III

It is embarrassing that I can no longer hold my pen. My hands are shaking. Not always, but in very short bursts, a few seconds each time. I force myself to note this.

If I had enough money left, I would take the train to Amiens. But I did that absurd thing when I left the doctor’s earlier. How stupid of me! All I have left is my return ticket and 37 sous.

Even supposing things had gone well, I might be here anyway, writing as I am. I remember noticing this quiet little tavern, with its comfortable, deserted back room, the big, rough-hewn wooden tables. (The bakery next door smelled of fresh bread.) I even felt hungry …

Yes, definitely … I would have taken this notebook from my bag, I would have asked for pen and ink, the same maid would have brought them to me with the same smile. I would have smiled, too. The street is full of sun.

When I reread these lines tomorrow, in six weeks – six months perhaps, who knows? – I sense that I will want to find in them … My God, to find what in them? … Well, just the proof that I was coming and going today as usual. Childish, I know.

The first thing I did was head in the direction of the station. On the way, I went into an old church whose name I do not know. There were too many people. That’s childish, too, but I would have liked to kneel freely on the flagstones, lie down rather, face to the floor. I had never felt such a strong physical revulsion against prayer – it was so strong that I didn’t feel any remorse. My will could do nothing against it. I had not believed that what is called by the trivial name of distraction could have such a feeling of dissociation, of dissipation. I wasn’t fighting fear, I was fighting an apparently infinite number of fears – one fear for each fibre, a multitude of fears. And when I closed my eyes and tried to focus my thoughts, I seemed to hear that murmur as if a vast invisible crowd were huddled deep inside my anguish, as on the darkest night.

Sweat was streaming from my forehead, from my hands. In the end, I left. The cold of the street took hold of me. I walked quickly. I think that if I had been in pain, I might have felt sorry for myself, for myself and my misfortune. But I felt only an incomprehensible lightness. My astonishment at being in contact with that noisy crowd was like the sudden shock of joy. It gave me wings.

I found five francs in the pocket of my douillette. I had put them there for Monsieur Bigre’s driver and had forgotten to give them to him. I ordered a black coffee and one of those little rolls I had smelled. The tavern belonged to a Madame Duplouy, the widow of a mason who once lived in Torcy. She had been observing me out of the corner of her eye from her counter for a while, over the partition that divided the main room from the back room. She came and sat down next to me and watched me eat. ‘At your age,’ she said, ‘people love to eat.’ I had to accept butter, that Flemish butter that smells of hazelnuts. Madame Duplouy’s only son died of tuberculosis, her little girl of meningitis at twenty months. She herself suffers from diabetes, her legs are swollen, but she cannot find a buyer for the tavern, which doesn’t attract much custom. I consoled her as best I could. The resignation shown by all these people makes me ashamed. At first, there doesn’t seem to be anything spiritual about it, because they express it in their own language, and that language is no longer Christian. Which amounts to saying that they don’t express it, that they no longer express themselves. They make do with proverbs and phrases from the newspapers.

On hearing that I wouldn’t be taking the train until this evening, Madame Duplouy was quite willing to put the back room at my disposal. ‘That way,’ she said, ‘you can carry on writing your sermon in peace.’ It was all I could do to stop her lighting the stove (I am still shivering a little). ‘In my youth,’ she said, ‘priests ate too much, had too much blood. Today you’re all thinner than stray cats.’ I think she must have misunderstood the face I made, because she hastily added, ‘Beginnings are always the hardest. Never mind! At your age you have your whole life in front of you.’

I opened my mouth to answer and … I didn’t understand at first. Yes, even before I had decided anything, thought of anything, I knew that I would keep silent. Keep silent, what a strange expression! It is silence that keeps us.

(My God, this is how You wanted it, I recognized Your hand. I thought I felt it on my lips.)

Madame Duplouy left me to resume her place at the counter. Some people had come in, some workers having a quick bite. One of them saw me over the partition, and his friends burst out laughing. The noise they make doesn’t bother me, on the contrary. Inner silence – the kind that God blesses – has never isolated me from people. It seems to me that they enter it, and I receive them as if at the threshold of my dwelling. And they do come there, they come there without knowing it. Alas, I can offer them nothing but a precarious shelter! But I imagine the silence of certain souls as vast places of refuge. Poor sinners at the end of their tether grope their way in, fall asleep, and leave again consoled, without retaining any memory of the great invisible temple where they briefly put down their burden.

Obviously, it is a little silly to evoke one of the most mysterious aspects of the communion of saints in relation to this resolution I have made and which could just as easily have been dictated to me by mere human caution. It isn’t my fault I always depend on the inspiration of the moment, or rather, to tell the truth, on an impulse of that sweet pity of God, to which I abandon myself. In short, I suddenly realized that since my visit to the doctor I had been dying to tell my secret to someone, to share the bitterness of it. And I also realized that in order to regain my composure, I simply had to keep silent.

There is nothing strange about my misfortune. Today hundreds, perhaps thousands of men around the world will hear such a verdict uttered, will hear it with the same astonishment. Of them all, I am probably one of the least capable of controlling my first impulse, I know only too well how weak I am. But experience has also taught me that I inherited from my mother, and doubtless from many other poor women of my race, a kind of endurance that is almost irresistible in the long term, because it doesn’t try to fight pain, it slips inside it and gradually makes it a habit – that is where our strength lies. How else to account for the determination to live shown by so many unfortunate women whose terrifying patience ends up wearing down the ingratitude and injustice of their husbands, their children, their nearest and dearest – oh nurses of the poor!

Only, we must be silent. I must keep silent as long as silence is allowed me. And that may last weeks or months. When I think that in the past all it would have taken was one word, a look of pity, a simple question perhaps, and the secret would have escaped me … It was already on my lips, it was God that held it back. Oh, I know perfectly well that other people’s compassion provides a momentary relief, and I do not despise it. But it does not quench our thirst, it trickles into the soul as if through a sieve. And when our suffering has passed from one man’s pity to another man’s pity, just as it passes from mouth to mouth, it seems to me that we can no longer either respect it or love it …

I am back at this table. I wanted to see that church again, the one I left so shamefacedly this morning. It turned out to be as cold and dark as I remembered. What I was hoping for did not come.

When I got back, Madame Duplouy offered to share her lunch with me. I didn’t dare refuse. We spoke about the curé of Torcy, whom she knew when he was a curate in Presles. She was very scared of him. I ate boiled meat and vegetables. In my absence, she had lit the stove, and when the meal was over she left me alone, in the warmth, over a cup of black coffee. I felt well, I even dozed off for a moment. When I awoke …

(My God, I have to write this. I think of those mornings, my last mornings of this week, the welcome of those mornings, the crowing of the cockerels – the high calm window, still full of darkness, of which one pane, always the same one, the one on the right, begins to catch flame … How fresh it all was, how pure …)

So it was very early when I got to Dr Lavigne’s surgery. I was admitted almost immediately. The waiting room was untidy, and a maid was on her knees, rolling up the carpet. I had to wait a few minutes in the dining room, which didn’t look as if it had been touched since the previous evening. The shutters and curtains were closed, the tablecloth was still on the table, breadcrumbs crunched beneath my shoes, and there was a smell of cold cigars. At last, the door behind me opened and the doctor motioned me inside. ‘I’m sorry I have to see you in here,’ he said, ‘it’s my daughter’s playroom. This morning, the apartment is all upside down, once a month, the owner brings in a team who go over it with vacuum cleaners – nonsense! On such days, I don’t see patients until ten o’clock, but it seems you’re in a hurry. Anyway, we have a couch you can lie on, that’s the main thing.’

