seen a handsomer boy, and never a greater little swindler) seemed to have a good deal to say about you. I enticed him—I bribed him to confide in me … not an easy thing to do, as you know, for I think it was only another lie, when he said he was not lying that time.… Tel! me whether what he told me about you is true."

In the meantime, Ménalque had got up and taken a little box out of a drawer.

​"Are these scissors yours?" he said, opening the box and taking out a shapeless, twisted, rusty object, which, however, I had little difficulty in recognizing as the pair of scissors Moktir had purloined.

"Yes, they are; they were my wife's scissors."

"He pretends he took them when your head was turned away one day he was alone in the room with you; but that's not the point; he pretends that at the moment he was hiding them in his burnous, he saw you were watching him in the glass and caught the reflection of your eyes looking at him. You saw the theft and said nothing! Moktir was very much astonished at this silence—and so was I."

"And I am too at what you have just said. What! Do you mean to say he knew I had caught him at it?"

"It isn't that that matters; you were trying to be more cunning than he; it's a game at which children like that will always get the better of us. You thought you had him, and in reality, it was he who had you.… But that's not what matters. I should like an explanation of your silence."

"I should like one myself."

Some time passed without a word from either of us. Ménalque, who was pacing up and down the ​room, lighted a cigarette absent-mindedly and then immediately threw it away.

"The fact is," said he, "there's a 'sense,' as people say, 'a sense' which seems to be lacking in you, my dear Michel."

"The 'moral sense,'" said I, forcing myself to smile.

"Oh, no! simply the sense of property."

"You don't seem to have much of it yourself."

"I have so little of it that, as you see, nothing in this place is mine; not even—or rather, especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of rest; possessions encourage one to indulge in it, and there's nothing like security for making one fall asleep; I like life well enough to want to live it awake, and so, in the very midst of my riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify my life. I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want it to demand at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health.…"

"Then what do you blame me for?" I interrupted.

"Oh, how little you understand me, my dear Michel; for once that I am foolish enough to try and make a profession of faith!… If I care little for ​the approbation or disapprobation of men, Michel, it is not in order to approve or disapprove in my turn; those words have very little sense for me. I spoke of myself too much just now.… I was carried away by thinking you understood me.… I simply meant to say that, for a person who has not got the sense of property, you seem to possess a great deal. Isn't that rather serious?"

"And what is this great deal I possess?"

"Nothing, if you take it in that way.… But are you not beginning a course of lectures? Have you not an estate in Normandy? Have you not just settled yourself—and luxuriously too—in an apartment at Passy? You are married? Are you not expecting a child?"

"Well!" said I, impatiently, "it merely proves that I have succeeded in making my life more dangerous than yours."

"Yes, merely"; repeated Ménalque ironically; then, turning abruptly, he put out his hand:

"Well, good-bye now; I don't think any more talk tonight would be of much use. But I shall see you again soon."

Some time went by before I saw him again.

​Fresh work, fresh preoccupations took up my time; an Italian scholar brought to my notice some new documents he had discovered which were important for my lectures and which I had to study at some length. The feeling that my first lesson had been misunderstood stimulated me to shed a different and more powerful light on the succeeding ones; I was thus led to enounce as a doctrine what I had at first only tentatively suggested as an ingenious hypothesis. How many assertions owe their strength to the lucky circumstance that as suggestions they were not understood? In my own case, I admit I cannot distinguish what proportion of obstinacy may have mingled with my natural propensity for asserting my opinions. The new things I had to say seemed to me especially urgent because of the difficulty of saying them, and above all of getting them understood.

But, alas, how pale words become when compared with deeds! Was not Ménalque's life, Ménalque's slightest action a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? How well I understood now that the great philosophers of antiquity, whose teaching was almost wholly moral, worked by example as much—even more than by precept!

