CHAPTER FOUR

Michel arrived, one spring morning, in a small town in a mountainous region. He had not decided to come to it, but he was passing through and the landscape pleased him. Then, as he had no more reason to be anywhere else than there, he stopped.

The little village, Swiss in appearance and French in language, was asleep in the depths of a bay formed by a lake. Was it Swiss or French? It did not matter to Michel. An eternal silence was resident there; an immemorial past continued there.

A river that flowed into the lake passed through a confused accumulation of old houses with projecting roofs and divided the small town into two villages. One of the villages was darker than the other because of the high mountains looming over it, which deprived it of sunlight, but the other, built on marshy ground from which reeds emerged at intervals, had an odor of mud and fever. A convent rang the hours there.

To cross from one bank to the next there was a large flat boat, which was not easy to steer. It was, however, manned by a girl: a strange girl, pretty in spite of her suntan, dressed entirely in black, with a black hood like a nun’s. If she had no one to take from one bank to the other she remained seated, head bowed, on the bench of the boat, between the two limp oars and recited her rosary, but she only had to be hailed and she would arrive with her boat. She hurried; her small hands worked hard; she pulled her oars with all the strength of her slim body, thrown backwards. To the man, woman or child who wanted to pass over the water she showed a profound reverence, and, placing her arms in a cross over her rounded bosom, she said: “I beg your pardon, very humbly.”

No one paid any attention to what she said. On disembarking, no one thanked her or gave her a sou. She recommenced the reverence of humility, and then begged pardon again. And the man, woman or child drew away. Then, at a rapid pace, she went to a wooden pile supporting the first section of a bridge that had disappeared—nothing any longer existed at either bank but the stump. She knelt down in front of the pile, made the sign of the cross, kissed the damp wood, made the sign of the cross again and went back to her boat, to row or to pray, according to whether she was required or not.

Michel watched her for some time, with surprise and compassion. He asked about her and was told: “That’s Brigitte.”

Eventually, he learned Brigitte’s story.

A little girl was thus named. Her father was an old widower, religious and morose. At play, she had more enthusiasm, gaiety and zeal in running and jumping, always wanting to be first, and was more amusingly inventive than her companions—but her ardor sometimes disappeared rapidly, and then she went away, with obstinate quietness.

She could be seen roaming the streets, a well-behaved child, her school apron tightened by a belt, her face inclined forwards. She had a handsome and mobile face, which smiles illuminated and melancholy rendered angelic. Her hair was blonde and as shiny as brass, pulled back, hanging in a plait terminated by a black ribbon. Her eyes were brown; and their gaze settled at length, but sometimes only opened on invisible thoughts.

At that time, the two banks had been linked by a bridge, which was known as the Bridge of Death. The rails were solid wood, at the height of the shoulders of passers-by. The girders, distant from one another, provided a view of double landscape of the lake and the valley, soon as narrow as a ravine. Those girders supported a tiled roof, so that the bridge was like a corridor. The ancient architects who had constructed it had not attempted to take it straight from one bank to the other; it affected the sinuous form of a caterpillar moving between pebbles. Under the roof, in the triangular spaces between one upright and the next, there were panels of painted wood on which some artist of old had represented the numerous episodes of a Dance of Death.

In the course of her tenth year, Brigitte had looked at those paintings one day. As she had always seen them, it required a freak of chance to bring them to her particular attention.

It was a subject of painful astonishment for her.

In the first picture, she saw skeletons still clad in a few muscles, who were dancing; one of them, for that purpose, was playing the fiddle, another the pipes and a third a triangle. Brigitte thought that she could hear that music, with lively notes and a brisk beat.

In the second picture, she saw a pope officiating. He was saying mass in his miter, elevating the host. Behind him, however, in the guise of a choirboy wearing a surplice, was a skeleton. In his left hand, the fellow was holding the hem of the pontifical chasuble; in his right, he was shaking a hand-bell frenziedly—and he was laughing.

In the third picture, she saw the Emperor visiting his beautiful domains, ornamented by golden fabrics and furs, wearing a crown and carrying a scepter. A courtier accompanying him, pointing out the opulence of the palaces and gardens, bowing respectfully, was a skeleton brazenly mocking, bantering and jesting.

Brigitte looked at those bizarre images. She did not understand all of their significance, but she was subject to a powerful attraction. She stopped for a long time in front of each of them, allowing the uncertain and tremulous ideas to penetrate her soul along with the colored forms.

She saw the Empress and the ladies-in-waiting; she saw the King and the Queen, and the Bishop, the Duc, the Abbé, the Comte of the Holy Empire, the Comtesse and the Knight, forming, from one picture to the next, a long procession, with which skeletons mingled, fearful nonentities in plumed hats, velvet doublets and buckled shoes—and the hideous, elegantly costumed individuals were joking and sniggering.

