After a series of detours, much retracing of tracks, and innumerable stops Al pulled up at the Place de la Bastille.
“Now get lost,” he told Séverine.
She didn’t understand.
“Get out,” he said threateningly. “And watch you don’t get picked up.”
Séverine obeyed passively. As the car was about to take off she asked, “And Marcel?”
He glared at her, but it was so obvious she spoke in good faith that he merely growled, “Read it in the papers tonight. And tell yourself he did it for you.”
“I have to go home,” Séverine said loudly.
Two passers-by turned to look at the young woman talking to herself. Séverine dragged herself out of her stupor. Her conscious life seemed to have stopped the moment Marcel got ready to strike. The aimless ride in the jolting car seemed to have numbed her. She had imagined she was driving for eternity in that questionable vehicle, beside the silent Al cramped over his wheel. Now she had to continue an advance in an unknown direction. In unleasing Marcel, she pictured herself throwing up a wall, digging a precipice, putting some impassible barrier between herself and her future. She was convinced that no living creature could have broken the fatal chain of events. Groping painfully forward through the murky agony of her chaotic soul, she tried to link what she’d lived through with what lay ahead.
She was sure Marcel had killed; the fact caused her no emotion. Her task was to decipher the meaning of those abstract symbols: the actions of men and of herself. Marcel had killed Husson. Husson had been going to tell Pierre what Pierre must never know: that had been the cause of all her terrors. Now Husson wouldn’t talk. Thus she had no more to fear. She could see Pierre again. She had to, in fact. It was lunch time.
Once back home Séverine hadn’t the energy left to be surprised that Pierre wasn’t in. She stretched out in bed and fell asleep immediately. The doorbell, ringing harshly through the still apartment at about two o’clock, didn’t wake her. She didn’t hear her maid knock and come in.
“Madame, madame,” the maid exclaimed more and more loudly, till Séverine’s eyes opened, “there’s a doctor outside and he’s got very serious news about Monsieur.”
Brief as it had been, Séverine’s sleep had brought back all her anguish; her first thought was that Husson had had time to talk before dying, and that Pierre had no desire to return home.
“I don’t want to see anyone,” she said.
“Please, madame, you must.” The maid’s tone was so insistent Séverine suddenly got up and went into the living-room.
The intern from Pierre’s hospital was very pale.
“Madame,” he began, “there’s been an unfortunate accident.”
He stopped, searching for words, hoping for some interruption. It didn’t come. Séverine’s rigidity frightened him.
“Please don’t be alarmed, it’s nothing critical,” he went on hurriedly. “What happened … well, Sérizy was stabbed in the temple.”
“Who?”
She threw herself at the intern so violently that he barely dared repeat, “Sérizy.”
“My husband? Pierre? You must be mistaken.”
“I’ve been working under him for a year, madame,” the intern said sadly, “and I have the same affection for him we all have there … yes, he was stabbed; the man who did it has already been arrested. They brought your husband straight into emergency. Of course, he still hasn’t recovered consciousness but his heart … there’s a good chance he’ll get through. Professor Henri, our director, has been told about it. He’ll be there now. I’ll go with you, madame.”
Even when they were in front of the hospital Séverine couldn’t concede that here, in the same building in which he’d looked after so many suffering bodies, Pierre himself was now no more than a body in the care of men in white coats. She recognized the porch under which she’d waited for him after her first visit to the rue Virène. The memory merely seemed to confirm her sense of unreality: only bad dreams could close a circle as totally as that.
Then she saw Professor Henri, and her protective confusion vanished. They had dined with him several times, and she recalled the pleasure Pierre had taken in repeating the word “director” to him, in mingled affection and deference. The word returned to her now, Pierre’s intonation intact; it all but made her faint, for if the professor was really there, if he was walking toward her … Séverine’s thoughts were cut short. The surgeon was holding her hands.
He was a small, wiry man who had retained his youthful appearance. Because of this, he had great confidence and a scorn for the amenities.
“My dear lady, please don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll answer for Pierre’s life. As far as anything else goes I’ll know tomorrow.”
“Can I see him?”
“Of course. He’s still in a coma. As I say, I’ll know better tomorrow.”