He pulled back the curtains, and I saw him in broad daylight. He was much younger than I had imagined. His face is as thin as mine, and such a strange colour that at first I thought it was a trick of the light. It seemed to gleam like bronze. And he was staring at me with his dark eyes, with a kind of detachment, impatience, but no hardness, quite the opposite. As I laboriously removed my much-mended woollen jumper, he turned his back. I sat there stupidly on the couch, not daring to lie down. In any case, the couch was cluttered with toys, all more or less broken. There was even an ink-stained rag doll. The doctor put it down on a chair, then, after a few questions, carefully examined me, occasionally closing his eyes. His face was just above mine, and his long, dark hair brushed my forehead. I could see his scraggy neck, held tight in an ugly, yellowing false celluloid collar, and the blood gradually rushing to his cheeks now gave them a browner tint. I was scared of him and also slightly disgusted.

His examination lasted a long time. I was surprised that he should pay so little attention to my sick chest: he simply passed his hand several times over my left shoulder, where the clavicle is, and whistled. The window looked out on a little courtyard, and I glimpsed a low, soot-blackened wall interspersed with openings so narrow they looked like arrow slits. Obviously, I had built up a very different picture of Professor Lavigne and his residence. The little room struck me as really grimy and – I don’t know why – those broken toys, that doll, wrenched my heart. ‘You can get dressed now,’ he said.

A week earlier I would have expected the worst. But I had been feeling so much better in the last few days! No matter, the minutes seemed long to me. I tried to think about Monsieur Olivier, our excursion last Monday, that flaming road. My hands were shaking so hard that I twice broke a lace as I put my shoes back on.

The doctor was walking up and down the room. At last, he came back towards me, smiling. His smile was not much comfort. ‘Well, the thing is, I’d quite like an X-ray. I’ll give you a note for the hospital, Dr Grousset’s department. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait till Monday.’

‘Is it quite necessary?’

He hesitated for a second. My God, I think that at that moment I would have been prepared to hear anything without flinching. But I know by experience that when that deep silent call that precedes prayer rises within me, my face takes on an expression that is close to anguish. I think now that the doctor misunderstood it. His smile grew stronger, a very frank, almost affectionate smile. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’d only be a formality. What’s the point in keeping you here any longer? Just go quietly back home.’

‘Can I resume the exercise of my ministry?’

‘Of course.’ (I felt the blood rising to my face.) ‘Oh, I’m not saying your little problems are over, the attacks may come back. But what can we do? One must learn to live with one’s ailments, we’re all in the same boat, more or less. I’m not even going to prescribe a diet: try things out, only eat what goes down. And when what used to go down will no longer go down, don’t persist, simply go back to milk and sugar water, I’m talking to you as a friend, a comrade. If the pains are too strong, take a spoonful of the potion I’m going to give you a prescription for – one spoonful every two hours, never more than five spoonfuls a day, got that?’

‘All right, professor.’

He pushed a pedestal table near the armchair opposite me and found himself face to face with the rag doll that seemed to raise towards him its shapeless head, from which the paint was flaking, as if in scales. He flung it angrily across the room, and it hit the wall with a strange noise and rolled to the ground, where it lay on its back, its arms and legs in the air. I no longer dared look at either.

‘Listen,’ he said all at once, ‘I really think you should have an X-ray, but there’s no rush. Come back in a week.’

‘If it isn’t absolutely necessary …’

‘I can’t really say that. Nobody’s infallible, after all. But don’t let Grousset get under your skin! A photograph is a photograph, you don’t ask it to make a speech. We’ll discuss it together, you and I … In any case, if you listen to me, you won’t change any of your habits; habits are men’s friends when it comes down to it, even the bad ones. The worst thing you can do is interrupt your work, for whatever reason.’

I barely heard him, I was anxious to be back out in the street, free. ‘All right, professor.’ I got to my feet.

He was nervously fingering his cuffs. ‘Who on earth sent you here?’

‘Dr Delbende.’

‘Delbende? Don’t know him.’

‘Dr Delbende is dead.’

‘Oh? Oh well, too bad! Come back in a week. On second thoughts, I’ll take you to see Grousset myself. Tuesday week, is that agreed?’

He almost pushed me out of the room. For some seconds now, his dark face had taken on a strange expression: he seemed cheerful, with a convulsive, wild cheerfulness, like that of a man who can barely disguise his impatience. I walked out without shaking his hand, and as soon as I got to the waiting room, I realized that I had forgotten the prescription. The door had only just closed, and I thought I could hear steps in the drawing room. I assumed the room I had left was empty and that I would only have to take the prescription from the table, that I wouldn’t be disturbing anyone … But there he was, standing in the narrow window recess with his trousers partly pulled down, preparing to inject a little syringe into his thigh. I could see the metal shining between his fingers. I can’t forget his terrible smile, which even surprise didn’t erase immediately: it was still hovering around his half-open mouth as his eyes fixed me angrily. ‘What is it?’

‘I came back for my prescription,’ I stammered, taking a step towards the table. The paper was no longer on it.

‘I must have put it back in my pocket,’ he said. ‘Wait a moment.’

He pulled out the needle with an abrupt move and stood there motionless, without taking his eyes off me, the syringe still in his hand. He seemed to be defying me. ‘With this, my dear fellow, one can do without God.’

I think my embarrassment disarmed him.

‘Oh, come on, that’s only a medical student’s joke. I respect all opinions, even religious ones. Actually, I don’t have any of my own. For a doctor, there are no opinions, there are only hypotheses.’

‘Professor …’

‘Why do you call me Professor? Professor of what?’

I thought he had gone mad.

‘Answer me, dammit! You mentioned a colleague whose name I don’t even know, and you call me Professor.’

‘Dr Delbende advised me to see Professor Lavigne.’

‘Lavigne? Are you pulling my leg? Your Dr Delbende must have been a real idiot. Lavigne died last January, at the age of seventy-eight! Who gave you my address?’

‘I found it in the phone book.’

‘Really? My name isn’t Lavigne, it’s Laville. Can’t you read?’

‘I’m absent-minded,’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon.’

He placed himself between me and the door. I wondered if I would ever get out of that room: I felt as if I had fallen through a trapdoor and was now confined at the bottom of a hole. Sweat was running down my cheeks, blinding me.

‘No, I beg your pardon. If you want, I can give you a note for another professor, Dupetitpré, for example. But between ourselves, I think it’s pointless. I know my job as well as these provincials. I was an intern in Paris hospitals, I even came third in the competitive examination! Forgive me for singing my own praises. In any case there’s nothing tricky about your case, anyone would have handled it like me.’

I again walked towards the door. His words did not arouse any suspicion in me, but the look in his eyes made me feel extremely embarrassed. They were excessively bright and fixed. ‘I wouldn’t like to take advantage,’ I said.

‘You’re not taking advantage.’ He took out his watch. ‘My consultations don’t start until ten. I must confess to you,’ he continued, ‘that this is the first time I’ve ever been alone with one of you – with a priest, I mean, a young priest. Does that surprise you? It is quite odd, I must admit.’

‘I only regret that I’ve given you such a bad opinion of all of us,’ I replied. ‘I’m a very ordinary priest.’

‘Oh, please! On the contrary, you interest me enormously. You have a very … a very remarkable physiognomy! Haven’t you ever been told that?’

