“Why, I’ve never heard anyone say what you’ve just said,” Honoré rejoined.
“You’re young,” replied de Buivres. “Come to think of it, there was someone there tonight who had quite a fling with her—there’s no denying it, I think. It’s that little François de Gouvres. He says she’s quite hot-blooded! But it seems her body isn’t all that great, and he didn’t want to continue. I bet she’s living it up somewhere at this very moment. Have you noticed that she always leaves a social function early?”
“Well, but now that she’s a widow, she lives in the same house as her brother, and she wouldn’t risk having the concierge reveal that Madame comes home in the middle of the night.”
“Come on, old chum! There’s a lot you can do between ten P.M. and one A.M.! Oh well, who knows?! Anyhow it’s almost one o’clock, I’d better let you turn in.”
De Buivres rang the bell himself; a second later, the door opened; de Buivres shook hands with Honoré, who said goodbye mechanically, entered, and simultaneously felt a wild need to go back out; but the door had closed heavily behind him, and there was no light aside from the candle waiting for him and burning impatiently at the foot of the staircase. He did not dare awaken the concierge in order to reopen the door for him, and so he went up to his apartment.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
—BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
Life had greatly changed for Honoré since the night when Monsieur de Buivres had made certain comments (among so many others) similar to those that Honoré himself had so often heard or stated with indifference, and which now rang in his ears during the day, when he was alone, and all through the night. He had instantly questioned Françoise, who loved him too deeply and suffered too deeply from his distress to so much as dream of taking offense; she swore that she had never deceived him and that she would never deceive him.
When he was near her, when he held her little hands, to which he softly recited:
You lovely little hands that will close my eyes,
when he heard her say, “My brother, my country, my beloved,” her voice lingering endlessly in his heart with the sweetness of childhood bells, he believed her. And if he did not feel as happy as before, at least it did not seem impossible that his convalescent heart should someday find happiness.
But when he was far away from Françoise, and also at times when, being near her, he saw her eyes glowing with fires that he instantly imagined as having been kindled at other times (who knows?—perhaps yesterday as they would be tomorrow), kindled by someone else; when, after yielding to a purely physical desire for another woman and recalling how often he had yielded and had managed to lie to Françoise without ceasing to love her, he no longer found it absurd to assume that she was lying to him, that, in order to lie to him it was not even necessary to no longer love him—to assume that before knowing him she had thrown herself upon others with the ardor that was burning him now—and it struck him as more terrible that the ardor he inspired in her did not appear sweet, because he saw her with the imagination, which magnifies all things.
Then he tried to tell her that he had deceived her; he tried not out of vengeance or a need to make her suffer like him, but so that she would tell him the truth in return, a need above all to stop feeling the lie dwelling inside him, to expiate the misdeeds of his sensuality, since, for creating an object for his jealousy, it struck him at times that it was his own lies and his own sensuality that he was projecting onto Françoise.
It was on an evening, while strolling on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, that he tried to tell her he had deceived her. He was appalled to see her turn pale, collapse feebly on a bench, and, worse still, when he reached toward her, she pushed his hand away, not angrily but gently, in sincere and desperate dejection. For two days he believed he had lost her, or rather that he had found her again.
But this sad, glaring, and involuntary proof of her love for him did not suffice for Honoré. Even had he achieved the impossible certainty that she had never belonged to anyone but him, the unfamiliar agony his heart had experienced the evening Monsieur de Buivres had walked him to his door—not a kindred agony or the memory of that agony, but that agony itself—would not have faded, even if someone had demonstrated to him that his agony was groundless. Similarly, upon awakening, we still tremble at the memory of the killer whom we have already recognized as the illusion of a dream; and similarly, an amputee feels pain all his life in the leg he no longer has.
He would walk all day, wear himself out on horseback, on a bicycle, in fencing—all in vain; he would meet Françoise and escort her home—all in vain: in the evening he would gather peace, confidence, a honey sweetness from her hands, her forehead, her eyes, and then, calmed, and rich with the fragrant provision, he would go back to his apartment—all in vain: no sooner had he arrived than he started to worry; he quickly turned in so as to fall asleep before anything could spoil his happiness.
Lying gingerly in the full balm of this fresh and recent tenderness, which was barely one hour old, his happiness was supposed to last all night, until the next morning, intact and glorious like an Egyptian prince; but then de Buivres’s words, or one of the innumerable images Honoré had formed since hearing those words, crept into his mind, and so much for his sleep.
This image had not yet appeared, but he felt it was there, about to surface; and, steeling himself against it, he would relight the candle, read, and struggle interminably to stuff the meanings of the sentences into his brain, leaving no empty spaces, so that the ghastly image would not find an instant, would not find even the tiniest nook to slip into.
But all at once, the image had stolen in, and now he could not make it leave; the gates of his attention, which he had been holding shut with all his strength, to the point of exhaustion, had been opened by surprise; the gates had then closed again, and he would be spending the entire night with that horrible companion.
So it was sure, it was done with: this night like all the others, he would not catch a wink of sleep. Fine, so he went to the bromide bottle, took three spoonfuls, and, certain he would now sleep, terrified at the mere notion of doing anything but sleeping, come what may, he began thinking about Françoise again, with dread, with despair, with hate. Profiting from the secrecy of their affair, he wanted to make bets on her virtue with other men, sic them upon her; he wanted to see if she would yield; he wanted to try to discover something, know everything, hide in a bedroom (he remembered doing that for fun when he was younger) and watch everything. He would not bat an eyelash since he would have asked facetiously (otherwise, what a scandal! What anger!); but above all on her account, to see if, when he asked her the next day, “You’ve never cheated on me?” she would reply, “Never,” with that same loving air.
She might perhaps confess everything and actually would have succumbed only because of his tricks. And so that would have been the salutary operation to cure his love of the illness that was killing him, the way a parasitical disease kills a tree (to be certain he only had to peer into the mirror, which was dimly lit by his nocturnal candle). But no, for the image would keep recurring, so much more powerful than the images of his imagination and with what forceful and incalculable blows to his poor head—he did not even dare picture it.
Then, all at once, he would think about her, about her sweetness, her tenderness, her purity, and he wanted to weep about the outrage that he had, for a moment, considered inflicting on her. The very idea of suggesting that to his boon companions!
Soon he would feel the overall shudder, the feebleness one experiences several minutes before sleep induced by bromide. Suddenly perceiving nothing, no dream, no sensation, between his last thought and this one, he would say to himself: “What? I haven’t slept yet?” But then seeing it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours he had been possessed by bromidic sleep without savoring it.
He would wait for the stabbing pains in his head to weaken a bit; then he would rise and, so that Françoise would not find him too ugly, he would try in vain to liven up his worn-out eyes, restore some color to his haggard face by dousing it with cold water and taking a walk. Leaving home, he went to church, and there, sagging and exhausted, with all the final, desperate strength of his failing body, which wanted to be revitalized, rejuvenated, his sick and aging heart, which wanted to be