The intern took Séverine to Pierre’s room. She entered firmly but, despite what her mind had accepted in the past few minutes, she couldn’t get herself past the middle of the room. It wasn’t his bandaged forehead or the waxy appearance of the face. It was his total immobility and motionless features, more than asleep yet less than dead. This flaccid impotence made Séverine shudder, not only with pity and fear, but with a sort of ghastly reluctance—and also (though she didn’t admit it to herself) revulsion. Was this lifeless, flabby, lump, mouth hanging wide and eyelids fallen rather than lowered, the firm alert face of her husband? An uncouth relaxation lay upon his flesh which, only that morning, had glowed with bountiful youth.
Séverine couldn’t tell what threatened Pierre, but his features frightened her own animal instinct for good health; they told her that the punishment against which she’d armed a brutal lover was taking a far crueler form than anything she had ever dreamt of.
“I don’t know anything any more,” she whispered. “I must go.”
At the door a man was waiting for her.
“Very sorry to have to question you at such a painful moment, Madame Sérizy, but I’ve been put in charge of the inquiry, you see. Your husband’s still unable to talk. We wondered if you could help us.”
Séverine leaned against the wall. Something she hadn’t thought of before dizzied her. She was Marcel’s accomplice, they’d come to arrest her.
“Oh look,” said the intern, “what do you want her to say, after all? Monsieur Husson has told you that he was the one attacked, and that Doctor Sérizy was stabbed by accident.”
He took the plain-clothesman to one side and added softly: “I know it’s your duty, but give the poor woman a chance. At least for a little while. They were so very much in love with each other, you can see she can hardly stand up.”
Séverine watched the policeman leave. It was hard for her to realize she was free. She asked shyly:
“You mentioned Husson, you’ve seen him then?”
“But I told you, madame.…”
Dimly she recollected that during the ride to the hospital the intern had given her a recital of facts, which hadn’t penetrated her consciousness. She made him repeat them. Only then, and with terrifying clarity, did she understand the consequences of that leap she’d seen building up in Marcel’s muscles. She bit her lips so as not to cry out—“I made him do it, me, me.”
And as if this understanding of her responsibility had suddenly sharpened Pierre’s danger she murmured:
“He’s going to die.”
“I assure you he isn’t,” returned the intern. “Please calm down. You heard what the director said. Sérizy will recover, he’s going to be all right.”
“Why doesn’t he move then?”
“That’s quite usual after a shock of that nature. But he’ll live, I swear it.”
She felt the assurance couldn’t be false, or Pierre’s friend would have shown more anxiety himself. But she didn’t want to question him any further. What did a long and painful period of looking after Pierre matter, beside the single fact—he wasn’t going to die.
Séverine spent the rest of the day beside her husband. He remained motionless. At times she would bend over him, seized with terror, listening to his heart. It beat softly on. Then, reassured, she tried not to ask herself what such a strange surrender of all his muscles meant.
When evening fell Professor Henri changed the dressing and examined the wound. Despite herself Séverine gazed at that somber gash. From it had flowed the most precious blood in all the world, and what more precious still she didn’t know. She knew the weapon that had made that hole. When he undressed Marcel always put his revolver under the pillow and then his horn-handled knife. Séverine had held it in her hand, had toyed with the switch that released the blade.
Her teeth chattered.
“It’d be much better if you’d try to get some sleep at home,” the professor told her. “Sérizy’ll be well looked after, I’ll answer for that. And you’ll need all your strength tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the important day … I don’t mean as regards his life but … well, we’ll see. Why don’t you go and get some rest.”
She obeyed with a kind of concealed satisfaction. But she didn’t return to the apartment. A secret irresistible desire had formed within her. She only recognized it when she was actually giving the cab-driver Husson’s address. Some law of psychological gravity led her to the source of all, the man with whom she thought the affair would end, and the only being who knew her whole story.
Directly she was in Husson’s presence she saw he’d been expecting her.
“Yes, I knew it,” he said absently.
He took her into a quiet luxurious living-room. Though it was the middle of summer, logs blazed in the hearth. Husson sat in front of the fire, his long hands dangling.