​The next time I saw Ménalque was in my own house, nearly three weeks after our first meeting. We had been giving a crowded evening party, and he came in almost at the end of it. In order to avoid being continually disturbed, Marceline and I had settled to be at home on Thursdays; in this way it was easier to keep our doors shut for the rest of the week. Every Thursday evening then, those people who called themselves our friends used to come and see us; our rooms were large enough to hold a good many guests and they used to stay late. I think that what attracted them most was Marceline's exquisite charm and the pleasure of talking to each other, for as to myself, from the very beginning of these parties, there was nothing I could find either to say or to listen to, and it was with difficulty I concealed my boredom.

That evening, I was wandering aimlessly from the drawing-room to the smoking-room, from the antechamber to the library, caught by a sentence here and there, observing very little but looking about me more or less vaguely.

Antoine, Etienne and Godefroi were discussing the last vote in the Chamber, as they lolled on my wife's ​elegant armchairs. Hubert and Louis were carelessly turning over some fine etchings from my father's collection, entirely regardless of how they were creasing them. In the smoking-room, Mathias, the better to listen to Leonard, had put his red-hot cigar down on a rosewood table. A glass of curaçoa had been spilt on the carpet. Albert was sprawling impudently on a sofa, with his muddy boots dirtying the cover. And the very dust of the air one breathed came from the horrible wear and tear of material objects.… A frantic desire seized me to send all my guests packing. Furniture, stuffs, prints, lost all their value for me at the first stain; things stained were things touched by disease, with the mark of death on them. I wanted to save them, to lock them up in a cupboard for my own use alone. How lucky Ménalque is, thought I, to have no possessions! The reason I suffer is that I want to preserve things. But after all, what does it really matter to me?…

There was a small, less brilliantly lighted drawing-room, partitioned off by a transparent glass door, and there Marceline was receiving some of her more intimate friends; she was half reclining on a pile of cushions and looked so fearfully pale and tired that I suddenly took fright and vowed that this reception ​should be the last. It was already late. I was beginning to take out my watch, when I suddenly felt Moktir's little scissors in my pocket.

"Why did the little wretch steal them," thought I, "if it was only to spoil and destroy them at once?"

At that moment someone touched me on the shoulder; I turned quickly; it was Ménalque.

He was almost the only person in evening dress. He had just arrived. He asked me to present him to my wife; I should certainly not have done so of my own accord. Ménalque was distinguished looking—almost handsome; his face was like a pirate's, barred by an enormous drooping moustache, already quite grey; his eyes shone with a cold flame that denoted courage and decision rather than kindness. He was no sooner standing before Marceline than I knew she had taken a dislike to him. After he had exchanged a few banal words of courtesy with her, I carried him off to the smoking-room.

I had heard that very morning of the new mission on which the Colonial Office was sending him; the newspapers, as they recalled his adventurous career, seemed to have forgotten their recent base insults and now could find no words fine enough to praise him with. Each was more eager than the other to extol ​and exaggerate his services to his country, to the whole of humanity, as if he never undertook anything but with a humanitarian purpose; and they quoted examples of his abnegation, his devotion, his courage, as if such encomiums might be considered a reward.

I began to congratulate him, but he interrupted me at the first words.

"What! You too, my dear Michel! But you didn't begin by insulting me," said he. "Leave all that nonsense to the papers. They seem to be surprised that a man with a certain reputation can still have any virtues at all. They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it."

"That may lead far," I said.

"Indeed I hope so," answered Ménalque. "If only the people we know could persuade themselves of the truth of this! But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern ​and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to—they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone—that is what they suffer from—and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia—the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything—but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value—and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life."

I let Ménalque speak on; he was saying exactly what I myself had said the month before to Marceline; I ought to have approved him. For what reason, through what moral cowardice did I interrupt him and say, in imitation of Marceline, the very sentence word for word with which she had interrupted me then?

"But, my dear Ménalque, you can't expect each one of them to be different from all the others." …

​Ménalque stopped speaking abruptly, looked at me oddly and then, as at that very moment Eusèbe came up to take leave, he unceremoniously turned his back on me and went off to talk about some trifle or other to Hector.

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I realized not only that they were stupid, but worse still, that they might have given Ménalque the impression that I thought his remarks had been pointed at me. It was late; my guests were leaving. When the drawing-room was nearly empty, Ménalque came back to me.

