18

DESPOIR’S ROOM

AFTER HE SENT his last letter to Madeleine, Haussmann wondered whether it had been the right thing to do. Of course if he received such a letter he would understand; but then he was fifty-seven years old, and he had learned a thing or two in the course of those years which had made their one-way trip past him like aristocrats on the way to Madame Guillotine. Madeleine was not so old, nor so wise; she was at the uncomfortable age when people change, deftly and irreversibly, into what they are going to be for the rest of their lives. Would she understand?

Haussmann remembered how he had been at twenty-two, when he was already secretary-general of the Vienne, in Poitiers. It was his first administrative post, his first year away from Paris and his family. What a lonely time that had been! Haussmann remembered the old Prefect he’d served, Boullé, whose father had been a prefect before him, and who seemed in his slow way to be making civil service into something dynastic; and his assistant, Sproul, quiet as a shadow and as hard to pin down. Sproul had played a trick on him, hadn’t he? Yes, he had tried to cheat him out of his official lodgings, and sent him to live in a boardinghouse, a dingy, unpleasant place where he had spent a few months before he figured out what was what.

Haussmann rubbed his temples: amazing how long ago that year seemed, yet how much of it remained visible in memory. He saw himself arriving in Poitiers after three days’ journey on rough roads, and there was Sproul, a thin old man who appeared beside him the way shadows appear, imperceptibly, in silence, and with a composure that spoke of immutable habit. Sproul was apologizing. He had not expected the new secretary-general so soon, he said, stroking the tines of his gray moustache, and there were no accommodations at all in the center of town just now and so he had taken the liberty of sending Haussmann’s bags on to the Two Hearts.—The Two Hearts? Sproul took the young man’s arm and led him, still dazed from the journey and ignorant of his prerogatives, across the river, to a gray ramshackle building at the city’s edge.

The place got its name, said Madame Prosequi, the landlady, from the travelers’ superstition that your heart did not leave a place where you had fallen in love until you saw the church spires of another town. As the Two Hearts sat atop a low rise from which you could see the spires of the cathedral of Poitiers like a pair of ivory needles over the next hill, the lovesick traveler who stopped there might be said to have two hearts, one still enthralled elsewhere, and the other, barely palpable, his own. Poitiers had grown since the inn was named, producing squares and streets, lumber yards and depots and apartment houses and shops without any heart at all, to judge from the murk of their interior and the blank aspect of their outsides. The travelers who once flowed through the Two Hearts in accordance with the systole and diastole of the mail coaches slowed to a sluggish trickle, and at last stopped flowing altogether, leaving the stable empty (it was torn down soon after) and the rooms full of a sort of human sediment. When Haussmann moved in, the other boarders included Charpentier the singing teacher, who gave a recital every Christmas in the Hôtel de Ville; Boussole, a celebrated bootmaker’s representative for all of western France; Aragonax the advocate, who claimed to be descended from a great Gaulish chief; and half a dozen others, not one of whom seemed to want more from the world than he presently had. Haussmann felt badly for them, and for himself when he was in their presence. He kept away from the communal dinners served by Madame Prosequi in a dining room that smelled of injured marine life, though those fish that entered it generally left again unharmed.

Haussmann’s room was on the top floor, but it was large and light, with a soft bed and a pair of windows from which the cathedral spires were clearly visible. There was another room across the landing, which was occupied, Madame Prosequi said, by a medical student, but for a long time Haussmann did not meet his neighbor. He left the Two Hearts early in the morning for the prefecture, at first because he thought he was needed there, and then, when it became clear that his job consisted only of signing official documents and storing notarized copies in the appropriate file, in the hope that he could somehow make himself needed.

He filled the shelves of his office—at least he had an office—with volumes of law and local history; he went on expeditions through the region and met with farmers and businessmen, aristocrats and curates, and lepers in the Vienne’s last leprosarium, a former monastery on the heights outside Chatellerault. Like a doctor mapping with deft fingers the interior geography of a patient, Haussmann listened and studied and in that way acquired a sense of the secret pulses that animated the region. He made frequent appointments with Boullé to tell him that the townspeople at Champigny-le-Sec needed water or that the schoolmaster at Chauvigny was less patriotic than one would like. Boullé heard him out good-naturedly, then told him that if the matter was important it would already have come to the Prefect’s attention. Occasionally Haussmann had the satisfaction of hearing him call for Sproul and ask, in a hushed voice, whether the schoolmaster…? Haussmann did not hear how Sproul answered these questions, but he suspected that whatever action the prefecture took was advantageous most of all to Sproul.