“There’s no news, is there?” he inquired in the same queerly abstracted tone. “I was just calling the hospital. It’s the price of my life lying there, you know.”
Séverine remained silent, but a strange well-being went through her. Husson’s company was the only one she could tolerate at the moment, his words alone she could listen to.
He stared alternately at the fire and then at his hands, which he held in front of the flames. It was as if he’d have liked to melt them there. He went on:
“You know, I was sure he wasn’t going to die, as soon as he fell. No, there was something worse in the air.”
Wearily, he raised his eyes to Séverine’s.
“You really thought I’d tell him?”
A flutter of her eye-lids was his only answer.
“How you loved him,” Husson went on after a pause. “Someone like me can’t really understand that, I suppose … so I made my mistake. I didn’t foresee what an emotion like that might lead to.…”
Séverine sat listening attentively. He couldn’t understand the best side of me, she was thinking. And Pierre couldn’t understand the worst … if only he’d guessed, maybe he’d have held me back or watched me more closely. But if he’d guessed, he wouldn’t have been Pierre.
“And the other man, with that knife of his,” Husson said suddenly, “what passion too.”
He shuddered, hugging the fire more closely. His head shook with a sorrow exceeding the circumstances.
He murmured: “I’m the only one who wasn’t motivated by something noble. Yet you three were wounded to death and I got off free. Why? In the name of what, for God’s sake? So that I could begin my little experiments over again?”
He laughed weakly. Then he continued thoughtfully:
“See how well we get on tonight. In this whole wide world there isn’t anyone this evening—even the most ardent lover—who needs you more than I do. And vice versa.”
“Tell me,” Séverine asked him, “when you first caught sight of Marcel, you knew he was sent by me?”
“By us,” Husson corrected her gently.
Then he gave himself up to vague thoughts. The sound of easy breathing drew his attention. Séverine had fallen asleep on the sofa.
A sleep, Husson reminded himself, wrung from how many torments of insomnia. And tomorrow.…
He thought of Professor Henri’s fears, of the official inquiry that would be held. How could this poor broken child defend what remained of her sanity? He’d help her, of course, but could he save her?
He went to her. She was sleeping so freshly, so innocently. Was this the woman he’d seen stretched out on a red coverlet in the house to which, one sunny morning, he himself had sent her? But could he say that he was now the same man who’d answered Belle de Jour’s wretched pleading with a perversely evasive gesture? It was, in fact, that gesture which had pierced Pierre’s forehead. Séverine’s chaste face was full of its own mystery, that quality he’d observed so often, with such keen hopeless avidity. Tenderly he touched her hair; then he went and got the softest blanket he could find and put it gently over this exhausted younger sister.
Séverine selpt soundly till nine in the morning. She woke feeling a purely physical sense of recuperation. But almost instantly she regretted the sleep she’d had. It set her up for her anguish again, for her only agony now: how Pierre was. Everything that had led her to visit Husson seemed hopelessly miserable today. Coming had been a weakness on her part, she’d been neurotic. She was ashamed, now, of their conversation, which had seemed to make such sense the night before.
Husson came in. He too felt embarrassed. He’d slept well also; his shadows had fled, life had taken another step forward. And his view of things had thereby been changed. His words and gestures of the previous evening, prompted by a vision of the great fatal laws, were now no more than embarrassing symptoms of hypersensitivity.
“I have news,” he said. “His life’s no longer in danger, he’s even come to, but.…”
Séverine didn’t wait to listen to anything else. Pierre had recovered consciousness and she hadn’t been there to welcome his first moments of light. How badly he must be needing her.
Throughout the ride she imagined what Pierre’s smile would be like when he saw her, how he would move towards her, feebly, to be sure, maybe even imperceptibly, but enough for her to be able to amplify, and reconstruct, the impulse. Her tormented journey was nearing its end. He’d get well again, she’d take him away somewhere. Once again they’d know days in the shade of great trees, games on the sand, mountain songs on the smooth snow. He’d smile at her again, hold his hands out toward her.
Pierre’s eyes were indeed open, but he didn’t recognize his wife. At least so she thought. How else could she explain the lack not only of any movement, but also of any expression at all, of that faint flicker which stirs even a dying man approached by his beloved. Pierre didn’t recognize her. It was an unspeakable shock for Séverine.