"I can't leave you like this," he said. "No doubt, I misunderstood what you said. Let me at least hope so."

"No," I answered, "you did not misunderstand it … but it was senseless, and I had no sooner said it than I knew it was foolish. I was sorry, and especially sorry to think it would make you place me among the very people you were attacking and who, I assure you, are as odious to me as to you. I hate people of principle."

"Yes," answered Ménalque, laughing, "there is nothing more detestable in the world. It is impossible to expect any sort of sincerity from them; for they ​never do anything but what their principles have decreed they should do; or if they do, they think they have done wrong. At the mere suspicion you might be one of them, the words froze on my lips. I felt by my distress what a great affection I have for you; I hoped I was mistaken—not in my affection, but in the conclusion I had drawn."

"Yes, really; your conclusion was wrong."

"Oh! it was, I am sure," said he, suddenly taking my hand. "Listen a moment; I shall soon be going away, but I should like to see you again. My expedition this time will be a longer one and more risky than any of the others; I don't know when I shall come back. I must start in a fortnight's time; no-one knows I am leaving so soon; I tell you so in confidence. I start at day-break. The night before leaving is always a night of terrible heart-ache for me. Give me a proof that you are not a man of principle; may I count on it that you will spend that last night with me?"

"But we shall see each other again before then," I said, a little astonished.

"No; during the next fortnight I shall be at home to no-one. I shall not even be in Paris. Tomorrow I leave for Buda-Pesth; in six days' time I must be in ​Rome. I have friends dotted here and there to whom I must say good-bye before leaving. There is one expecting me in Madrid."

"Very well then, I will pass your night of vigil with you."

"And we will have some Chiraz to drink," said Ménalque.

A few days after this party, Marceline began to feel less well. I have already said she was easily tired; but she did not complain, and as I attributed her fatigue to her condition, I thought it natural and felt no particular anxiety. A rather foolish—or rather ignorant—old doctor had at first been over reassuring. Some fresh symptoms, however, accompanied by fever, decided me to send for Dr. Tr… who was considered at that time the cleverest specialist in Paris for such cases. He expressed astonishment that I had not called him in sooner and prescribed a strict régime which she ought to have begun to follow some time ago. Marceline had been very courageous, but not very prudent, and had overtired herself. She was told she must now lie up till the date of her confinement, which was expected about the end of January. ​Feeling no doubt a little anxious and more unwell than she would admit, Marceline consented very meekly to the most tiresome orders. She had a moment's rebellion, however, when Tr… prescribed quinine in such heavy doses that she knew it might endanger the child. For three days she obstinately refused to take it; then as her fever increased she was obliged to submit to that too; but this time it was with deep sadness and as if she were mournfully giving up all hope of the future; the resolution which had hitherto sustained her seemed broken down by a kind of religious resignation, and her condition grew suddenly worse in the days that followed.

I tended her with greater care than ever, did my best to reassure her and repeated the very words Dr. Tr… had used, that he could see nothing very serious in her case; but her extreme anxiety ended by alarming me too. Alas! our happiness was already resting on the dangerous foundations of hope—and hope of what an uncertain future! I, who at first had taken pleasure only in the past, may have one day felt, thought I, the sudden and intoxicating sweetness of a fugitive moment, but the future disenchants the present even more than the present then disenchanted ​the past; and since our night at Sorrento my whole love, my whole life have been projected into the future.

In the meantime the evening I had promised Ménalque came round; and notwithstanding the reluctance I felt at abandoning Marceline for a whole winter's night, I got her, as best I could, to acknowledge the solemnity of the occasion and the gravity of my promise. Marceline was a little better that evening and yet I was anxious; a nurse took my place beside her. But as soon as I was in the street, my anxiety gained ground; I shook it off, struggled against it, was angry with myself for not being better able to get rid of it; thus I gradually reached a state of excessive tension, of singular excitement, both very unlike and very like the painful uneasiness from which it sprang, but liker still to happiness. It was late and I strode along rapidly; the snow began to fall in thick flakes; I was glad to be breathing a keener air, to be struggling with the cold; I was happy with the wind, the night, the snow against me; I rejoiced in my strength.