‘Certainly not,’ I exclaimed. ‘I think you’re making fun of me.’

He shrugged and turned his back on me. ‘Do you know if there have been many priests in your family?’

‘None, monsieur. I don’t know much about my family. Families like mine have no history.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. Your family’s history is written all over your face, and it’s quite a history!’

‘I wouldn’t like to read it there. What would be the point? Let the dead bury the dead.’

‘They bury the living well enough. You think you’re free?’

‘I don’t know how much freedom I have, whether it’s large or small. I think only that God has given me enough of it so that one day I can put it back in His hands.’

‘Excuse me,’ he resumed after a silence, ‘I must seem coarse to you. The thing is, I myself belong to a family … a family rather like yours, I suppose. When I saw you earlier, I had the unpleasant impression that I was face to face with my … my double. Do you think I’m mad?’ I threw an involuntary glance at the syringe. He burst out laughing. ‘No, morphine doesn’t intoxicate, don’t be afraid. It’s even quite good for the brain. All I ask of it is what you probably ask of prayer: oblivion.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘what one asks of prayer is not oblivion but strength.’

‘Strength wouldn’t be any use to me now.’ He picked the rag doll up from the floor and carefully placed it on the mantelpiece. ‘Prayer,’ he resumed in a pensive voice. ‘I hope you pray as easily as I plunge this needle into my skin. Nervous people like you don’t pray, or pray badly. Admit rather that what you love in prayer is only the effort, the constraint, it’s an act of violence you commit against yourself without knowing it. A nervous person is always his own executioner.’

When I think back on it, I can hardly explain to myself the shame into which his words threw me. I no longer dared raise my eyes to look at him.

‘Don’t go taking me for an old-fashioned materialist. The instinct for prayer exists deep in each of us, and is no less inexplicable than any other. One of the forms of the obscure struggle of the individual against the race, I suppose. But the race absorbs everything, silently. And the species, in its turn, devours the race, so that the yoke of the dead crushes the living a little more. I don’t think that for centuries any of my ancestors has ever felt the slightest desire to know any more than their parents did. In the village in the lower Maine where we have always lived, it’s common to say: as stubborn as Triquet – Triquet is our nickname, has been from time immemorial. And in our area, stubborn means loutish. Well, I was born with that rage to learn that you call libido sciendi. I worked the way other people eat. When I think of my youth, my little room in Rue Jacob, the nights I spent, I feel a kind of terror, an almost religious terror. And to get to what? To what, I ask you? … That curiosity that my family never had I’m now killing little by little, with morphine. And if it takes too long … Have you never been tempted by suicide? It’s not uncommon, it’s even quite normal in nervous people like you …’

I couldn’t find anything to say in response, I was fascinated.

‘It’s true that an inclination to suicide is a gift, a sixth sense, something like that, we’re born with it. Mind you, I’d do it discreetly, I still hunt. Anyone can cross a hedge, pulling his rifle behind him – bang! And the next morning, dawn finds you with your nose in the grass, all covered in dew, all fresh and quiet, with the first smoke about the trees, the cries of the cockerel and the songs of the birds. Doesn’t that tempt you?’

God! I thought for a moment that he knew about Dr Delbende’s suicide, and was only pretending he didn’t, for some horrible reason. But no, he seemed sincere enough. And as moved as I was myself, I felt that my presence – for what reason, I don’t know – had upset him, that with every passing second it was more unbearable to him, but that he felt in no fit state to leave me. We were one another’s prisoners.

‘People like us should stay behind the cows,’ he resumed, in a muted voice. ‘We don’t spare ourselves, we don’t spare anything. I’d wager you were in the seminary at exactly the same time I was at school in Provins. God or Science, we threw ourselves on it, we had fire in our bellies. And now here we are facing the same …’

He broke off, I should have understood, I was still only thinking of escaping.

‘A man like you,’ I said, ‘doesn’t turn his back on his objective.’

‘It’s my objective that has turned its back on me,’ he replied. ‘In six months, I’ll be dead.’ I thought he was still talking about suicide and he probably read that thought in my eyes. ‘I wonder why I’m showing off to you. There’s something about you that makes one want to tell stories, any kind of story. Kill myself? Come, now. That’s a pastime for lords of the manor or poets, a stylish act that’s beyond me – not that I’d want you to take me for a coward either.’

‘I don’t take you for a coward,’ I said. ‘I simply allow myself to think that the … that this drug …’

‘Don’t talk nonsense about morphine. One day, you yourself …’ He was looking at me with real gentleness. ‘Have you ever heard of malignant lymphogranulomatosis? No? Well, it’s not an illness for the general public. I did my student thesis on it, imagine that. So there’s no way I could be mistaken, I didn’t even need to wait for the laboratory test. I give myself another three months, six months at most. You see, I’m not turning my back on the objective. I’m looking it in the face. When the itch becomes too strong, I scratch it, but what can we do? My patients have their demands, and a doctor needs to stay optimistic. On days when I give consultations, I drug myself a little. Lying to patients is the necessity of our state.’

‘Perhaps you lie to them rather too much.’

‘Do you think so?’ he said. His voice had the same gentleness as his face. ‘Your role is less difficult than mine: you only deal with the dying, I assume. Most death agonies are euphoric. It’s quite another thing to cast down all of a man’s hopes with a single blow, a single word. That’s happened to me once or twice. Oh, I know what you might say in reply, your theologians have made hope into a virtue, that hope of yours has its hands together in prayer. That’s as may be: nobody has ever seen that deity close up. But the hope I’m talking about is a beast, I tell you, a beast inside man, a powerful beast, a fierce one. Better to let it die quite gradually. Or else, don’t miss it! If you miss it, it scratches, it bites. And the sick are so mischievous! However well one knows them, one gets caught out by them eventually. For instance, there was this old colonel, a hard-boiled type from the colonial service, who asked me to tell him the truth, as a comrade … Brr! …’

‘One should die little by little,’ I stammered, ‘to get used to it.’

‘That’s difficult! Is that the teaching you’ve followed?’

‘At least I’ve tried. Besides, I don’t compare myself to lay people, who have their jobs and their families. The life of a poor priest like me doesn’t matter to anyone.’

‘That may be so. But if you preach nothing more than the acceptance of destiny, that’s not new.’

‘It’s a joyful acceptance,’ I said.

‘Enough! Man looks at his own joy as he would look at himself in the mirror, and he doesn’t recognize himself, the fool! One has pleasure only at one’s own expense, at the expense of one’s own substance – joy and pain are one.’

‘What you call joy, no doubt. But the mission of the Church is precisely to get back to the source of lost joys.’

His gaze was as gentle as his voice. I felt an inexpressible weariness, it seemed to me that I had been there for hours.

‘Let me leave now,’ I exclaimed.

He took the prescription from his pocket, but didn’t hold it out to me. And all at once, he put his hand on my shoulder, with his arm outstretched, his head bent, his eyes blinking. His face recalled to me the visions of my childhood! ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose one does owe the truth to people like you.’ He hesitated before continuing. As absurd as it may seem, the words reached my ears without arousing any suspicion. Twenty minutes earlier, I had entered this house resigned, I had been prepared to hear anything. Even though the last week spent in Ambricourt had left me with an inexplicable impression of safety, of confidence, something like a promise of happiness, Monsieur Laville’s initially reassuring words had nevertheless caused me great joy. I realize now that that joy was doubtless much greater than I had thought, much deeper. It was that same feeling of deliverance, of elation that I had known on the road to Mézargues, but mixed with it was the excitement of an extraordinary impatience. I would first of all have liked to flee that house, those walls. And at the exact moment when my gaze seemed to answer the doctor’s silent interrogation, I was barely aware of anything but the vague noise of the street. To escape! To flee! To find again that winter sky, so pure, where this morning I had seen the sunrise through the window of the railway carriage! Monsieur Laville must have been mistaken. The light came on in me, abruptly. Before he had finished his sentence, I was no longer anything but a dead man among the living.