Less dreadful, perhaps, than the one that made her flinch a moment later. She bent over Pierre, and in the depths of his eyes she detected a quiver, a trembling flame, a cry, an endless lament. It could only be addressed to her; then why, if he did know who she was, such terrifying silence and rigidity? She drew back quickly, stared at the nurse, the intern. They lowered their eyes.
“Pierre, Pierre, my dear darling,” she half-screamed, “give me a word, just a sound, something, anything, I.…”
“I beg you to keep calm for his sake,” the intern got out with difficulty. “We think he can hear all right.”
“But what’s wrong with him?” she moaned. “No, don’t tell me.”
What could even the most learned of all these people know? She alone knew every plane of that face. She alone could penetrate its frightful secret. Controlling her terror Séverine went back to the bed, took hold of her husband’s head and drew it passionately to her. But her numbed hands laid it back on the pillow again. His features hadn’t stirred. They were just as slack as the night before.
Still, Pierre’s stare sustained her. Those clear eyes which she’d known smiling and solemn, thoughtful and loving, were alive. What was she afraid of? He was too weak to move, or make a sound. She’d been absurd to be surprised by that, and cowardly to torture him with her cries and pleas.
“My darling, you’ll get better,” she said. “Your friends have told you so, haven’t they, and your director. You’ll see how quickly it’ll happen.”
She stopped and couldn’t keep from asking in an agonized voice, “Pierre, do you hear me? Just a sign so I’ll know … the smallest sign, darling.…”
A superhuman effort darkened the wounded man’s eyes, but nothing rose to the surface of his face. And Séverine began to suspect what the constraint of the old surgeon and his students meant. Without that change of light in Pierre’s eyes she might have deluded herself. But it was only too plain—Pierre wanted to speak and move, but there were bonds on his flesh.
For a long time Séverine bent over those eyes, the sole remaining voice of a deep and loving intelligence. She talked to them, asked questions and tried to read a reply in their wavering light. Finally, to avoid bursting into tears, she left the room.
The intern followed her. In the corridor he said:
“You mustn’t give up hope, madame. Only time can tell for sure what was affected.
“But don’t tell me he’s going to stay like this for ever. It’s impossible. It’s worse than.…”
Suddenly she remembered Husson’s words—there was something worse in the air—and was silent.
“During the war,” the young intern was saying without much conviction, “there were cases of total recovery from paralysis.”
“Paralysis,” Séverine repeated dully.
As long as she hadn’t known the medical word for Pierre’s immobility, it had seemed somehow less disastrous. The affliction belonged to him, all by himself; it was in his power. Once labeled, however, he entered an anonymous category, subject to the dreary laws of all.
“Now that you know the truth,” went on the intern, “may I offer a word of advice. Don’t talk to him too much. Make him realize as little as possible.…”
“Pierre!”
“I agree. With Sérizy it will be doubly difficult, but all the same we ought to be able to numb his intellect a bit. We’ve done it with others, I assure you. In sickness even the liveliest minds.…”
“No, I don’t want to,” Séverine interrupted nearly savagely. “He isn’t impaired at all. He’s still Pierre. If you don’t think so, give him to me. I’ll be able to do it.”
There was such absolute determination, such overpowering love in Séverine’s face that the intern felt like shaking her hand, as he might that of a gallant fighter.
She never left his room. Day and night she belonged to those eyes that glowed like lost lanterns. Her own life was abolished. For what could equal the drama of the closed, desperate struggle that was going on within the immobile body powerless to transmit its will? And what a matchless victory Séverine felt she had won on the morning she thought she saw Pierre’s lips tremble. A scarcely visible vibration, but she was certain she had seen it. Later in the day the trembling recurred, grew stronger. Professor Henri stroked his patient’s forehead more warmly than he had the night before.
The next morning Pierre could form syllables, his weak fingers were able to make folds in the sheets. A boundless song poured through Séverine’s soul. She was now convinced that a complete cure would come about, and the doctors’ cautious attitude only irritated her. At the end of a week she had wrung from them an authorization to take Pierre home. The wound had closed. She’d answer for the rest. For even if the lower part of his body so far remained paralyzed, he could move his arms and torso—in an uncontrolled way, true, but enough to satisfy Séverine. Moreover, Pierre had begun to be able to speak relatively well, and two experiments had proved that he could read.
