Then he repeated to himself: “The life of a crushed man!”; and he recalled that in the instant when the horse had knocked him down, he had said to himself: “I’m going to be crushed!”; he recalled his stroll, recalled that he was supposed to have lunch with Françoise that morning; and then, through that circuitous path, he thought about his love again.
And he said to himself: “Was it my love that was weighing on me? What could it be if it wasn’t my love? My character, perhaps? Myself? Or was it life?” Then he thought: “No. When I die, I won’t be delivered from my love, I’ll be delivered from my carnal desires, my carnal longings, my jealousy.” Then he said: “Oh, Lord, make that hour come to me, make it come fast, oh, Lord, so that I may know perfect love.”
Sunday evening, peritonitis had declared itself; Monday morning around ten o’clock, he ran a fever; he wanted to see Françoise, called out to her, his eyes blazing: “I want your eyes to shine too, I want to give you more pleasure than I’ve ever given you . . . I want to give it to you . . . I want to hurt you.”
Then suddenly he turned livid: “I see why you don’t want to, I know very well what you had someone do to you this morning, and where, and who it was, and I know he wanted to bring me there, put me behind the door so I could see the two of you, and I wouldn’t be able to swoop down on you since my legs are gone, I wouldn’t be able to prevent you, for the two of you would have more pleasure if you could have seen me there the whole time; he really knows everything that gives you pleasure, but I’ll kill him first, and before that I’ll kill you, and before that I’ll kill myself. Look! I’ve killed myself!” And he fell back on the pillow, exhausted.
He calmed down bit by bit, still trying to determine whom she could marry after his death, but there were always the images he wanted to ward off, the face of François de Gouvres, of de Buivres, the faces that tortured him, that kept resurfacing.
At noon he received the last sacraments. The doctor had said he would not make it past the afternoon. His strength ebbed extremely swiftly; he could no longer absorb food and could barely hear. His mind remained lucid, and, saying nothing lest he hurt Françoise, who he could see was overcome with grief, he mused about what she would be once he was no more, once he knew about her no more, once she could no longer love him.
The names he had spoken mechanically that very morning, the names of men who might possess her, resumed parading through his head while his eyes followed a fly that kept approaching his finger as if to touch it, then flying away and coming back without, however, touching it; and yet, reviving his attention, which had momentarily lapsed, the name François de Gouvres kept returning, and Honoré told himself that de Gouvres might actually possess her, and at the same time Honoré thought: “Maybe the fly is going to touch the sheet? No, not yet”; then, brusquely rousing himself from his reverie: “What? Neither of those two things strikes me as more important than the other! Will de Gouvres possess Françoise, will the fly touch the sheet?
Oh! Possessing Françoise is a bit more important.” But his exactness in seeing the gap between those two events showed him that neither one particularly touched him more than the other.
And he said to himself: “Oh, it’s all the same to me! How sad it is!” Then he realized that he was saying “How sad it is!” purely out of habit and that, having changed completely, he was not the least bit sad about having changed. The shadow of a smile unclenched his lips. “This,” he told himself, “is my pure love for Françoise. I’m no longer jealous; it’s because I’m at death’s door. But so what? It was necessary so that I might at last feel true love for Françoise.”
But then, raising his eyes, he perceived Françoise amid the servants, the doctor, and two old relatives, all of whom were praying there, close to him. And it dawned on him that love, pure of all selfishness, of all sensuality, love that he wanted to have in him, so sweet, so vast, and so divine, now encompassed the old relatives, the servants, even the doctor as tenderly as Françoise, and that, already feeling for her the love for all creatures, with which his soul, kindred with their souls, was uniting him, he now felt no other love for her. And this thought could not even cause him pain, so thoroughly was all exclusive love for her, the very idea of a preference for her, now abolished.
Weeping at the foot of the bed, she murmured the most beautiful words of the past: “My country, my brother.” But Honoré, having neither the will nor the strength to undeceive her, smiled and mused that his “country” was no longer in her, but in heaven and all over the earth. He repeated in his heart, “My brothers,” and though looking at her more than at the others, he did so purely out of pity for the stream of tears she was shedding before his eyes, his eyes, which would soon close and had already stopped weeping. But now he did not love her any more and any differently than he loved the doctor, his old relatives, or the servants. And that was the end of his jealousy.
Early Stories
Norman Things
Trouville, the capital of the canton, with a population of 6,808, can lodge 15,000 guests in the summer.
—GUIDE JOANNE
For Paul Grünebaum
For several days now we have been able to contemplate the calm of the sea in the sky, which has become pure again—contemplate it as one contemplates a soul in a gaze. No one, however, is left to enjoy the follies and serenities of the September sea, for it is fashionable to desert the beaches at the end of August and head for the country. But I envy and, if acquainted with them, I often visit people whose countryside lies by the sea, is located, for example, above Trouville. I envy the person who can spend the autumn in Normandy, however little he knows how to think and feel.
The terrain, never very cold even in winter, is the greenest there is, grassy by nature, without the slightest gap, and even on the other sides of the hillocks, in the amiable arrangements called “woodlands.” Often, when on a terrace, where the blond tea is steaming on the set table, you can, as Baudelaire puts it, watch “the sunshine radiating on the sea” and sails that come, “all those movements of people departing, people who still have the strength to desire and to wish.”
In the so sweet and peaceful midst of all that greenery, you can look at the peace of the seas, or the tempestuous sea, and the waves crowned with foam and gulls, charging like lions, their white manes rippling in the wind.
However, the moon, invisible to all the waves by day, though still troubling them with its magnetic gaze, tames them, suddenly crushes their assault, and excites them again before repelling them, no doubt to charm the melancholy leisures of the gathering of stars, the mysterious princes of the maritime skies.
A person who lives in Normandy sees all that; and if he goes down to the shore in the daytime, he can hear the sea sobbing to the beat of the surges of the human soul, the sea, which corresponds to music in the created world, because, showing us no material thing and not being descriptive in its way, the sea sounds like the monotonous chant of an ambitious and faltering will. In the evening, the Normandy dweller goes back to the countryside, and in his gardens he cannot distinguish between sky and sea, which blend together. Yet they appear to be separated by that brilliant line; above it that must be the sky.
That must be the sky, that airy sash of pale azure, and the sea drenches only the golden fringes. But now a vessel puts a graft upon it while seeming to navigate in the midst of the sky. In the evening, the moon, if shining, whitens the very dense vapors rising from the grasslands, and, gracefully bewitched, the field looks like a lake or a snow-covered meadow.
Thus, this rustic area, which is the richest in France, which, with its inexhaustible abundance of farms, cows, cream, apple trees for cider, thick grass, invites you solely to eat and sleep—at night this countryside decks itself out with mystery, and its melancholy rivals that of the vast plain of the sea.
Finally, there are several utterly desirable abodes, a few assailed by the sea and protected against it, others perched on the cliff, in the middle of the woods, or amply stretched out on grassy plateaus.
I am not talking about the “Oriental” or