In the evening Haussmann went to Boullé’s house to play billiards or whist. Sproul was always there, although he did not play, because, he said, he objected on principle to games of chance. Also present was the Prefect’s cousin Adèle Bellebecq, a bony, brown-haired girl who was visiting from Saint-Brieuc. As soon as the new secretary-general appeared, she stopped speaking of going home; she looked at Haussmann with unmistakable interest, and he understood that, if he played his cards right—which, in this case, meant losing systematically to the Prefect—he might one day enter the Boullé dynasty. In the absence of any better prospect, he chatted with Adèle, who was, it turned out, intelligent and not unkind; and he played to lose. Haussmann went home late, and, as he walked through the empty streets of Poitiers, wondered whether this was what people outside Paris called a life, and, if so, how they put up with it.

One night as he went into the Two Hearts, he passed a young man on his way out. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a cloak, but what Haussmann could see of him was not bad-looking: a squarish face and blond hair that hung down almost to his eyes. His shoulders were broad and his columnar legs looked able to bear loads much greater than his own not inconsiderable weight. His boots were heavy and scuffed, but there was something almost dashing about him, going out on a mysterious errand at an hour when the rest of the city was asleep. Haussmann would not have been surprised to find a sword under his cloak, or a letter from the Queen.

He greeted Madame Prosequi in the parlor and asked,—Who was that?

—That’s your neighbor, she said. He’s called Despoir.

In Paris Haussmann would have forgotten about him in a day or two, his face obliterated in memory by a dozen more interesting faces, his mysterious errand replaced by a dozen less penetrable mysteries. It was doubtless only because Poitiers offered so little else to think about that Haussmann remained curious about Despoir. He interrogated his landlady, who could tell him only that Despoir was from Normandy, that his parents were farmers, and that he was the oldest of many children. He often went out late at night, she said, and did not come home until early in the morning; then he did not go out during the day. Whether this comprised a part of his medical studies, or was in addition to them, or had replaced them altogether, she did not know. When Haussmann heard Despoir’s boots on the landing he tried to guess where the medical student was going, but the heavy footfalls going up or down the stairs told him nothing. Once, returning from Boullé’s, he found Despoir standing on the bridge, looking upstream. He asked the medical student some inane question about his health, or whether he enjoyed the night air. Despoir answered curtly. He had to be going, he said; when he left it was in the direction of the Two Hearts, as though some pressing business awaited him there. The fellow is a brute after all, Haussmann thought, and left him to his sleepy, useless existence. He was glad only that Despoir kept quiet, for the wall between them was thin.

How surprised he was, then, to see, one morning in the middle of a vile and interminable February rain, a young woman standing outside Despoir’s room, murmuring through the door to the occupant. And what a woman! Her hair was the color of burnt wood; and her face, though no larger than your hand, concentrated within those dimensions all the innocent perfection that you find in girls at a country dance, when the leaping firelight covers up in shadows the traces of pox and the work of dancing brings out marvelous colors beneath the pallor of a winter spent indoors. She wore a long dress of no particular color, and over it a webby shawl of gray wool, like an old woman’s, but there was no hiding a beauty like that; even if she had been shrouded like a Turk’s bride her eyes would have given her away; they were gray, but shone like shells on a beach at the end of a summer rain. And her lips! They were the palest red, like a field of poppies, if you saw it through a gauze veil … Haussmann could not say exactly what they were like, but he could say that she was beautiful. Despoir’s answer was not the one she wanted; she blushed more deeply and murmured something else, then turned, paused a half-step from the door, and ran down the stairs so quickly that Haussmann hardly had time to take off his hat. A moment later Despoir came out of his room, one hand in his matted hair and the other raised in some imprecation—but as soon as he saw that he wasn’t alone on the landing, he spun on his heel and disappeared into his room again. The door closed behind him and it didn’t open again for days afterward.