Never would Séverine have suspected that the simple act of bringing home a crippled man could have given her so much unadulterated joy. She had hated to see Pierre’s lips making effort after effort to formulate a single word; had hated to see him make a spasmodic gesture whenever he wanted to move his hand. Everything would get better now that he was back in his own room, now that he had smiled at the sight of his books —a smile the more touching for being incomplete. All that was needed now was patience. Séverine felt warmly and infinitely patient, and ready to triumph over everything.
She’d completely forgotten that the woman who planned to nurse Pierre back to health had a double within her, who was a prostitute and murderess. She was abruptly reminded the following day.
The gentle young maid who had worked for the Sérizys since their marriage came to her, obviously embarrassed.
“I didn’t want to disturb you, madame, so long as you were at the hospital, and I didn’t want to the first day Monsieur came back, but—you’ve seen the papers?”
Séverine answered truthfully, “No.”
“I see,” the maid continued with evident relief. “If you’d seen the photos of the murderer.…”
Séverine let her continue, but she heard nothing more. She had no need to. Her maid had recognized Marcel from the photographs in the papers.
The room and its furnishings, and the still-speaking maid (Séverine heard vaguely “gold mouth”), all started to sway heavily and steadily. She felt herself swaying. She had to sit down.
“I see you’re just as much amazed as I was, madame,” concluded the maid. “I didn’t want to say anything to anyone about it before talking to you, but now I must tell the police.”
Séverine was sorry she had come home at all. Cut off from the outside world as well as from her own past, she’d had the right of sanctuary at the hospital. How utterly mad she had been to imagine the invisible ten-tacles around her severed forever. They were entangling her again. Oh, hadn’t she suffered enough? What further ransom did they want of her?
“It’s true, isn’t it,” the maid asked, “I ought to, oughtn’t I?”
“Naturally,” Séverine got out without knowing what she was saying.
At once she realized the results of her reply—she’d be subjected to an interrogation, accused of complicity, imprisoned. And Pierre, barely free of his fleshly coffin, would learn the story—for not knowing which she’d made him pay so dearly. It was too absurd.
“Wait … no, you mustn’t,” Séverine exclaimed.
The maid looked surprised. Her suspicion helped Séverine calm down a little.
“Yes, of course … testimony like that of yours, of ours,” she corrected herself forcibly, “it won’t lose anything by waiting two or three days now. But for the moment I can’t get away, you can see that for yourself.”
“As you say, madame, but I feel badly for having delayed so long already.”
Once more that sensation she’d hoped to feel no more, the despair of a hunted animal, filled Séverine. Once more she felt herself driven, cornered, at bay. And now it was no longer a man after her, but a mob society had trained for hunting her. Who would there be to take care of Pierre, to smile at him, amuse him, feed him, put him to sleep? All she asked was to be allowed this humble duty. And it was going to be refused her.
The idea of death entered her mind; at this point she would have welcomed the icy deliverer with all her exhausted soul. But, thinking she heard a sound in Pierre’s room, her whole being was suddenly prepared to struggle—threatened love, dark anger, a furious defiance.
“I’ll go on to the very end,” she murmured, “but they mustn’t hurt him.”
She called Husson and asked him to come over.
My accomplice, she thought. He knows. He’ll help me out.
Husson became extremely attentive from the moment Séverine began to speak.
“It’s worse than you think,” he said. “I see you haven’t been reading the papers. The police are on the right track.”
“They’re after me?”
“In a sense. That young man has a rather conspicuous lower jaw. The Anaïs household talked. It was easily established that your Marcel went to the rue Virène daily, and for the same person. Likewise Anaïs and the other two recognized me from those photographs I couldn’t avoid. A connection was established between my visit and your disappearance. In short, they deduce that Marcel hurled himself on me because of a girl in the whore-house. Next, several spectators, including a cop, said they saw a woman getting away in a car at the moment of the attempt. Other passers-by say they noticed the car parked at the gate, engine kept running, between twelve and twelve-thirty … The press is full of it. The story was cut out for them—an attack like that in plain daylight … Marcel and his various and sundry pseudonyms … the mysterious car, and above all this woman … There isn’t a tabloid in town that hasn’t used Belle de Jour in its headlines.”