Cancer … Cancer of the stomach … The word, above all, struck me. I had been expecting another. I had been expecting tuberculosis. It took me a great effort of attention to convince myself that I was going to die of a disease rarely seen in people my age. I must simply have frowned, as if on hearing a difficult problem. I was so absorbed that I don’t think I turned pale. The doctor didn’t take his eyes off mine, and in them I saw trust, sympathy and I don’t know what else. They were the eyes of a friend, a companion. His hand had again come to rest on my shoulder.

‘We’ll go and consult Grousset, but to be honest, I don’t think the horrible thing you have is really operable. I’m actually surprised you’ve held out this long. The abdominal mass is voluminous, there is considerable thickening, and I just noticed beneath the left clavicle a sign that’s unfortunately very indicative, what we call Troisier’s sign. Mind you, it may develop slowly, although I have to say that at your age—’

‘How long do I have?’

He must have misunderstood me again because my voice was not trembling. Alas, my composure was only astonishment. I could distinctly hear the rumble of the trams, the ringing of the bells, in my mind I was already leaving that gloomy house and losing myself in the fast-moving crowd … May God forgive me, I wasn’t thinking about Him …

‘Hard to say. It mainly depends on how much blood you lose. That’s very rarely fatal, but if it happens too frequently … Who knows? When I advised you earlier to quietly get back to work, I wasn’t pretending. With a little luck, you’ll die standing, like that famous emperor, or almost. It’s a question of morale. Unless …’

‘Unless?’

‘You’re persistent,’ he said, ‘you would have made a good doctor. And I’d much rather give you all the information now than to let you skim through dictionaries. Well, if at any time you feel a pain on the inside of your left thigh, along with a little fever, go to bed. That kind of phlebitis is quite common in cases like yours, and may lead to an embolism. And now, my dear fellow, you know as much as I do.’

He finally handed me the prescription, and I mechanically slipped it into my notebook. Why didn’t I leave at that moment? I don’t know. Perhaps I couldn’t repress an impulse of anger, of rebellion against this stranger who had just calmly disposed of me as if I were his property. Perhaps I was too engrossed in the absurd enterprise of connecting my thoughts, my projects, my memories even, my whole life in a few seconds to the new certainty that turned me into a different man? I think quite simply that I was, as usual, paralysed by shyness and didn’t know how to take my leave. My silence surprised Dr Laville. I realized that from the way his voice shook.

‘The fact remains that today, all around the world, there are more and more examples of patients once condemned by doctors who live to be a hundred. There are even cases of the resorption of malignant tumours. Besides, a man like you wouldn’t have been fooled for very long by Grousset’s chatter, which only reassures imbeciles. There’s nothing more humiliating than to gradually wheedle the truth out of these soothsayers, who in any case don’t give a damn about what they’re saying. They recommend taking Scottish showers: enough of them and you lose all self-respect. In the end, even the bravest go off to meet their fate along with the herd. I’ll see you a week tomorrow, and go with you to the hospital. In the meantime, celebrate Mass, hear confessions, don’t change any of your habits. I know your parish very well. I even have a friend in Mézargues.’

He held out his hand. I was still in the same state of distraction, of absence. Whatever I do, I know I will never understand by what terrible miracle I was able at such a moment to forget even the name of God. I was alone, inexpressibly alone, face to face with my own death, and that death was nothing but the loss of the body, no more than that. The visible world seemed to flow out of me at a terrifying speed and in a chaos of images, not gloomy ones – on the contrary, all of them were bright and dazzling. ‘Is it possible? Have I loved it so much?’ Those mornings, those evenings, those roads. Those changing, mysterious roads, those roads filled with the steps of men. Have I loved the roads so much, our roads, the roads of the world? What child, raised in their dust, has not confided his dreams to them? They carry them slowly, majestically, towards unknown seas, oh, great rivers of light and shade that carry the dreams of the poor! I think it was the word ‘Mézargues’ that had broken my heart. The thought of Monsieur Olivier, of our excursion, should have been far from my mind, and yet it wasn’t. I couldn’t take my eyes off the doctor’s face, and suddenly it disappeared. I didn’t realize immediately that I was crying.

Yes, I was crying. I was crying without a sob, without even a sigh, I think. I was crying with my eyes wide open, I was crying as I have seen the dying cry, it was life still coming out of me. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my cassock, and was again able to make out the doctor’s face. He had an indefinable expression of surprise, of compassion. If one can die of self-disgust, I would have died. I should have fled, but didn’t dare. I was waiting for God to inspire a word in me, a priestly word, I would have paid for that word with my life, with what remained of my life. At least I wanted to ask forgiveness, I could only stammer the words, my tears were choking me. I felt them running down my throat, they tasted of blood. What would I not have given for them to actually be blood! Where did they come from? Who could say? It was not for myself that I was crying, I swear! I have never felt so close to hating myself. I was not crying about my death. In my childhood, it sometimes happened that I would wake up like that, sobbing. From what dream had I awakened this time? Alas, I had thought I was going through the world almost without seeing it, the way one walks with one’s eyes lowered amid a brilliant crowd, and sometimes I even imagined that I despised it. But now it was myself I was ashamed of, not the world. I was like a poor man who is in love but doesn’t dare say it or even admit to himself that he is in love. Oh, I don’t deny that those tears might have been cowardly! But I also think they were tears of love …

In the end, I turned away from him and walked out and found myself back in the street.

Midnight, at Monsieur Dufréty’s

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to borrow twenty francs from Madame Duplouy, that way I could have slept in a hotel. It’s true I wasn’t in a fit state to think clearly, I was in despair at having missed the train. But my poor old classmate was pleased to see me and take me in. I feel that all is well.

I will probably be reprimanded for having accepted, even for one night, the hospitality of a priest whose situation is not legitimate (it is worse). The curé of Torcy will call me reckless. He would be mistaken. That was what I told myself yesterday as I climbed those dark, malodorous stairs. I stood for a few minutes outside the door of the apartment. A yellowed visiting card was fixed there with four drawing pins: Louis Dufréty, representative. It was horrible.

A few hours earlier, I might not have dared go in. But I am no longer alone. There is this thing inside me … Anyway, I pulled the bell with the vague hope that I wouldn’t find anyone at home. He came and opened the door. He was in his shirtsleeves, with one of those pairs of cotton trousers that we put on under our cassocks, and barefoot in his slippers. He said to me almost sharply, ‘You should have told me you were coming, I have an office in Rue d’Onfroy, I’m only camping out here. The place is awful.’ I kissed him. He had a coughing fit. I think he was more moved than he would have liked to show. The remains of a meal were still on the table. ‘I have to eat,’ he resumed with poignant solemnity, ‘though unfortunately I don’t have much appetite. You remember the haricot beans at the seminary? The worst of it is that I have to cook here, in the alcove. I’ve started to hate the smell of fried fat, it’s a nervous thing. Anywhere else I would devour it.’

We sat down side by side. I barely recognized him. His neck has grown inordinately longer and above it his head seems quite small, almost like a rat’s head.