Haussmann could think of nothing else. Who was the beauty who’d come to see Despoir, this miserable medico, this lump? And why, good Lord, why would he turn her away? In the course of his visits in the town, Haussmann stopped at the Faculty of Medicine. He happened to mention to its Director that he was staying at the Two Hearts, a fine place, he said, in fact he lived next door to a medical student, a fellow named Despoir, and had the Director heard of him? The Director had not. Well, that was no surprise; there were hundreds of medical students in Poitiers and one could not be expected to keep track of them all. A handsome fellow, though … By the way, what was the situation with cadavers? Did they have enough? Haussmann drew the Director out on this and other pleasant subjects, and left the medical school informed, if not satisfied. He went to the cafés near the university and asked the students about Despoir, but none of them seemed to know him, except one or two who thought that he had already graduated and gone on to practice somewhere. The booksellers had sold him no books; the postman had delivered no letters for him; the pawnbroker had pawned nothing that belonged to Despoir. He seemed to have passed through Poitiers without leaving a mark. Whether he had loved or been loved, no one could tell; and Despoir kept to himself.

*   *   *

A month later Poitiers gave itself over to a winter ball: one of the heated events that make the season in a provincial town, which is remembered long afterward by everyone associated with it in any way, from the baker who prepared the braids of white and yellow bread to the chandler whose shop is nearly emptied out by all the orders for candles of various sorts, to the wineseller, the carter, and the Parisian glovemaker whose window has nothing left in it but bare ivory hands. Even those who pass near a provincial ball speak fondly of it; they remember how they stood outside staring at the orange-and-gold light in the ground-floor windows, and how long was the line of carriages waiting at the front door; and in this way they forget all sorts of unpleasant things: how the melting snow trickled from the hems of their coats into their boots, and how they coughed raggedly, and how a little farther down the road their cart got stuck in a patch of mud and it was nearly morning by the time they got it home.—Well, asks the wife then, and where were you?—They’re having a ball up the road, you sigh, and fall dead tired into bed; that night your dreams are better lit than they are at any other time.

Haussmann understood from certain half-sentences uttered by M. Boullé, phrases about the pleasure of dancing and the importance of seeing one’s youth happily employed, that he was supposed to look after Adèle Bellebecq. This he did, in dance after dance, and in the stuffy rooms where refreshments were served, so well that if, at midnight, he had proposed that Adèle begin a new life with him aboard a pirate ship, she would certainly have accepted. He had however no intention of asking her for anything—until he saw the woman who had visited Despoir. In simple clothes she was lovely, but in a ball gown, with flowers on her wrist, jewels at her throat, and jewels in her hair, her beauty was such that in comparison to it the ladies of Poitiers looked like so many overstuffed owls. Even so, if it hadn’t been for Despoir he would have done nothing. He felt his duty to Adèle—and to Boullé, who had been winking at him all night; personal interest would not have moved him to abandon that. But if he acted on Despoir’s behalf … It was a pity, really, that such a beautiful woman should be rebuffed. A face like that was meant for happiness, just as Despoir’s strong, rough features were meant for adventure. If he were to step in, to see, for Despoir, what the situation was, he would be doing something akin to a public service—the closest he would come in Poitiers to civic improvement, he thought a little sullenly. With a serenity felt more often by the narrators of stories than by those who play in them, he asked Adèle if she would excuse him for a moment and went to ask Despoir’s lover to dance.

Her name was Hermione de Néuville; she was the daughter of the Baron Néuville, a stern old gentleman whose estate contained some of the finest orchards in all the province. She said that she would be delighted to dance, and asked whether the young men of Poitiers were afraid of her? Because not one of them had spoken to her all evening.

—I wouldn’t know, Mademoiselle; I’m from Paris.

—How unusual! Hermione said. And are yellow gloves really in fashion there?

Haussmann blushed. His gloves were indeed yellow; the color was favored by “advanced” circles in Paris, in other words dandies and poets and idlers. In Paris he would never have worn them. The gloves went with a life which was not his own: a flamboyant life that involved, from what he gathered, a great deal of drunkenness and the love of actresses; it involved nights spent singing in the streets at the top of one’s lungs, and Haussmann could not sing. If he had worn yellow gloves his friends would have laughed at him. Haussmann a dandy! They would no more believe it than if he told them he was giving civil service up to cross Arabia on camelback. But they were not here—and for the first time their absence seemed as though it might have advantages.

—Some people wear them, he murmured.

