It is with my body, with my body’s desire, that I will be delivered from that.—Yes, but until then what will become of me? Feebler, more incapable of resisting than ever, hampered on my two broken legs, when, wanting to hurry over to her and make sure she is not where I will have pictured her, I will remain here, unable to budge, ridiculed by all those who can ‘have a fling with her’ as long as they like, before my very eyes, the eyes of a cripple whom they no longer fear.”
The night of Sunday to Monday he dreamed he was suffocating, feeling an enormous weight on his chest. He begged for mercy, did not have the strength to displace all that weight; the feeling that all this weight had been upon him for a very long time was inexplicable; he could not endure it another second, it was smothering him. Suddenly he felt miraculously relieved of that entire burden, which was drawing further and further away after releasing him forever. And he said to himself: “I’m dead!”
And above him he saw everything that had been weighing down on him and suffocating him for such a long time, saw it all rising; at first he believed it was de Gouvres’s face, then only his suspicions, then his desires, then those past days when he had started waiting in the morning, crying out for the moment when he would see Françoise, then his thoughts of Françoise.
At each moment that rising burden kept assuming a different shape, like a cloud; it kept growing, growing nonstop, and now he could no longer explain how this thing, which he knew was as vast as the world, could have rested on him, on his small, feeble human body, on his poor, small, listless human heart, rested on him without crushing him. And he also realized that he had been crushed and that he had led the life of a crushed man. And this immense thing that had weighed on his chest with all the force of the world—he now realized it was his love.
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.
The end