‘It’s kind of you to come. To be honest, I was surprised when you answered my letters. Between ourselves, you weren’t all that broad-minded back in the seminary.’

I don’t know what I replied.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have a little wash. I’m taking my time today, which I don’t often do. Still, an active life has its good points. But don’t think I’ve become a Philistine! I read an enormous amount, I’ve never read as much. One day, I might even … I have some very interesting notes, very true to life. We can talk about that later. You used to be pretty good at putting together alexandrines, if I remember correctly. I’d value your advice.’

A moment later, through the half-open door, I saw him slip out to the stairs with a milk can in his hand. I was alone again with … My God, it’s true I would have gladly chosen another death! Lungs that gradually melt like a piece of sugar in water, an exhausted heart that needs to be constantly stimulated, or even that strange disease of Dr Laville’s, the name of which I’ve forgotten: I suspect all these must seem rather vague and abstract as threats … Instead of which, merely putting my hand on my cassock in the spot where the doctor’s fingers lingered for such a long time, I think I can feel … Most likely, it’s my imagination, but no matter! However much I tell myself that nothing in me has changed in weeks, or almost, the thought of returning home with … with this thing disgusts and embarrasses me. I was already only too tempted to feel revulsion towards my own body, and I know the danger of such a feeling, which would result in losing heart completely. My first duty, at the beginning of the ordeal that awaits me, should surely be to come to terms with myself …

I have thought a lot about this morning’s humiliation. I think it is due rather to an error of judgement than to cowardice. I lack common sense. It is clear that in the face of death, my attitude cannot be that of men much superior to me, men I admire, like Monsieur Olivier or the curé of Torcy. (I deliberately put those two names together. In such a situation, both would have kept that supreme distinction which is the natural disposition, the freedom of great souls. The countess, too … Oh, I am not unaware that these are qualities rather than virtues, and that they cannot be acquired! Alas, there must be something in me, since I love them so much in other people … It is like a language I might understand very well without being able to speak it. I do not learn from my failures. Which is why, now that I need all my strength, my sense of my own powerlessness grips me so strongly that I lose the thread of my meagre courage, the way a clumsy orator loses the thread of his speech. This ordeal is not new. In the past I would find consolation in the hope of some wonderful, unforeseeable event – martyrdom, perhaps? At my age, death seems so remote that we are not swayed by the daily evidence of our own mediocrity. We do not want to believe that an event like death will have nothing strange about it, that it will probably be neither more nor less mediocre than ourselves: a death in our own image, in the image of our destiny. It does not seem to belong to our familiar world, we think of it as we think of those fabulous lands whose names we read in books. Here was I, just a little while ago, thinking that my anguish had been that of a sudden, momentary disappointment. But what I thought was lost beyond imaginary oceans is actually in front of me. My death is there. It is a death like any other, and I will enter it with the feelings of a very common, very ordinary man. It is even a certainty that I will be no better at dying than I have been at taking care of myself. I will be just as clumsy, just as awkward. People keep telling me, ‘Be simple!’ Well, I’m doing my best. But it’s so difficult to be simple! Lay people say ‘the simple’ as they say ‘the meek’, with the same indulgent smile. They ought to say ‘the kings’.

My God, I give you everything, with all my heart. Only, I don’t know how to give, I just let others take. The best thing is to remain calm. For if I do not know how to give, You know how to take … And yet I would have liked to be – once, just once – liberal and magnanimous with You!

I was very tempted to go and see Monsieur Olivier in Rue Verte. I was actually on my way there, but turned back. I think it would have been impossible for me to hide my secret from him. Since he is leaving for Morocco in two or three days, it wouldn’t have mattered very much, but I sense that in his presence I would despite myself have played a role, spoken a language that isn’t mine. I don’t want to challenge anything, defy anything. The heroic thing, for someone like me, is not to be a hero, and since I lack strength, I would now like for my death to be small, as small as possible, I would like it to be indistinguishable from the other events of my life. After all, it is to my natural awkwardness that I owe the indulgence and friendship of a man like the curé of Torcy. So perhaps it is not unworthy. Perhaps it is the awkwardness of childhood. As severely as I judge myself sometimes, I have never doubted that I have the spirit of poverty. The spirit of childhood is very similar. The two things may well be one and the same.

I am glad I didn’t see Monsieur Olivier again. I am glad I am starting the first day of my ordeal here, in this room. Actually, it’s not a room, a bed has been put up for me in a little corridor where my friend keeps his pharmaceutical samples, in packets that give off a terrible smell. There is no solitude deeper than a certain kind of ugliness, a certain desolate ugliness. A gas burner, the kind that is called, I think, a fish-tail burner, hisses and spits above my head. It seems to me that I am wrapping myself in this ugliness, this misery. It would once have filled me with revulsion. I am glad that today it welcomes my misfortune. I have to say that I haven’t sought it out, and didn’t even recognize it immediately. When, last night, after my second blackout, I found myself on the bed, my first thought was to flee, to flee at all costs. I recalled the time I fell in the mud outside Monsieur Dumouchel’s enclosure. This was worse. I didn’t only recall the hollow path, I saw also my house, my little garden. I thought I could hear the great poplar which, on the calmest nights, wakes well before dawn. I imagined foolishly that my heart had stopped beating. ‘I don’t want to die here!’ I cried. ‘Let me be taken down, let me be dragged anywhere, I don’t care!’ I had certainly lost my head, but all the same I recognized the voice of my poor classmate. It was both angry and tremulous. (He was arguing with someone on the landing.) ‘What do you want me to do? I can’t carry him by myself, and you know perfectly well we can’t ask the concierge for anything more!’ Then I felt ashamed and realized I was a coward.

I really need to make things clear here once and for all. I shall therefore resume my account at the point where I left off a few pages earlier. After my former classmate had left, I was alone for a while. Then I heard whispering in the corridor and at last he came in, still holding his milk can in his hand, very out of breath and very red in the face. ‘I hope you’ll have dinner here,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, we can have a chat. Perhaps I’ll read you a few pages … It’s a kind of diary, I call it: My progress. My case should interest quite a few people, being so typical.’

As he spoke, I must have had the first of my dizzy spells. He forced me to drink a large glass of wine, and I felt better, apart from a violent pain in the region of my navel, which gradually eased off.

‘What can we do?’ he resumed. ‘We have nothing but bad blood in our veins. The junior seminaries take no account of developments in hygiene, it’s really awful. A doctor said to me once, “You’ve all been undernourished intellectuals since childhood.” That explains a lot of things, don’t you think?’

I couldn’t help smiling at this.

‘Don’t think I’m trying to justify myself! The one thing I believe in is total honesty to others as well as to myself. To each his truth, that’s the title of a fantastic play, by a very well-known author.’

I am reporting his words exactly. They would have struck me as ridiculous if I hadn’t at the same time seen on his face clear signs of a distress I no longer hoped he would confess.

‘If it wasn’t for this illness,’ he resumed after a silence, ‘I think I’d still be at the same point as you. I’ve read a lot. And then, when I left the sanatorium, I had to take my chances and look for a position. That takes willpower, it takes guts, guts more than anything. I suppose you think there’s nothing easier than to place merchandise? A mistake, a serious mistake! Whether you’re selling pharmaceuticals or a gold mine, whether you’re Ford or a humble representative, you always have to know how to handle people. Handling people is the best way to learn willpower, as I’ve discovered. Fortunately, the risky part is over. Within six weeks, my business will have been finalized, and I’ll enjoy the pleasures of independence. Mind you, I don’t encourage anyone to follow me. There are painful moments, and if I hadn’t been sustained by my sense of responsibility towards … a person who has sacrificed the most brilliant situation for my sake and to whom … But forgive me this allusion to the event that …’

‘I am aware of it,’ I said.