They danced endlessly, then caught their breath and spoke of everything. Hermione, Baron Néuville’s youngest, had grown up among the ranks of apple and pear trees which shed blossoms each spring in such profusion that the hillsides themselves acquired her complexion, while fruit the color of her lips smiled from among the green branches of the trees. Later, Haussmann would hear that when she turned fifteen the trees were blighted, struck by a burrowing disease that seemed to sap the will of the fruit to ripen; in the same year she had run away from home. A coachman never cursed the way she cursed when they caught her, people said, hiding in a hayrick a dozen miles from her father’s house; indeed, she herself admitted to knowing the whole of the language, and not only its nicer parts, for her father, she said, insisted that no part of the world was evil in itself, and thus everything was worth knowing, as long as it was known in the right way. There were other rumors that she had taken lovers in all her father’s villages, and bore a stranger’s child, and drowned it in the river; but whether these stories were true is highly doubtful, for the stuffed owls of Poitiers were so jealous of the beauty who flowered in their midst that they made up all sorts of gossip, most of it so improbable that it withered at once into a whisper, a gasp, a quaking of China-painted fans. Despite the rattle of stiff paper and bone that followed her wherever she went, Hermione was as though irradiated by the ball; she beamed, and sighed, and admitted that she had thought of little but dancing since the orchard crackled with the season’s first night frost. When she was younger the hills and alleys of crooked trees had been all to her, but, as she grew, she found her interest transferred to places farther and farther away, until it dropped below the horizon each night with the sun, and, like the sun, seemed to traverse half the planet while she slept.

They spoke of everything but Despoir. He tried to say his neighbor’s name more than once, but each time when he hesitated, Hermione asked him a question about life in Paris, or told some old farmer’s joke (her sense of humor, like her tongue, was rough and even a little cruel). He laughed, and hesitated, and they danced again. Soon it was after midnight. The dancers had slowed in their rounds; as they came out of the ballroom they stared a little, wondering perhaps whether Haussmann was one of the lovers they’d heard of. Oh, stare, he wanted to tell them, stare at us, we are elegant and worth staring at!

But Hermione murmured,—Come outside, and took his hands. In the courtyard it was too cold to speak. They walked arm in arm and admired the stars, which shine brightest at that time of year, when the earth is closest to them. What a curious happiness that was! Enjoying the warmth of Hermione’s arm, and thinking that the girl had mistaken him for a suitor, when in fact he was there on behalf of someone else. It made him almost dizzy, knowing that at any moment he would say the word that made him no longer simply himself, but a surrogate for another. It drew Haussmann to her. For a moment, in the dark, he imagined that he was Despoir, or, if not him, then one at least as good, who might take his place without any imposture—wasn’t he the one who, at twenty-two, had been named to a post that a man of forty might hold with honor? Wasn’t he the Parisian, the one with fine clothes, the one for whom the future held everything, the one who looked ahead and was not afraid? He was Despoir but with courage, and if Hermione de Néuville came to the door of his room he would not send her away. He wanted to say something to this effect, and who knows what sort of nonsense might have left his lips then, if Hermione had not stopped at the farthest point from the lights of the ball, and turned to look him square in the face.

—Mademoiselle, I …

—Ssh! she cautioned, and they held the rest of their conversation in whispers.—Sir, I do not know you …

—I fear you know me very well …

—But I think I may have seen you once before. Don’t you live at the Two Hearts?

Haussmann blushed all his answer.

—You live on the top floor? And you have a neighbor? Then, my friend, I must ask something of you, which I would not ask of another, but I can see from looking at you that you are to be trusted, and, if you’ll oblige me, you will deserve my greatest confidence … She took a letter from her bosom, and asked him would he deliver it to Despoir?

Haussmann bowed. Almost before he could raise his head she had gone inside, leaving the letter in his hand and a kiss—so light that if her lips hadn’t been cold, he would hardly have felt it—on Haussmann’s cheek.

Sproul was practically the only person left within. He told Haussmann that M. Boullé had driven Adèle home.—I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself? he asked, and before Haussmann could answer, he turned away. Haussmann walked home alone through the streets of Poitiers, which seemed to him then the most desolate of provincial towns, and stopped on the bridge. Hermione’s letter was still in his pocket. The city was very quiet. He let the letter go there, over the parapet, unopened. It landed on a patch of foam and drifted slowly downstream, white on white. He watched it go. Then he turned and crossed the bridge, toward the Two Hearts.

