Soon my uncles would have finished their game of cards and would be coming back. We would do it before they returned, I would never again yield, this was the last time… Then, above the fireplace, I saw myself in the mirror. None of the diffuse anguish of my soul was painted on my face, but from my shining eyes to my burning cheeks and my proffered lips, everything in that face breathed a sensual, stupid and brutal joy. Then I thought of the horror anyone would feel who had seen me just now kissing my mother with melancholy tenderness, and could now see me thus transformed into a beast. But immediately there arose in the mirror, against my face, Jacques’s mouth, avid beneath his moustache. Shaken to my depths, I moved my head towards his, when opposite me I saw – yes, I am telling it to you just as it happened, listen to me since I can tell you – on the balcony, outside the window, I saw my mother gazing at me, horror-struck. I don’t know if she cried out, I heard nothing, but she fell backwards and remained with her head caught between the two bars of the railing…
This isn’t the last time I’ll be telling you my story: as I said, I almost missed myself; even though I’d taken careful aim, I did not shoot straight. But they were not able to extract the bullet and my heart has started to behave erratically. But I can linger on for a week in this state, and until then I’ll be constantly trying to understand how it all started, and seeing how it finished. I would have preferred my mother to see me commit yet other crimes – or even that particular one, but without her catching sight of the expression of joy that my face had in the mirror. No, she can’t possibly have seen it… It was a coincidence… She was struck down by apoplexy a minute before she saw me… She didn’t see that expression… It’s not possible! God, who knew everything, would never have allowed it.
A Dinner in Town
But, Fundanius, who shared with you the pleasures of that meal? I am longing to know.
– Horace*
1
Honoré was late; he said hello to the hosts, to the guests he knew, was introduced to the others, and went to sit down at table. After a few moments, his neighbour, a very young man, asked him to name the guests and tell him something about them. Honoré had never met him in society until now. He was very handsome. The hostess kept gazing at him with burning eyes that indicated quite well enough why she had invited him, and showed that he would soon be part of her circle. Honoré sensed within him the potential for future greatness, but, without any envy, out of polite benevolence, he decided it was his duty to reply.
He looked around. Opposite, two neighbours were not talking to each other; they had been invited together, out of clumsy good intentions, and placed next to each other because they were both active in literature. But on top of this initial reason for hating each other, they had a more specific one. The older, a kinsman – doubly hypnotized – of M. Paul Desjardins and M. de Vogüé, affected a scornful silence towards the younger man, the favourite disciple of M. Maurice Barrès,* who considered him in turn with a certain irony. Furthermore, the ill will each of them felt exaggerated – greatly against their respective desires – the importance of the other, as if the chief of rogues had been forced to confront the king of imbeciles.
Further along, a superb Spanish woman was eating in a furious temper. She had unhesitatingly – being a serious kind of person – sacrificed a lovers’ tryst this evening to the probability that she might advance her social career by coming to dinner in an elegant household. And indeed, there was every likelihood that she had made the right choice. The snobbery of Mme Fremer was for her lady friends, and the snobbery of her lady friends was for Mme Fremer, like a mutual insurance against becoming commonplace and bourgeois.
But chance had so willed it that Mme Fremer was going through, on just this very evening, a stock of people she hadn’t had time to invite to her dinners before – people to whom, for different reasons, she really wanted to be polite, and whom she had assembled almost at random. The whole gathering was suitably crowned by a duchess, but one whom the Spanish woman already knew and who was of no further interest to her.
And so she kept exchanging angry glances with her husband, whose guttural voice could always be heard at these evening receptions saying successively (leaving between each request an interval of five minutes suitably filled with other little tasks), “Would you please introduce me to the Duke?” And, to the Duke, “Monsieur, would you please introduce me to the Duchess?” And, to the Duchess, “Madame, may I introduce my wife to you?”
Exasperated at having to waste his time, he had nonetheless resigned himself to striking up a conversation with his neighbour, the associate of the master of the house. For over a year, Fremer had been begging his wife to invite this man. She had finally yielded and had hidden him away between the Spanish woman’s husband and a humanist. The humanist, an omnivorous reader, was also an omnivorous eater.
Quotations and burps kept welling from his lips, and these two disagreeable characteristics were equally repugnant to the woman next to him, a noble commoner, Mme Lenoir. She had soon brought the conversation round to the victories of the Prince de Buivres in Dahomey* and said in a voice tremulous with emotion, “Dear boy, how delighted I am to see him honouring his family!” She was indeed a cousin of the Buivres, who, all being younger than she was, treated her with the deference due to her age, her attachment to the royal family, her huge fortune and the unfailing sterility of her three marriages.
She had transferred to the entire Buivres clan all the family feelings of which she was capable. She took personal umbrage when any of them so misbehaved that he had to be put under legal guardianship; and, around her right-thinking brow, on the parting in her Orleanist hair, she naturally wore the laurels of the family member who happened to be a general. Initially an intruder into that hitherto so exclusive family, she had become its head and, as it were, its dowager.
She felt really exiled in modern society, and always spoke with nostalgic affection of the “gentlemen of bygone days”. Her snobbery was all in her imagination: indeed, her imagination contained nothing else. Names rich in history and glory exerted a singular influence on her sensitive mind, and she took great delight, quite devoid of self-interest, in dining with princes or reading memoirs from the Ancien Régime. She always wore the same grape-bedecked hats, which were as invariable as her principles. Her eyes sparkled with inanity. Her smiling face was noble, her affected gestures exaggerated and meaningless. Thanks to her trust in God, she was in a similarly optimistic flutter on the eve of a garden party or a revolution, and made darting little gestures that seemed designed to ward off radicalism or bad weather.
Her neighbour the humanist was talking to her with wearisome eloquence and a dreadfully facile gift for the right formula; he kept quoting Horace to excuse his gluttony and drunkenness in the eyes of others, and to add a poetic sheen to those failings in his own. Invisible, ancient and yet freshly plucked roses wreathed his narrow brow. But with an equal politeness, which came to her easily since she found in it a way of exerting her influence and showing her respect – nowadays rare – for old traditions, Mme Lenoir turned every five minutes or so to talk to M. Fremer’s associate.
The latter had, in any case, no cause for complaint. From the other end of the table, Mme Fremer was addressing to him the most charming flatteries. She wanted this dinner to count for several years’ worth and, resolved not to have to invite this wet blanket for a long time to come, she was burying him under garlands of praise. As for M. Fremer, who worked all day at his bank and then in the evening found himself being dragged out into society by his wife, or forced to stay at home if they were giving a reception, he was always ready to eat anyone alive, but always muzzled,