Ménalque had heard me coming and came out on to the landing to welcome me. He was waiting for ​me not without impatience. His face was pale and he looked overwrought. He helped me off with my overcoat and forced me to change my wet boots for some soft Persian slippers. Sweets and cakes were standing on a small table by the fire. There were two lamps, but the light in the room came chiefly from the fire on the hearth. Ménalque immediately enquired after Marceline; for the sake of simplicity I answered that she was very well.

"Are you expecting your child soon?" he went on.

"In a month."

Ménalque bent down towards the fire as if he wished to hide his face. He remained silent. He remained silent so long that at last I felt embarrassed, and as I myself could think of nothing to say either, I got up, took a few steps, and then went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder. Presently, as though he were pursuing his thoughts aloud:

"One must choose," he murmured. "The chief thing is to know what one wants.…"

"Don't you want to go?" I asked, in some uncertainty as to what he meant.

"It looks like it."

"Are you hesitating then?"

"What is the use? You have a wife and child, so ​stay at home.… Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know but one. It is madness to envy other people's happiness; one would not know what to do with it. Happiness won't come to one readymade; it has to be made to measure. I am going away tomorrow; yes, I know; I have tried to cut out my happiness to fit me … keep your calm happiness of hearth and home…

"I cut out my happiness to fit me too," I said, "but I have grown; I am not at ease in my happiness now; sometimes I think it is strangling me.…"

"Pooh! you'll get accustomed to it!" said Ménalque. Then he planted himself in front of me and looked deep into my eyes; as I found nothing to say, he smiled rather sadly.

"One imagines one possesses and in reality one is possessed," he went on. "Pour yourself out a glass of Chiraz, dear Michel; you won't often taste it; and eat some of those rose-coloured sweets which the Persians take with it. I shall drink with you this evening, forget that I am leaving tomorrow, and talk as if the night were long.… Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead letter now-a-days? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand ​in hand with life; so that the artist's life itself was already a poetic realization, the philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unacquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy—and the result was admirably persuasive. Now-a-days beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart."

"But you live your wisdom," said I; "why do you not write your memoirs? Or simply," I added, seeing him smile, "recollections of your travels?"

"Because I do not want to recollect," he replied. "I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been."

These words were too far in advance of my thoughts not to end by irritating me; I should have liked to hang back, to stop him; but I tried in vain to contradict, and besides I was more irritated with ​myself than with Ménalque. I remained silent therefore, while he, sometimes pacing up and down like a wild beast in a cage, sometimes stooping over the fire, kept up a long and moody silence, or again broke abruptly into words:

"If only our paltry minds," he said, "were able to embalm our memories! But memories keep badly. The most delicate fade and shrivel; the most voluptuous decay; the most delicious are the most dangerous in the end. The things one repents of were at first delicious."

Again a long silence; and then he went on:

"Regrets, remorse, repentance, are past joys seen from behind. I don't like looking backwards and I leave my past behind me as the bird leaves his shade to fly away. Oh, Michel! every joy is always awaiting us, but it must always be the only one; it insists on finding the bed empty and demands from us a widower's welcome. Oh, Michel! every joy is like the manna of the desert which corrupts from one day to the next; it is like the fountain of Ameles, whose waters, says Plato, could never be kept in any vase.… Let every moment carry away with it all that it brought."

Ménalque went on speaking for long; I cannot ​repeat all his words; but many of them were imprinted on my mind the more deeply, the more anxious I was to forget them; not that they taught me much that was new—but they suddenly laid bare my thoughts—thoughts I had shrouded in so many coverings that I had almost hoped to smother them.

And so the night of watching passed.

The next morning, after I had seen Ménalque into the train that carried him away, as I was walking home on my way back to Marceline, I felt horribly sad and full of hatred of his cynical joy; I wanted to believe it was a sham; I tried to deny it. I was angry with myself for not having found anything to say to him in reply; for having said words that might make him doubt my happiness, my love. And I clung to my doubtful happiness—my "calm happiness," as Ménalque had called it; I could not, it was true, banish uneasiness from it, but I assured myself that uneasiness was the very food of love. I imagined the future and saw my child smiling at me; for his sake I would strengthen my character, I would build it up anew.… Yes, I walked with a confident step.