‘Yes … I’m sure you are … Anyway, we can talk about it very objectively. As you may imagine, I’ve arranged it so that tonight at least you won’t have to encounter …’

My gaze clearly embarrassed him, I don’t suppose he found in it what he had hoped to read. Faced with his poor, tortured vanity, I had the same painful impression I had had some days earlier in the presence of Mademoiselle Louise. It was the same inability to feel pity, to share anything, the same narrowing of the soul.

‘She usually gets home at this time. I asked her to spend the evening with a lady friend, a neighbour …’

Across the table, he timidly stretched towards me a thin, livid arm emerging from an excessively wide sleeve and placed his hand on mine, a hand that was both very sweaty and very cold. I think he was genuinely moved, except that his eyes were still lying.

‘She has nothing to do with my intellectual development, although our friendship was merely at first an exchange of views, of judgements on men and life. She was head nurse at the sanatorium. She’s an educated, cultivated woman with an above-average background: one of her uncles is a tax collector in Rang-du-Fliers. In short, I felt obliged to keep the promise I made her there. So please don’t go thinking I was swept off my feet! Does that surprise you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But it seems to me that you are wrong to stop yourself from loving a woman you have chosen.’

‘I didn’t know you were sentimental.’

‘Listen,’ I went on, ‘if I were ever unfortunate enough to break my vows, I’d rather it was for the love of a woman than as a result of what you call your intellectual development.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t agree with you,’ he replied curtly. ‘First of all, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re talking about something you know nothing about. My intellectual development …’

He must have continued for a while longer, since I have the memory of a long monologue to which I listened without understanding it. Then my mouth filled with a kind of sickly-sweet mud, and his face appeared to me with extraordinary clarity and precision before sinking into the shadows. When I opened my eyes, I was spitting out what remained of a slimy thing sticking to my gums (it was a clot of blood), and I immediately heard a woman’s voice saying, in the accent of the Lens area, ‘Don’t move, Father, it’ll pass.’

I regained consciousness immediately. The vomiting had been a great relief. I sat down on the bed. The poor woman made to go out, and I had to retain her by the arm.

‘I’m sorry. I was with a neighbour on the other side of the corridor. Monsieur Louis panicked a little. He wanted to run to the Rovelle pharmacy. Monsieur Rovelle is a friend of his. Unfortunately the shop isn’t open at night, and Monsieur Louis can’t walk very fast, he gets out of breath very easily. When it comes to health, he doesn’t have much to spare.’

To reassure her, I took a few steps up and down the room, and she finally consented to sit down. She is so small that one would easily take her for one of those little girls you see in miners’ cottages to whom it is difficult to give an age. Her face is not unpleasant, quite the contrary, nevertheless it seems that one would only have to turn one’s head to forget it immediately. But her faded blue eyes have such a humble, resigned smile that they are like the eyes of an old woman, an old weaver woman.

‘When you feel better, I’ll go,’ she went on. ‘Monsieur Louis wouldn’t like it if he found me here. It wasn’t his idea for us to talk, he told me in no uncertain terms when he left that I should tell you I was a neighbour.’

She sat down on a low chair.

‘You must have a really bad opinion of me, the room hasn’t even been tidied, everything’s dirty. That’s because I leave for work very early in the morning, at five o’clock. And I’m not very strong either, as you can see.’

‘Are you a nurse?’

‘A nurse? Get away with you! I was a cleaner in the sanatorium when I met Monsieur Louis … I suppose you’re surprised that I call him Monsieur Louis, even though we live together?’ She bowed her head, pretending to rearrange the folds of her thin skirt. ‘He’s stopped seeing any of his old … I mean, his old classmates! You’re the first. In a way, I know perfectly well I’m not meant for him. Only, what can you do? At the sanatorium, he thought he was cured, he got ideas in his head. As far as religion goes, I don’t see anything wrong about living as husband and wife, but apparently he’d promised, right? And a promise is a promise. No matter! At the time, I couldn’t talk to him about such a thing, especially as … I’m sorry … I loved him.’

She uttered the word so sadly that I didn’t know what to say in reply. We both blushed.

‘There was another reason. An educated man like him isn’t easy to treat, he knows as much as the doctor, he knows all the remedies, and even though he’s now in the profession, even with his fifty-five per cent discount drugs are expensive.’

‘What do you do?’

She hesitated for a moment. ‘Cleaning work. The most tiring part is having to rush from one neighbourhood to another.’

‘But what about his trade?’

‘Apparently it brings in a good income. Only, he’s had to borrow for the desk, the typewriter. On top of that, he hardly ever goes out. Talking tires him out so much! Mind you, I’d get by perfectly well on my own, but he’s got it into his head that he’s going to educate me, as he puts it!’

‘When?’

‘Well, in the evening, at night, because he doesn’t sleep much. Workers like me need our sleep. It’s not that he does it deliberately, he just doesn’t think. “It’s already midnight,” he says. In his mind, I have to become a lady! A man as good as him, well, he can’t help it … What’s for sure is that we wouldn’t be together if …’ She was looking at me extraordinarily closely, as if her very life depended on the words she was about to say, the secret she was about to reveal. I don’t think she mistrusted me, but she lacked the courage to utter the fatal words to a stranger. She was actually embarrassed. I have often remarked in poor women that reluctance to talk about illness, that sense of propriety. Her face turned red. ‘He’s going to die,’ she said. ‘But he doesn’t know it.’

I couldn’t help giving a start. She went even redder.

‘Oh! I know what you’re thinking. A curate from the parish came here, a very polite man, whom Monsieur Louis doesn’t know. According to him, I was stopping Monsieur Louis from returning to his duties, as he put it. Duty, well, that’s not an easy thing to understand. Oh, I’m sure these gentlemen would treat him better than I could, given the bad air in the apartment and the question of food which isn’t what it should be, in spite of everything. (As far as quality goes, I manage, it’s the variety that’s lacking, Monsieur Louis goes off things very quickly!) Only, I’d like the decision to come from him, that would be better, don’t you think? If I left, he’d feel betrayed. Because the fact is, no offence meant, he knows I don’t have much religion. So …’

‘Are you two married?’ I asked.

‘No, Father.’ I saw a shadow pass over her face. Then she seemed to make her mind up all at once. ‘I don’t want to lie to you, I was the one who didn’t want it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of … Well, because of what he is! When he left the sanatorium, I hoped he’d get better, I hoped he’d be cured. Then, if he wanted it one day, maybe … I won’t be a cause of trouble for him, I told myself.’

‘And what did he think about that?’

‘Oh, nothing. He thought I didn’t want it because of my uncle in Rang-du-Fliers, an ex-postman, who has property and doesn’t like priests. I said he’d disown me. The funny thing is, the old man is disowning me, but because I’m unmarried, a concubine, as he puts it. Of his kind, he’s a very good man, the mayor of his village. “If you can’t even get that priest of yours to marry you,” he writes, “you must have become a worthless tramp.”’