“Faster,” Séverine said, “tell me all of it.”
“So much for what’s against you. There’s one fact in your favor, namely that in spite of all inquiries neither the car nor the driver have been picked up, and—most important—Marcel won’t talk. Which is pretty heroic on his part since if he did he’d be let off lightly. But he’s going to keep quiet, that’s clear enough. In other words, though the material facts they’ve got hold of are correct, their moral theories are hopelessly mistaken. At present the police, the press, the law, all believe Belle de Jour to be … if you’ll forgive my.…”
“Say it. What do you think it matters to me?”
Husson admired the way she’d given up all thought of herself in her love for Pierre (but the other man, the pimp, wasn’t he risking imprisonment for love of her?). He went on:
Everyone thinks Belle de Jour is a whore. And since you left no trace of your real identity in the rue Virène, there’s no foreseeable chance that any connection will be established between Belle de Jour and you. But you understand that if your maid breathes a single word, if the faintest thread leads here, you’re lost.”
“But I’d deny … I’d say she was lying … she was trying to hit back at me … I’d.…”
“Please,” said Husson, taking her hands. “We’ve reached a point at which you simply have to keep hold of all your common sense. Your maid wouldn’t be credited alone, true, but if Anaïs recognized you, and the others.…”
“Charlotte … Mathilde,” Séverine murmured, “and then … all those men.”
She started to list their names as if some dread clamor of wind, of which she was only the echo, were conducting them up to her: Adolphe … Léon … André … Louis … others, so many, many others.
“And it’ll all be in the papers,” she said slowly, “and Pierre will read it, because he can read now, you know, I was so happy he could read.”
She smiled then, a sudden grin that oddly recalled a mouth filled with gold, and whispered:
“She won’t talk.”
Séverine tried to take her hands out of Husson’s hold. He gripped them harder, said in a low tone:
“Look, Marcel’s in prison. By yourself you can’t possibly.…”
She shuddered. It was true. She’d actually wanted.…
“Do you think a fat sum of money might do the trick?” asked Husson.
“No. I’ve had her for ages. I know her through and through. I used to have only absolutely honest people around me.”
Husson released Séverine’s hands, since his own had started to tremble. He left without asking to see Pierre.
After Professor Henri’s daily visit, Séverine called in her maid. She told her the doctor had advised her not to go out for some time; she begged the girl not to hand over her evidence or, at least, to postpone doing so indefinitely. All she got out of the maid, who was now thoroughly suspicious, was the promise of a week’s delay.
In the days immediately prior to the crime Séverine had thought nothing could exceed her suffering. She learnt now that pain is boundless. More than once she recalled a foreign proverb which Pierre had translated for her: “Oh God, do not give man all he is capable of suffering.” In truth, Séverine felt her martyrdom extending into infinity. Every hour brought her some unsuspected pang, since every hour showed her more clearly Pierre’s complete need of her.
His wan smile and pathetically happy eyes whenever he saw her had been wonderful discoveries for her at the hospital; now they turned into awful accusations. What would become of her when she was arrested? When Pierre found out. When he learnt that, not content with tarnishing his love, she’d cut down all his strength and youth with the knife of a lover picked up in a whore-house.
At least Pierre had then had a faultless body, a good job, with which to defend himself. Perhaps she’d die; or, if she lacked the courage for that, she might be able to rejoin Marcel, be soon buried in the mud of a classless existence. In the rue Virène she’d heard talk of women entangled in that way, passed memories rising intermittently to the surface of their drugged or alcoholic degradation.
Drugs or alcohol … she might have had recourse to them, too; she felt the need enough during those leaden days. But she couldn’t possibly think of such a thing. She had to appear calm and contented whenever she was with Pierre, and she had to be with him constantly. He didn’t require her to be present, he didn’t even ask her to be. But whenever she left his room, the worried fixity of that lost face was itself sufficient appeal.