*   *   *

The rest of the winter passed without event. And yet, as the days brought their gray light to his window earlier each morning, and the square below kept its orange luster later into the afternoon, Haussmann began to entertain the strangest possibilities: he wondered whether the letter had really been addressed to Despoir, as he assumed at first, or whether it might not have been meant for him. How Hermione would have heard of him before the ball, he had no idea, unless his reputation as secretary-general had somehow reached her. It occurred to him that she might have been holding the letter for the first brave suitor who came along, that it might have contained a plea for help of some sort—perhaps her father was a cruel man, and kept her locked away against her will; or perhaps she’d gotten into trouble, debt, an unwanted engagement, in short she needed to be rescued from something. Haussmann regretted the impulse that had caused him to throw the letter away unread, but it was gone and without it he knew nothing. He dared not write to Hermione, for then he would have to admit what he had done, nor could he ask Despoir about her. He could do nothing but wait; so he waited.

Cousin Adèle had gone home to Saint-Brieuc the day after the ball, and without her there weren’t enough people for whist; it was a good thing, Boullé observed dryly, that his secretary-general knew how to entertain himself. Haussmann had not enjoyed the evenings at the Prefect’s very much, but without them he had nothing to distract himself from his thoughts of Hermione. She had once visited the Two Hearts at sundown, and often as not Haussmann managed to be seated in Madame Prosequi’s parlor at that hour. At first his landlady took this as a touching offer of companionship for a lonely woman, but when she saw that her boarder was too distracted to make conversation, and answered every question with—Hm! It’s very well! she guessed what Haussmann himself did not yet know, namely, that he had fallen in love. She got the story from him (except the part about the letter), and, when it was told, said frankly,—Go and see her, then.—But I hardly know her, Haussmann protested, while to himself he said: she loves Despoir.

Afraid that Madame Prosequi would discover this objection, too, Haussmann went up to his room. Whereas before he had avoided the Two Hearts as much as possible, now the evening often found him lying on his bed, his chin propped on his hand, staring at a book. His work did not benefit from this diligence. Half his attention waited for Hermione’s footfall on the stairs, and the other half waited for Despoir to leave his room. Does she love Despoir? Then he will go to her, Haussmann thought. He waited only for the proof, or, what would be better, proof to the contrary: if Despoir never went to see her, then it must mean that they did not love each other, which meant in turn that her heart was free … And Despoir continued lazy as ever. He went downstairs at night for his customary walk; sometimes Haussmann, in a fit of restlessness, decided to stretch his own legs as well, but by the time he’d put his boots on and gone downstairs, Despoir had vanished.

Haussmann no longer spent very much time in the prefecture. What was the good of it, when Boullé would not even give him a quarter-hour to discuss improvements to the roads, or a new method which Haussmann himself had devised to stimulate the growth of the paper industry? If they wanted nothing from him, then he would give them nothing. He went to work at ten, at eleven o’clock, and left at three or four. When Sproul saw him, he raised an eyebrow and said,—The young secretary! What are you doing here? To which Haussmann could think of nothing clever to say; he raised his hat and mumbled,—I was just leaving.

He wrote less and less often to his friends in Paris, and their letters to him were more and more perplexed, as though he had offered to loan them money and urged them to take it from his empty hand. To his mother he wrote that the provincials lived by a different rhythm than the Parisians, and that news could not be expected to accumulate as quickly here as it did at home. He was well, he said; he did not lack anything; he would write again when there was something worth saying.

He walked through Poitiers but saw nothing; in his head he composed a confession to Hermione de Néuville. My dear Hermione, he would say, I never delivered your letter to Despoir, but you must forgive me, because I love you, and isn’t the fact that I am a poor messenger proof that I may be a better lover? When he got back to the Two Hearts and took out a piece of paper the words seemed ridiculous. He was a civil servant, not a lover! With fresh determination he opened a treatise on accounting, and copied a phrase, “debts must be recorded twice, once at the time the obligation is incurred, and again at the time of the disbursement of funds…” into his notebook. He studied the drafting of contracts, the burial of the dead, and the prevention of fires, but it did him no good. What use were books? The Prefect did not rely on books, but on quiet, evil men like Sproul. Lovers had no use for books; what they needed were letters, or meetings, yes, encounters … He lay back on his bed, studied the ceiling, and waited for Despoir to stir.

One morning when he went to the prefecture, he found Sproul in his office, signing papers.

—Just a few contracts that need to go out today, Sproul said. The Prefect didn’t know if you’d be in, so he asked me to sign …

Haussmann picked one of the papers up. Sproul hadn’t even bothered to spell his name correctly: he had left off the last n. He pointed this out.