Brigitte was astonished to observe that the Emperor, the Empress, the King, the Queen and the other powerful lords or clerics did not perceive the mortuary company in which they were, and did not notice the jokes that were being made about them, and did not know that they were advancing in a funereal procession.

In another picture, a monk was dying, lying on an iron bed. A skeleton had climbed on to the mattress; with both hands it was shaking the shoulders of the dying man, whose mouth was open, panting.

Then there were the Judge, the Flag-Bearer, the Advocate, the Merchant and the Philosopher. Trade and philosophy provoked the same irony in the skeletons.

An architect was building; workmen, on the scaffolding, were hoisting stones, and he was tracing the plain of the edifice with his compasses—but a skeleton crowned with gold was confusing his calculations; another was causing workmen to stumble; a third was unfurling a banner on which one read: Sic transit gloria mundi. Brigitte could not understand Latin, but she divined that the edifice would collapse, because of the malice of the skeletons.

A painter was striving to represent the important members of a guild naturally, but while one skeleton smeared the colors in various directions another insinuated its horrible face between the radiant faces of the drapers or goldsmiths who were posing, and having itself portrayed in their stead.

A captain brandished a standard in order to excite the courage of his troops, engaged with the enemy. A skeleton had seized the edge of the cloth and was pulling upwards, with the result that the shaft was slipping through the captain’s fingers.

Lovers, in whom Brigitte could only see a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman, were walking along the pathways of a flowery park. They were holding hands, walking in step, their eyes ecstatic. Skeletons dressed as pages at festivals surrounded them, officious, ceremonious and mocking.

Among the various peasants, gardeners, artisans, the teasing of skeletons was always subtly introduced.

One panel showed a clockmaker’s shop. The man was meticulously contriving the delicate combinations of wheels, cords and counterweights in a machine that would beat the measure of time and according to which credulous people would calculate the future—but he did not see, behind him, the cradle in which his baby was sleeping, which already had the form of a coffin and on which a skeleton was balancing on one desiccated knee.

When she saw that, Brigitte was afraid. She ran to her father’s house. The religious old man questioned her about her disturbance,

“I’ve seen death,” said Brigitte.

He took her to the bridge and immediately led her to the final panel. That was the final judgment, God the Father in his glory, surrounded by cherubim, dominations and angels with bells and trumpets. Lower down, bodies were resuscitating. Some, emerging from the terrestrial mire, had recovered their form and freedom of movement; others, still half-embedded, were making a great effort to hoist themselves up with their arms; others were lifting the lids of coffins.

The religious old man commented on that scene in the spiritualistic mode. He wanted Brigitte to deduce, like him, the triumph of the soul and its supernatural destiny. But no: Brigitte had spontaneously deduced the universal corruption of the flesh and that death is the inevitable and malicious companion of life.

The words of the preacher did not enter into her mind, which was full of funereal thoughts.

From that day on, Brigitte seemed entirely consecrated to a melancholy dream. Her impulse of delight did not last, and returned her to a dolorous silence. The idea of death was resident within her.

She knew the refinements of an anxious sensitivity. She no longer squandered the minutes; their number, henceforth limited, did not permit prodigality or distraction. She estimated the probabilities of the hours and days that the future retained for her; she calculated and recalculated their sum in her mind, without even thinking of desiring that they might be more abundant. Resigned, she witnessed with a pathetic wonderment the play of duration, like ripples in water.

Sometimes, after long mental wanderings that had strayed into the distresses of mortal anticipation, sudden rebellions gripped her and threw her into an imprudent gaiety. Then she ran and skipped exuberantly, her eyes sparkling, her plait swinging on her back, her apron lifting up and allowing the sight of her little legs, excited by the joy of dancing.

At fifteen, she was a beautiful young woman.

One morning in that year, at the beginning of a bright spring, she was in the house, as usual. She went to the window. The air was calm, a trifle lukewarm, still mingled with a delightful freshness. On the horizon, the snow on the mountains was melting, allowing the foliage of trees that the winter had not afflicted to appear: blue or green firs and black cypresses. At intervals, the sun illuminated admirable reflections, principally on the lake, where the little waves were a luminous frisson of gems.

The carillon of the convent burst forth and multiplied its prettiness. The shrill or deep notes, some tremulous with childlike joy and others soaring into the sky like rockets, took flight. A flock of doves departed, pell-mell, following their whims so cleverly that their sunlit whiteness was gracefully entangled. Brigitte saw them disperse at the same time as she heard the carillon scatter. It seemed to her that there was a concordance between the two charming phenomena. The doves disappeared in the sky when the carillon fell silent.

