He himself rang the doorbell; after a short while, the door opened; Buivres held out his hand to Honoré, who bade him a mechanical farewell, went in, suddenly felt possessed by an insane need to go out again, but found the door had closed heavily behind him; and apart from his candle waiting for him, burning impatiently at the foot of the stairs, there was no other light. He did not dare awaken the concierge to open the door for him, and he went up to his room.
2
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
– Beaumont and Fletcher*
Life had changed considerably for Honoré ever since the day when M. de Buivres had, among so many others, made certain remarks to him – remarks similar to those which Honoré himself had listened to or uttered so many times with complete indifference – but which he could on longer get out of his head, either during the daytime when he was alone, or through the long night. He had immediately asked Françoise a few questions: she loved him too much and suffered too much at his pain to dream of taking offence; she had sworn to him that she had never deceived him and never would deceive him.
When he was with her, when he was holding her little hands and saying to them, quoting Verlaine’s line:
“Oh lovely little hands that will close my eyes,”*
when he heard her saying to him, “My brother, my country, my beloved,” and her voice aroused prolonged echoes in his heart with all the sweetness of the church bells in one’s place of birth, he believed her; and even though he did not feel quite as happy as he had before, at least it did not seem to him impossible that his convalescent heart might one day rediscover happiness.
But when he was far away from Françoise, and even sometimes when he was near her and noticed her eyes gleaming with a fire that he immediately imagined had been kindled elsewhere – who knows, yesterday, perhaps, and again the day after – kindled by another man; when, having yielded to the purely physical desire for another woman and recalling how many times he had so yielded and managed to lie about it to Françoise without ceasing to love her, he no longer found it absurd to suppose that she too was lying to him, that it was not even necessary for her not to love him if she were to lie to him, and that before knowing him she had thrown herself on other men with the same ardour that now consumed him – an ardour that appeared to him more terrible than the ardour that he inspired in her appeared sweet, since he saw it with the eyes of imagination that magnifies everything.
Then he tried to tell her that he had deceived her; he conducted this experiment not out of vengeance or any need to make her suffer in the same way that he did, but so that she would reciprocate by telling him the truth as well, and above all so that he would no longer sense the lie within him, and to expiate the misdeeds of his sensuality, since in order to create an object for his jealousy it seemed to him at times that it was his own lie and his own sensuality that he was projecting onto Françoise.
It was one evening, as he was taking a walk along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, that he tried to tell her that he had deceived her. He was alarmed to see her grow pale and sit down suddenly on a bench, overcome; and all the more alarmed when she pushed away, without anger and even with gentleness, in her sincere and heart-stricken despondency, the hand he was stretching out towards her.
For two days he thought he had lost her or rather that he had found her again. But this involuntary, spectacular and melancholy proof of love that she had just given him was not enough for Honoré. Even if he had gained the impossible certainty that she had only ever belonged to him, the unprecedented suffering that his heart had first experienced on the night when M. de Buivres had taken him back to his house – not a similar suffering, or the memory of that suffering, but that very same suffering – would never have ceased to afflict him, even if it could have been demonstrated to him that it was without foundation. Thus it is that we still tremble on awakening at the memory of the murderer whom we have already recognized to be the illusion caused by a dream; thus it is that amputees suffer throughout their lives in the leg that they have lost.
In vain he had spent the day walking, worn himself out on horseback, on his bicycle, fencing; in vain he had met Françoise, taken her back to her home and, in the evening, gathered from her hands, her forehead and her eyes the trust and peace, as sweet as honey, with which he returned home, calmed and enriched with their sweet-smelling store; hardly was he back home than he started to worry, slipped quickly into bed so as to get off to sleep before anything happened to his happiness that, carefully embalmed in that fresh and recent tenderness only one hour old would travel through the night until the next day, intact and glorious like a prince of Egypt; but it seemed that Buivres’s words, or one of the innumerable images he had since formed in his thoughts, were on the point of appearing to his mind’s eye, and then there would be no prospect of sleep.
That image had still not appeared, but he sensed it lying in wait and, stiffening his resolve against it, he would relight his candle, read and endeavour to cram his brain mercilessly full of the meaning of the sentences he was reading, not leaving a single gap, so as to prevent that dread image from having a single moment or the tiniest little place to slip in.
But all at once, there it was: it had managed to get in, and now he could not get it out again; the door of his attention that he had been holding shut with all his might, exhausting himself in the effort, had been forced open; then it had shut again, and he was going to have to spend the night with this horrible companion. So there was no doubt about it, it was definite: this night like all the others he would not get a minute’s sleep; so off he went to get the bottle of Bromidia, swallowed three spoonfuls and, certain now that he would be able to sleep, and even alarmed at the thought that he would not be able to do anything but sleep, whatever happened, he started to think about Françoise again, with panic, with despair, with hatred. He wanted to take advantage of the fact that his affair with her was not common knowledge to make bets on her virtue with other men, to throw them at her, to see if she would yield, to try to discover something, to find out everything, to hide in a bedroom (he remembered doing so for fun when he was younger) and see it all.
He would not hesitate at the thought of the other men, since he would have asked them to do it seemingly as a joke – otherwise, think of the scandal and the uproar! – but in particular because of her, to see if the next day when he asked her, “You’ve never deceived me?” she would reply, “Never,” with that same loving expression.
Perhaps she would confess everything, and indeed would have yielded only as a result of his stratagems. And then it would have been the salutary operation after which his love would be cured of the malady that was killing him, just as the malady caused by a parasite kills the tree (he only needed to look at himself in the mirror, lit feebly as it was by his night-time candle, to be sure). But no – the image would always come back, and he did not even try to work out how much stronger it would be than the images formed by his imagination, and with what incalculable power it would strike down on his poor head.
Then, suddenly, he thought of her, her gentleness, her tenderness, her purity, and he felt like weeping at the outrage that for a second he had dreamt of inflicting on her. Just think: the very idea of suggesting it to his party friends!
Soon he sensed the general tremor and feeling of faintness that occurs a few minutes before Bromidia sends you to sleep. Suddenly, aware of nothing, not even a dream or a sensation, occurring between his last thought and his present reflections, he said to himself, “What, haven’t I been asleep yet?” But on seeing that it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours the sleep of Bromidia had possessed him without him actually enjoying it.
He waited for the restless movements in his head to calm down a little, then got up and tried in vain, with the help of cold water and walking up and down, to bring back some of the usual colour to his pale figure and his drawn and weary eyes, so that Françoise would not find him too ugly.