‘But when …’

I didn’t dare finish, she finished for me, in a voice that might have seemed indifferent to many, but which I know well, which awakens in me so many memories, an ageless voice, the valiant, resigned voice that calms the drunkard, reprimands restless children, cradles the baby in its swaddling clothes, argues with the ruthless shopkeeper, implores the bailiff, reassures the dying, the voice of housewives, probably the same through the centuries, the voice that stands up to all the miseries of the world … ‘When he’s dead, I’ll have my cleaning. Before the sanatorium, I was a kitchen maid in a preventorium for children, near Hyères, in the south. You know, there’s nothing better than children, children are God.’

‘You may find a similar position,’ I said.

She blushed even more. ‘I don’t think so. The thing is – I wouldn’t like this to get around, but between ourselves, I wasn’t very strong before, and now I’ve caught his illness.’

I fell silent, and she seemed very embarrassed by my silence.

‘It’s possible I had it before,’ she said apologetically. ‘My mother wasn’t very strong either.’

‘I wish I could help you,’ I said.

She must have thought I was going to offer her money, but after looking at me, she seemed reassured, and even smiled. ‘Listen, what I’d really like is for you to slip him a little note, if you can, about this idea he has about educating me. When you think that … Well, you know how it is, we don’t have much time left to spend together, the two of us, so it’s hard! He’s never been very patient, which isn’t surprising, being sick and all! But he says I’m doing it deliberately, that I could learn. Mind you, my illness must have something to do with it, I’m not that stupid … Only, what can I tell him? Just imagine, he’s started teaching me Latin! Me, who never even got my certificate. Besides, when I’ve finished my cleaning work, it’s like my mind is dead, all I want to do is sleep. Couldn’t we at least have a quiet talk?’ She bowed her head and played with a ring she wears on her finger. When she noticed that I was looking at the ring, she quickly hid her hand under her apron.

I was dying to ask her a question, but didn’t dare. ‘Your life is hard,’ I said. ‘Don’t you ever despair?’

She must have thought I was setting a trap for her, and her face became dark and attentive.

‘Aren’t you ever tempted to rebel?’

‘No,’ she replied, ‘only, sometimes there are things I just don’t understand.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Oh, the kind of thoughts that come when you rest, Sunday thoughts I call them. Sometimes also when I’m tired, very tired … But why do you ask me that?’

‘Out of friendship,’ I said. ‘Because there are moments when I myself …’

She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. ‘You don’t look very well either, Father, to be fair! Well, the thing is, when I don’t feel up to anything any more, when I can’t even stand, what with that pain in my side, I go and hide in a corner, all alone and – you’ll laugh at this – instead of telling myself happy things, things that would cheer me up, I think about all the people I don’t know who are like me – and there are lots of them, it’s a big world! – beggars pacing up and down in the rain, lost children, sick people, lunatics in asylums howling at the moon, so many of them, so many! I slip in among them, I try to make myself small, and not only the living, you know, the dead, too, who’ve suffered, and people not yet born, who’ll suffer like us … “Why? Why do we suffer?” they all say … It seems to me like I’m saying it with them, I think I can hear them, it’s like a big murmur that cradles me. At moments like that, I wouldn’t change places with a millionaire, I feel happy. What can we do? I can’t help it, I don’t even reason with myself. I’m just like my mother. “If the biggest luck is to have no luck,” she used to say, “I’ve had my share!” I never heard her complain. And yet she was married twice, both times to drunks, worse luck! My dad was the worst, a widower with five boys, real devils. She put on weight like you wouldn’t believe, all her blood turned to fat. No matter. “There’s nothing tougher than a woman,” she also used to say. “The only time a woman should lie down is when she’s going to die.” She had a sickness that took her in the chest, in the shoulder, in the arm, she couldn’t breathe any more. The last night, Dad came home drunk as a lord, as usual. She tried to put the coffee pot on the fire, and it slipped out of her hands. “I’m a silly old fool,” she said, “run to the neighbour and borrow another one and come straight back, before your father wakes up.” When I got back, she was almost dead, with one side of her face almost black, and her tongue moving between her lips, also black. “I have to lie down,” she said, “I’m not feeling well.” Dad was snoring on the bed, she didn’t dare wake him, she went and sat down by the fire. “You can put the bacon in the soup now,” she said, “it’s come to the boil.” And she died.’

I didn’t want to interrupt her because I understood perfectly well that she had never talked for so long to anybody. In fact, she seemed suddenly to wake from a dream, and was very embarrassed.

‘Here’s me talking and talking, and I can hear Monsieur Louis coming home, I recognize his steps in the street. It’s best if I go. He’ll call me again, most likely,’ she added, blushing, ‘but don’t say anything to him, he’ll be furious.’

Seeing me on my feet, my friend reacted with joy, which touched me.

‘The pharmacist was right, he laughed at me. It’s true, the slightest blackout scares me terribly. It was probably just indigestion.’

We decided then that I would spend the night here, on this cot.

I’ve tried to get to sleep again, but it’s impossible. I was afraid the light, and especially the hissing of the gas burner, would bother my friend. I half opened the door and looked into his room. It was empty.

No, I’m not sorry I stayed. On the contrary. I even think the curé of Torcy would approve. Anyway, if it was a foolish thing to do, it shouldn’t matter any more. The foolish things I do have stopped mattering: I’m out of the running.

Of course, there were lots of things about me that might have caused my superiors anxiety. But the fact is, we were looking at things the wrong way. For example, the dean of Blangermont wasn’t wrong to doubt my capabilities, my future. Only, I didn’t have a future, and neither of us knew it.

I also tell myself that youth is a gift from God, and like all gifts from God, there are no regrets involved. Only those He has singled out not to survive their youth are young, truly young. I belong to that race of men. I used to wonder what I would be like at fifty, at sixty. And of course, I couldn’t find an answer. I couldn’t even imagine it. There was no old man in me.

That assurance is sweet to me. For the first time in years, for the first time ever perhaps, it seems to me that I am confronted with my youth, looking at it without mistrust. I think I recognize its face, a forgotten face. It is looking back at me, forgiving me. Overwhelmed by the sense of fundamental awkwardness that made me incapable of any progress, I claimed to demand from it what it couldn’t give, I found it ridiculous, I was ashamed of it. And now, both weary of our pointless quarrels, we can sit down together at the side of the road, without saying anything, and for a moment breathe in the great peace of the evening which we will enter together.

It is also very sweet to tell myself that nobody has been guilty of excessive severity towards me – I do not write the great word ‘injustice’. Of course, I am glad to pay tribute to those souls capable of finding a principle of strength and hope in the sense of iniquity of which they are victims. Whatever I do, I am fully aware that I will always be loath to know that I am the cause – even the innocent cause – or just the opportunity for someone else’s sin. Even on the cross, accomplishing in anguish the perfection of His holy humanity, Our Lord does not claim to be a victim of injustice: Non sciunt quod facient. Words intelligible to the youngest children, words one could call childish, but which the demons must have been repeating to themselves ever since without understanding, with growing horror. Just when they were expecting a thunderbolt, it is like an innocent hand descending on their bottomless pit.

So it gives me great joy to think that the reproaches from which I have sometimes suffered were only made to me in common ignorance of my true destiny. It is clear that a reasonable man like the dean of Blangermont was too determined to predict what I would be later and was unconsciously resenting me today for the faults I would have tomorrow.

I have loved people naively (in fact I doubt I can love any other way). Such naivety would in the long run have become dangerous for me and for my fellow man, I feel. For I have always resisted quite clumsily an inclination of my heart that is so natural I allow myself to believe it invincible. The thought that this struggle will finish, no longer having an object, had already come to me this morning, but at the time I was still stunned by Dr Laville’s revelation. It only entered me little by little. It was a thin trickle of clear water, and now it overflows from my soul and fills me with coolness. Silence and peace.