—It’s good to see you so concerned about your work! But don’t worry. No one reads the signature.

—I read it. And if I saw a forgery like this, I’d throw the document out.

—Would you? Well, fortunately not everyone is as careful as you are. Anyway, it’s better than if they weren’t signed at all.

—I can’t believe that M. Boullé…

—Ask him, then, ask him. Sproul waved him to the Prefect’s office.

M. Boullé received him coolly.—The signatures? My dear boy, isn’t it too late to worry about them now? Unless you want to copy all the contracts over? No? Then we’ll let them go. You can sign too, if you want. Put Sproul’s name under your own. Will that make you feel better?

—No, I …

—Really, you don’t look well. What’s the matter? A late night?

—No, not at all.

—You’re pale; you ought to get some rest. Even a small city can wear you down … Sproul! Call a carriage. M. Haussmann isn’t feeling well; we’re sending him home at our expense.

A letter was waiting for him at the Two Hearts. His mother had written to tell him that his father had heard from a friend at the Interior Ministry that he, Haussmann, had received his first official evaluation, and that it had been largely, alarmingly, unfavorable. “I know people must be jealous because you’ve accomplished so much so young,” she said. “Please write soon, and reassure me that there’s nothing to this rumor but their malice.” Haussmann put the letter on his table and lay down. He was very tired. It seemed to him that he had been running a race all his life, a race whose course was unmarked, with no flags at its finish line, so that, for all he knew, he might be in the middle of it, or at the end, or already past the finish and running for no reason at all. Where had it got him? Haussmann looked out the window at the spires of the cathedral, chalk-white in the afternoon light; then he closed his eyes.

For three days he did not leave his room.

What he thought of in all those long hours is difficult to say. Often he wondered what Despoir was doing in the next room; occasionally he pressed his ear to the wall and tried to make out the sound of some activity, but could hear nothing except the pigeons scratching about on the tiles of the roof. He thought sometimes about how his life had been when he was a child, when his parents had sent him to stay with his grandmother and grandfather at Versailles. He had been happy then, he thought, a country child, building snares to catch frogs and lying at night on a hill, watching the roof of the world turn on its lazy axis. His grandfather was a general, and he had a box of ribbons that came from many wars. He let Haussmann hold the ribbons and told him that he would grow up to be brave, but Haussmann, back then, anyway, didn’t care about bravery; what he loved were the colors of the cloth, which reminded him of the ribbons in his mother’s hair … He remembered when his mother had taken him to see his grandmother before she died, and what sort of cakes he’d had, and how the birds had gathered just outside the window, turning their heads to one side and the other, waiting for crumbs. He had been afraid that they would eat him up, but had fed them all the same, from his shaking hand.

The red light climbed the wall of his room as the sun set, and he could see all sorts of pits and brownish stains in the paper, which, he thought, he must take care of, and while he was at it he might give the floor a good scrubbing, and polish the windowpanes—but by the time he thought of these things it was too late to begin. He put on his yellow gloves instead and looked at himself in the mirror. He smoothed his hair, straightened his collar. He imagined that the mirror was a window into Despoir’s room, and that he was looking at Despoir, which was to say himself. He thought of what he would say to Hermione, and what she would say in return, and how she would take his hand and tell him that she understood who he was, he was Haussmann the dandy! Then Hermione laughed at him and the scene dissolved; he saw only himself in the mirror, or less than himself, he saw the image of someone pretending to be him in ridiculous gloves. He took them off, put them back in their box, and began a letter, Dear M. Boullé, You will not be surprised to receive my resignation from the post of secretary-general … which he would never finish. He did not think of Hermione again, or when he thought of her it was only as a sort of footbridge to thinking about Despoir. He listened at the wall and wondered what might be happening in the next room, or looked out the window and thought that it must soon be time for Despoir to take his walk; or he lay on his bed and thought about nothing at all.