Alas! when I got in that morning, I was struck by a sight of unaccustomed disorder. The nurse met me and told me guardedly that my wife had been seized ​in the night with bad sickness and pains, though she did not think the term of her confinement was at hand; feeling very ill, she had sent for the doctor; he had arrived post-haste in the night and had not yet left the patient; then, seeing me change colour, I suppose, she tried to reassure me, said that things were going much better now, that … I rushed to Marceline's room.

The room was darkened and at first I could make out nothing but the doctor, who signed to me to be quiet; then I saw a figure in the dark I did not know. Anxiously, noiselessly, I drew near the bed. Marceline's eyes were shut; she was so terribly pale that at first I thought she was dead; but she turned her head towards me, though without opening her eyes. The unknown figure was in a dark corner of the room, arranging, hiding, various objects; I saw shining instruments, cotton wool; I saw, I thought I saw a cloth stained with blood.… I felt I was tottering. I almost fell into the doctor's arms; he held me up. I understood; I was afraid of understanding.…

"The child?" I asked anxiously.

He shrugged his shoulders sadly. I lost all sense of what I was doing and flung myself sobbing against ​the bed. Oh! how suddenly the future had come upon me! The ground had given way abruptly beneath my feet; there was nothing there but an empty hole into which I stumbled headlong.

My recollections here are lost in dark confusion. Marceline, however, seemed at first to recover fairly quickly. The Christmas holidays allowed me a little respite and I was able to spend nearly the whole day with her. I read or wrote in her room, or read aloud to her quietly. I never went out without bringing her back flowers. I remembered the tenderness with which she had nursed me when I was ill, and surrounded her with so much love that sometimes she smiled as though it made her happy. Not a word was exchanged about the melancholy accident that had shattered our hopes.…

Then phlebitis declared itself; and when that got better, a clot of blood suddenly set her hovering between life and death. It was night time; I remember leaning over her, feeling my heart stop and go on again with hers. How many nights I watched by her bedside, my eyes obstinately fixed on her, hoping by the strength of my love to instil some of my own ​life into hers. I no longer thought much about happiness; my single melancholy pleasure was sometimes seeing Marceline smile.

My lectures had begun again. How did I find strength to prepare them, to deliver them?… My memory of this time is blurred; I have forgotten how the weeks passed. And yet there was a little incident I must tell you about.

It was one morning, a little after the embolism; I was sitting with Marceline; she seemed a little better, but she was still ordered to keep absolutely motionless; she was not allowed to move even her arms. I bent over her to give her some drink and after she had drunk, and as I was still stooping over her, she begged me, in a voice made weaker still by her emotion, to open a little box, which she showed me by the direction of her glance; it was close by, on the table; I opened it and found it full of ribbons, bits of lace, little ornaments of no value.… I wondered what she wanted. I brought the box to her bedside and took out every object one by one. Was it this? That?… No, not yet; and I felt her getting agitated "Oh, Marceline, is it this little rosary you want?"

She tried to smile.

​"Are you afraid then that I shan't nurse you properly?"

"Oh. my dear," she murmured. And I remembered our conversation at Biskra, and her timid reproaches when she heard me refuse what she called "the help of God." I went on a little roughly:

"I got well alone all right."

"I prayed for you so much," she answered.

She said the words tenderly, sadly. There was something anxious and imploring in her look.… I took the rosary and slipped it into her weak hand as it lay on the sheet beside her. A tearful, love-laden glance rewarded me—but I could not answer it; I wailed another moment or two, feeling awkward and embarrassed; finally not knowing what to do, "Goodbye," I said, and left the room, with a feeling of hostility, and as though I had been turned out of it.

Meanwhile the horrible clot had brought on serious trouble; after her heart had escaped, it attacked her lungs, brought on congestion, impeded her breathing, made it short and laborious. I thought she would never get well. Disease had taken hold of Marceline, never again to leave her; it had marked her, stained her. Henceforth she was a thing that had been spoilt.