She went into the next room to read the papers. They fascinated her now. They were full of information about her, in about equal parts of fantasy and truth. Now that everything else about the crime was known, the enigma of Belle de Jour had become the focus of interest. Reporters had questioned Madame Anaïs and her girls. The clothes Belle de Jour had worn in the rue Virène were minutely described, her hours of attendance discussed. Eventually a reporter rang the Sérizys’ doorbell.
Séverine imagined she’d been found out, but the young man only wanted a report of Pierre’s progress. It was his visit that made Séverine realize her husband wasn’t getting any better. And that same evening Professor Henri said with unusual gentleness:
“I’m afraid Sérizy’s going to stay just about as he is now. Possibly there’ll be an improvement in his speech, in control of the neck and arm muscles; but from the pelvis down the body’s dead.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Séverine said.
She wanted to burst into wild, convulsive laughter. This was the state to which she’d reduced Pierre: he could no longer live like a man, but he could suffer with the best of them.
The next day, having been given Professor Henri’s permission to read, Pierre asked to see the papers.
“He thinks about it too much for us to keep the papers away from him,” the Professor had told Séverine.
And Pierre, seeing his wife’s fearful hesitation, had articulated the words:
“I’m not afraid.…”
He wanted to add “darling” but it was a word he hadn’t yet succeeded in forming.
His hands wandered erratically before he found what he wanted to see; Séverine had to turn the pages for him. Belle de Jour was the center of attention, and Pierre, with a sick man’s curiosity, grew interested in this woman on whose account he’d been so pointlessly stabbed. He couldn’t talk very much, but each time he read that name his expressive eyes turned to Séverine. His look tortured her. Soon those same eyes, more full of her than ever, would see the photograph of his wife under the notorious nickname. Her time was running out. She knew the term of her freedom—Tuesday morning the District Attorney’s office would have her maid’s evidence. And today was already Friday.
On Sunday her maid came to tell her that she was wanted on the telephone.
“It’s a Monsieur Hippolyte,” she pronounced distastefully, “and he sounded like a character too.”
Séverine paused before picking up the receiver. What was he going to tell her? By how much was her wretched respite to be curtailed? Terror at the idea of setting off another disaster possessed her. Without giving any explanation, Hippolyte insisted on seeing Séverine right away, at the lake jetty in the Bois de Boulogne.
She found Hippolyte dully contemplating the ripples on the surface of the water. His shoulders hung a little, something that would have seemed impossible two weeks before. His cheeks were grey. As Séverine greeted him his vast frame quivered slightly, his lips contracted in a destructive crease. But these signs disappeared immediately.
“Get in,” he said in a dead voice, pointing to a boat he’d hired.
Séverine was convinced he was going to kill her. A great peace closed upon her. Hippolyte pulled at the oars. He hardly exerted himself, but his strength sent them out to the center of the lake. He let go the oars, and in the tired voice he maintained throughout their conversation he said:
“We can talk here. In a bar someone would have turned us in. But here.…”
Their boat was lost among a dozen others, amid holiday laughter. It was a summer Sunday.
“Marcel wanted me to see you,” Hippolyte continued, “and to tell you to keep calm. He won’t give you away. That was all his idea, see. If it was me, I’d have squealed right away, I don’t mind telling you. He’s got a good lawyer, I saw to that. With Belle de Jour in court he was O.K. Unpremeditated. Passion of the moment. O.K. And I’d have squealed on you in spite of him, even, only he told me if I did he’d tell about the two guys he killed. And he’d do it, too. He’s that crazy.”
He ground his jaws, which seemed less hard than they had been. He sighed:
“You’re lucky, you know it? Al saved your skin, and me, I keep my mouth shut. Now Marcel wants for me to tell you wait for him. He’ll get out. He’ll come back. You’ll see. We’ll give him a hand. He wants you to stay his woman, know what I mean.”
Hippolyte stared harshly at Séverine. She moaned:
“What’s the use? The day after tomorrow Juliette’s going to the police and I’ll be arrested.”
“Who’s this Juliette?”
“My maid. She saw Marcel in my apartment.”
“Wait a minute,” Hippolyte said.