Haussmann might have become anything then, or he might have become nothing, if it had not been for a change which, though it had nothing to do with him, returned him almost at once to himself. One morning—it was just after midsummer, and Haussmann, who’d gone to bed long past midnight, woke up to find it nearly noon—there was a clattering on the stairs, a scraping and thumping as of heavy objects being dragged about. Haussmann opened his door and found a gray man and his bonneted wife, who, though not wealthy, nonetheless gave the appearance of being extremely respectable, watching as a servant carried a trunk downstairs. They wished Haussmann a good morning and fell silent again. Despoir was not in his room. The trunk must have been very heavy: the servant, who looked to be even older than his master and was sweating heavily under his checked shirt and greasy leather vest, had managed to drag it as far as the top of the stairs, but could not find a way to get it down. First he tried preceding the trunk, but it pressed so heavily on him that he almost fell down the stairs; then he tried pushing the trunk before him, but again its weight was such that the servant was nearly dragged down after it. Haussmann couldn’t help but offer him a hand. It was indeed extremely heavy, and Haussmann wondered what was in it: medical textbooks, probably, half of them unread and the other half not understood. Despoir’s shabby clothes, a journal perhaps in which he’d drafted letters to Hermione. And between the pages of the textbooks were pressed, perhaps, the flowers which had fallen on the day Despoir and Hermione met, and somewhere perhaps there was an invitation to the ball where Haussmann had seen Hermione—there was an entire love affair in that trunk and it was only then, staggering down the stairs under its weight, that Haussmann realized how little he knew about it and how little he would ever know.

No one thanked Haussmann for his assistance. He helped the servant to lift the trunk into a farmer’s cart, and the old couple took their places opposite the trunk, facing backward. Haussmann felt sorry for them. He saw, as if he had been in their place, what must have happened: the letters from their son which were nothing but one excuse and the next, attestations of illness at exam time and the vindictiveness of certain professors, the experiments that failed in their sixth month. How long had they believed the letters, and for how long after they had stopped believing them did they continue to send whatever small sum they had sent—it could not have been much, or else Despoir would never have taken such a room—hoping, somehow, that things would sort themselves out? And what had decided them at last that things would not be sorted out? Haussmann could have cried with pity for them, for the terrible deception that Despoir had wrought. For Despoir himself he felt nothing at all, or only contempt, mixed with relief that he would never see the so-called medical student again. All the same, when the poor farmer’s cart had driven off, away from Poitiers, and was gone from the horizon, Haussmann went into the room that had formerly been Despoir’s. Only dust and a broken bottle on the floor suggested that it had once been furnished; a pale spot on the wall indicated the place where a portrait had hung. Now that it was empty, Haussmann thought, the room looked nothing at all like his own.

*   *   *

He went to his office at seven-thirty the next morning. When Sproul came in at half past ten and told him that he ought not to be working in his condition, he held up a procurement order, by which the Ministry of the Interior proposed to buy certain furnishings from Sproul’s business partners at a price that was more than fair. There was nothing improper about that—except that Sproul had signed it, “Secretary-General of the Vienne, J. SPROUL.”

—A slight irregularity, Haussmann said. I was just going to forward it to the Minister for review …

—There’s no need for that! I’m sure we can find an explanation, you and I? But what a mess your desk is! Let me clear some of these papers off, now that you’re back among the living.

That summer Haussmann explored the countryside around Poitiers, and found it beautiful. He climbed all the neighboring hills and went off on long fishing excursions, from which he returned with net sacks of twitching silver catch; these he presented to Madame Prosequi, who prepared them in a number of delicious ways, and, as they sat together in the parlor after dinner, sighed to herself. As if to say—Haussmann thought—well, so we’ve found that there’s more than one fish in the ocean! He walked everywhere; he avoided only the estate of the Baron de Néuville, which in any case was far away and not in the most pleasant part of the countryside. By the fall, he and Sproul had come to an understanding: he would overlook Sproul’s questionable transactions, and, in return, Sproul would see that Boullé gave him credit for the civic improvements he thought of with increasing frequency. Water came to Champigny-le-Sec, and the schoolmaster at Chauvigny was replaced, and the lepers at Chatellerault donated, by unanimous accord, their cadavers to the medical school. His mother wrote to tell him that the Interior Minister himself had asked, in a not unapproving voice, who this young Haussmann was.

In time everyone dismissed the previous winter’s episode as a strange illness which must have had its origin in the river water, and indeed other cases of it were found to have occurred in the same year: there was a poor girl who’d somehow convinced herself that she could ride an unbroken horse, and snapped her neck in a nighttime fall; and at the lycée two students had, for several weeks, refused to speak in anything but Italian, although between them they knew no more than fifty words of the language. A pharmacist had drowned himself in the Clain and was found in an eddy, with a bundle of waterlogged prescriptions in his pocket, an illegible symptom of the uneasy times. But those times were over now; even Haussmann resigned himself to a sort of benevolent incomprehension of the affair. He was leaving the Two Hearts, having wrested his official lodgings back from Sproul.