Oh, of course, during the last few weeks, the last few months that God grants me, for as long as I am able to keep charge of a parish, I will try, as I did before, to act with caution. But when it comes down to it, I will have less care for the future, I will work for the present. That kind of work seems to be what I am suited for, what fits my capabilities. For I have no success except with little things, and so often tormented by anxiety as I am, I have to admit that my triumph lies in the little joys.

This crucial day will have been like all the others: it did not end in fear, but the one that is now beginning will not open in glory. I am not turning my back on death, but nor am I confronting it, as Monsieur Olivier would surely know how to do. I have tried to look at it as humbly as I can, although not without a secret hope of disarming it, winning it over. If the comparison did not seem so foolish, I would say that I looked at it as I had looked at Sulpice Mitonnet, or Mademoiselle Chantal … Alas, that would require the ignorance and simplicity of little children.

Before I knew what my fate was to be, I was often afraid that I wouldn’t know how to die when the moment came. The fact is, I am terribly impressionable. I recall something said by good old Dr Delbende, reported, I think, in this diary: that monks or nuns are, apparently, not always the most resigned to dying. Today, these qualms give me comfort. I can well understand why a man who is sure of himself, of his own courage, may desire to make of his death agony a perfect, accomplished thing. Failing which, mine will be what it can be, and nothing more. If the words were not very bold, I would say that for a person who is truly in love, even the most beautiful poems cannot equal a shy, hesitant declaration. And on mature reflection, this comparison should not offend anybody, for a human being’s death agony is before anything else an act of love.

It is possible that the Lord may make mine an example, a lesson. I would be just as happy if it moved people to pity. Why not? I have loved my fellow man very much, and I really feel that this earth of the living has been sweet to me. I will not die without tears. Since nothing is more alien to me than stoic indifference, why would I wish for an impassive death? Plutarch’s heroes inspire both fear and boredom in me. If I entered paradise in that disguise, it seems to me that I would make even my guardian angel smile.

Why be anxious? Why plan ahead? If I am afraid, I will say I am afraid, without shame. May the Lord’s first look, when His holy face appears to me, be a look that reassures!

I fell asleep for a moment with my elbows on the table. Dawn cannot be far, I think I can hear the milk wagons.

I would like to leave without seeing anyone. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem easy, not even if left a note on the table promising to come back soon. My friend wouldn’t understand.

What can I do for him? I fear he would refuse to meet the curé of Torcy. I fear even more that the curé of Torcy would surely wound his vanity and commit him to some absurd, desperate enterprise, which he is stubborn enough to undertake. Oh, my old master would surely gain the upper hand in the long run. But if that poor woman was telling the truth, there is not much time left.

There is not much time left for her either … Last night, I avoided looking straight at her, I think she would have read my thoughts in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure enough of myself. No, I wasn’t sure enough! However much I tell myself that another person would have provoked the words I dreaded rather than wait for them, I’m not entirely convinced. ‘Leave,’ he would have said to her, I suppose. ‘Leave, let him die far from you, reconciled.’ She would have left. But she would have left without understanding, once again obeying the instinct of her race, her gentle race destined since time immemorial for the knife. She would have lost herself in the crowd of men with her humble unhappiness, her innocent rebellion, which has no other language with which to express itself than the language of acceptance. I don’t think she is capable of cursing, for the unfathomable ignorance, the supernatural ignorance of her heart is the kind that an angel guards. Isn’t it terrible that there is nobody to teach her to raise her brave eyes towards the Gaze of all Resignations? Would God have accepted from me the priceless gift of a hand that does not know what it gives? I did not dare. The curé of Torcy will do as he chooses.

I said my rosary, with the window open on a courtyard that is like a dark well. But I get the feeling that above me the corner of the wall facing east is starting to turn white.

I’ve rolled myself in the blanket and even pulled it up over my head a little. I’m not cold. My usual pain no longer bothers me, although I do feel like vomiting.

If I could, I would leave this house. I would like to retrace the steps I took through the empty streets yesterday morning. My visit to Dr Laville and the hours spent in Madame Duplouy’s tavern have left me with nothing but a vague memory, and as soon as I try to focus my mind and evoke specific details, I feel an extraordinary, insurmountable weariness. What suffered in me then is no longer, can no longer be. A part of my soul remains insensitive and will remain so to the end.

Of course, I regret my weakness in front of Dr Laville. I should be ashamed, though, to feel no remorse, for what idea of a priest must I have given to that man who was so resolute, so firm? No matter, it’s over. The mistrust I had of myself, of my person, has been dispelled, I think, for ever. That struggle has come to an end. I no longer understand it. I have come to terms with myself, with this poor carcass.

It is easier than people think to hate oneself. The grace is to forget oneself. But if all pride were dead in us, the grace of graces would be to love oneself humbly, like any of the suffering limbs of Jesus Christ.

(Letter from Monsieur Louis Dufréty to the curé of Torcy.)

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LOUIS DUFRÉTY, REPRESENTATIVE

Lille, February … 19 …

Father,

I am sending you without further delay the information you were good enough to request. I will complement it at a later stage with an account to which my state of health has not allowed me to put the finishing touches and which I intend for the Young People’s Journal of Lille, a very modest review for which I write in my spare moments. I will make sure to send you a copy as soon as it appears in the bookshops.

It was a great pleasure for me to receive a visit from my friend. Our affection, born in the best years of our youth, was of a kind that has nothing to fear from the ravages of time. I believe in fact that his first intention was not to prolong his visit beyond the hour or two required for a pleasant brotherly chat. At about seven o’clock in the evening, he felt slightly indisposed. I thought I should keep him in the house. My lodgings, simple as they are, seemed to please him a lot, and he gladly agreed to spend the night there. I should add that, given the delicacy of the situation, I had myself asked a friend whose apartment is not far from mine for hospitality.

At about four in the morning, I crept to his room and found my unfortunate comrade lying on the floor, unconscious. We carried him to his bed. Careful as we were, I fear this move may have been fatal to him. He immediately began bleeding profusely. The person who was then sharing my life, having pursued serious medical studies, was able to give him the necessary care, and to inform me as to his condition. The prognosis was extremely grave. However, the bleeding stopped. While I was waiting for the doctor, our poor friend regained consciousness. But he did not speak. Thick drops of sweat were running over his forehead and his cheeks, and his eyes, barely visible between his half-open lashes, seemed to express a great dread. I observed that his pulse was rapidly weakening. A young neighbour went to fetch the priest on duty, the curate of the parish of Sainte-Austreberthe. The dying man made it clear to me by gestures that he wanted his rosary, which I took from the pocket of his trousers, and which from then on he held clutched to his chest. Then he seemed to recover his strength and in an almost unintelligible voice begged me to absolve him. His face was calmer, and he even smiled. Although a correct appraisal of the situation obliged me not to give in to his desire too hastily, neither humanity nor friendship would have allowed me to refuse him. I add that I think I carried out this duty in a spirit that I am certain will reassure you.

As the priest had still not arrived, I thought I should express to my unfortunate comrade my apologies for a delay that risked depriving him of the consolations the Church reserves for the dying. He did not appear to hear me. But a few moments later, his hand came to rest on mine, and with his eyes he clearly signalled to me that I should move my ear close to his mouth. He then uttered distinctly, although with extreme slowness, these words which I am sure I report very accurately: ‘What does it matter? All is grace.’

I think he died almost immediately.