There followed a profound meditation. Without his having anything to do with it, a surprise witness was going to disclose the identity of Belle de Jour. Marcel’s interests and honor would be safe. But would he accept neutrality from Hippolyte? Might he not take vengeance, in the heat of his anger, as he’d promised? For several long minutes Hippolyte summed up these conflicting possibilities and also his duty as a friend. Séverine didn’t know it, but her fate was being played out.
“So she thinks she’s going to the cops,” Hippolyte said finally. “That wouldn’t change anything if I didn’t want it to. I’ve got Anaïs and her girls right in my hand.
All you’d have to do would be deny it, you’d be believed before your maid. But she won’t go. It’d be better if she didn’t go.”
Séverine said in a whisper, “You mean, you’ll.…”
“Don’t be scared. I don’t hit often, only when I have to. No, I’ll just talk to her. That’ll be enough. Just like I’d have talked with the other one, the guy Marcel missed.”
He was swinging the boat back to the landing-platform. Before coming alongside he asked her: “Any message for Marcel?”
Séverine looked Hippolyte straight in the face.
“Please tell him,” she said, “that after my husband there’s no one in the world I love more.”
Her tone seemed to touch Hippolyte. He shook his head. “Ah, that husband of yours, I read how he’s half done for … and I once said you were lucky! The whole thing’s come out bad. But any way, you don’t have to bother about Juliette any more. Now go and take care of your cripple and don’t worry, poor girl.”
When she got back Séverine found Professor Henri at Pierre’s bedside.
“I took the opportunity of a Sunday free to be with Sérizy a bit,” said the surgeon. “I told him where he stood. In a couple of weeks’ time you must take him south. The sun is kind to the muscles.”
“Darling, aren’t you glad?” she asked when they were alone together again.
She tried to put cheerfulness into her words, but the scene she’d just been through robbed her voice of resonance. Strange—she didn’t feel the slightest sensation of relief. She trusted Hippolyte’s word implicity—in fact, Juliette left the following morning without waiting for her pay—but gaining the security she’d so despaired of achieving filled her with no joy. It only scooped a shapeless, nameless hollow inside her, into which everything sank. The runner who has put out too violent a final effort falls, in the same way, beside the winning-post he’s just passed.
Painfully she repeated, “You are glad, aren’t you?”
Pierre made no reply. It was growing dark, she had difficulty seeing the reactions of his feebly expressive face. She switched on the light, sat down beside those dead legs and, as always, questioned her husband’s eyes.
And then Séverine knew a crueler suffering than any that had ever wrung her heart. Embarrassment … worse, shame was what she saw in those trembling, boyish, faithful eyes. Shame for his ruined body, shame for having always to be looked after by her, the one person he himself had so dearly protected.
“Pierre,” she stammered out, “my darling, I’m absolutely happy with you.”
He tried to shake his head, scarcely succeeded in doing so and mumbled between twisted lips—“Poor … poor … south … the small car … sorry.”
“Please, Pierre, no more, no more.”
It was he who was asking her forgiveness, and all his life long, she knew now, he’d think himself a burden on her and long to die to free her from it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Séverine cried out suddenly. “I can’t bear.…”
She pressed her face against the chest that had once been so warm and strong. Was the whole struggle and its miraculous ending going to turn against Pierre then! She would seem purer and purer to him and he would simply suffer the more at causing her so much trouble, she … she who’d been.…
She knew no more. She wanted only to know where the real good, and true salvation lay. She longed for lightning, a shock, a thunderbolt.
In her feverish despair, pressing closer and closer against Pierre, she felt his clumsy hands trying to stroke her hair. Those invalid fingers were intolerably trusting, they decided the struggle. Séverine had been able to endure it all, but this was beyond her. She told him.
How is it possible to explain her motive? The impossibility of showing a false virtue to the man she loved so infinitely? A less noble need to confess? Or a hidden hope of being pardoned despite it all, and of living out her life without the weight of a horrible secret upon her? Who could assess the powers that moved and melted a human heart after such dreadful disturbances, and forced its secrets onto trembling lips?
Three years have now gone by. Séverine and Pierre live over a quiet little beach. But since the day Séverine spoke, she has not heard her husband’s voice.