A few nights before he moved into the new place, he went out to stretch his legs and found himself, as always, walking in the direction of the river. On the bridge he passed a young man who was dressed well, though not neatly, as though he’d just been in a scuffle. It was Despoir. He greeted Haussmann politely, though with a little embarrassment, and Haussmann replied in just the same way. Neither one seemed to want to spend much time in the other’s company, so, after they’d asked after each other’s health, they turned away—but Haussmann, without knowing why exactly, reached for Despoir’s hand, which he withdrew, rudely, Haussmann thought. Still he was moved to ask:—You knew Hermione de Néuville, didn’t you?

Despoir cursed most vilely; for a moment Haussmann was afraid that the other might throw him in the river. But Despoir only laughed.—Why, that whore! If it wasn’t for her I might have made something of myself. Good night! With that Despoir hurried across the bridge; in the darkness nothing more was visible of him but the ribbon of his hat and the white dash of his smile. Haussmann could not tell, for the life of him, whether Despoir was lying, or what he meant about making something of himself.

The next day, to celebrate his coming up in the world, he bought himself a golden watch chain. He looked at himself every which way in the jeweler’s window, and found himself quite dashing, a young man with prospects in life. You’re quite a catch, Haussmann, he told himself as he made his way back to the Two Hearts. Even Madame Prosequi seemed to think a little more of him: she opened the door wide-eyed, as though a second life had settled on him, firmer, clearer, and altogether more admirable than his own. He was in a talkative mood that night and so couldn’t help but tell Madame Prosequi how he’d seen Despoir. At which the old woman looked at him askance and told him that it was better not to joke about such things, Despoir having hanged himself a year ago, almost to the day.

*   *   *

There his memory was probably tricking him, though: he must have met Despoir earlier, or else he had seen someone else on the bridge. It was strange how memory changed things! Apart from that one detail the story was as clear as if it had happened days ago, but Haussmann could no longer understand why the medical student had fascinated him. Despoir was a lost soul, one of those people who sets out well enough in life but gets tangled up in something on the way. That hardly made him unique: most people got tangled up in something, sooner or later. How fortunate I am, Haussmann told himself, to have kept track of where I’m going! He thought as much when he was promoted from secretary-general to subprefect, and when he was made prefect he thought exactly the same thing. He thought it again when he met Octavie and asked for her hand in marriage, and again when, by a stroke of something he could not characterize as anything but luck, he happened to be in Paris on the very night of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état. Haussmann remembered that morning well: he had seen Louis Napoleon the night before, and the President (soon to be Emperor) had advised him to go to the Interior Ministry early the next morning to get his orders. Haussmann was there at seven o’clock sharp and demanded to see the Minister, whereupon the servant looked confused and asked him which minister he wanted to see?

—Well, I haven’t come here to see the Minister of Agriculture, Haussmann said, annoyed.

—I mean, does Monsieur desire to see Monsieur the Count de Thorigny or Monsieur the Count de Morny?

De Morny a minister? At once Haussmann understood what had happened, that things would no longer be the same, that they might never again be the same. He sent his card up to de Morny and was the first visitor to call on the first minister of the Second Empire. And all because he knew what was what! If Haussmann had hesitated at the door he might have made the wrong choice and if he had made the wrong choice then he would certainly not be the Prefect of Paris today. Every action had its moment: the law, though cruel, was inflexible.

Haussmann understood that Madeleine wanted to see him, that she needed or thought she needed to see him: but it was the wrong moment. When the time came he would explain it to her and she would understand. Why, she might even benefit from the lesson: it would help her to live not according to her feelings, or at least not always, but according to something larger: principles, immutable as the stars. So the Baron reasoned, and reassured himself. His intentions were the best throughout, and if he seems to have remembered a long story to no purpose you must excuse him. He was tired from overwork and all sorts of stories came into his head while he stared at his plans for Paris, so many stories that if I told you half of them we would never come to the real cause of his last regret. And if I have chosen this story to tell you among all the others, I have chosen it because it is the story of what might have been and was not, which is Haussmann’s story, which is the story of everyone who lives with what he has done.