The silence that fell then was so beautiful that Brigitte, without being aware of it and without wanting to, sang. She had not sung again since the stammered rhymes of her early childhood. Suddenly, her voice, which had just been born, intoxicated her.

Her father was at church. She sang recklessly. She did not pronounce phrases or words; she sang, expanding her voice in fervent and hazardous melodies. The housewives who were passing by stopped in surprise, their baskets balanced against their hips, their heads raised to look upwards beneath their headscarves, their mouths pouted critically. Men stood still, listening. Young people were subject to the singular alarm of that music.

Brigitte sang all morning, surprised herself by her voice and her delight. When her father came home, she did not stop singing. He closed the windows, but she kept on singing, and she was still audible in the street.

On the following says, she sang in the same way.

From the day the songs began, a folly animated the people of the little town. By means of her victorious voice, Brigitte had awakened in them a need for delight that they had never known before. She was their innocent prophetess. She did not perceive the great tumult that she had awakened in their souls, previously somnolent and dismal.

That spring, everyone decided to lead another existence. The existence that they had led until then came to appear paltry, miserable and humiliating. Other towns on the shores on the lake, they knew, had been boldly transformed into luxurious summer resorts to which foreigners flocked, squanderers of gold and joy. They decided to follow that example. The collaboration of rich and audacious companies that provided investment capital was sought; engineers and architects were summoned, with stone, iron, materials and workmen.

The religious old man went to reside elsewhere in the neighborhood, far enough away not to see or hear a new town being built on the ruins of the town where he had gown old. Brigitte refused to go with him; it was necessary for her to witness the triumph of her adolescent frenzy.

Throughout the time the works lasted, she was the extravagant and joyful soul of that dream of a new life. From dawn till dusk, she came and went among the stones that were being carved and piled up, growing from the ground into hotels, casinos, modern houses, municipal palaces, and theaters. She sang; her voice exalted the labor of the masons and carpenters—and one might have thought that her voice was giving life to that valiant architecture.

At dusk, she watched the two electric lamps in front of the telegraph office light up. Those small lights, in the gathering gloom, charmed her heart, where similar gleams had appeared.

In the morning, she was seen more than once going up to the telegraph poles of the roads, placing her ear to the wood and listening for a long time to their strange song, a complex metallic sonority measured by the rhythm of the wind—a song that seemed to her to come from unknown lands. And at sunset, she gazed at the shining wires, mysterious and gilded, through which she knew that news, advertisements and speech from elsewhere was passing.

She thought about those countries, whose names and distances she did not know. She believed that she could hear the noise they made, the echo of their lives and their persuasive counsel of joy. They told her that brief destiny is a magnificent fever; they told her to be docile to the burning desire of earthly life; they told her that even pain enters into the delight of life.

Thus, the vast world concurred with her ardor—but it did not summon her outside the place where she was exalted. It came to her; all the amplitude of kingdoms and oceans converged, to exalt her further, toward autonomic felicity.

Her most beautiful day was the one when the Bridge of Death was demolished.

The local inhabitants, out of superstitious dread, were of the opinion that it should be spared. There were discussions; the engineers demanded its destruction. Brigitte sided with them, arguing eloquently, determinedly and ferociously against the symbol of sadness. She carried away, if not all scruples, at least all uncertainties; the Bridge of Death would be demolished.

The convent claimed the painted wooden panels; it obtained them without difficulty. The nuns came, with the prior, to collect them, and carried them in procession to the convent, in order to avoid the sacrilege and ornament the cloister. They accompanied then with misereres.

When the bridge was rid of its images, Brigitte went on to it and, with puerile mockery, utterly excited by her victory over death, started singing, in her marvelous voice:

Sur le pont d’Avignon,

L’on y danse, l’on y danse....

For popular songs travel, far and wide, all the way to countries where no one knows what their original significance was.

Brigitte did not sing Le Pont d’Avignon as little girls sing it, but added to the naïve rhyme trills and tender roulades, vocal gaieties, ironic flourishes, mischievous graces and warm resonances. She did not dance—but, with her dress slightly uplifted, her arms scarcely moving, she sketched out the rhythm of a round dance.

A crowd gathered, and danced truly—danced without singing. Brigitte sang. The steps of the dancers resounded on the planking of the bridge.

Then the carpenters set to work. They extracted nails, tore up beam after beam. Pieces of wood and nails fell into the water; the entire skeleton of the bridge went to form a heap of debris on the bank. Soon, nothing remained but the piles, which emerged from the lake like arms sending signals of distress.

The new town was built. By the second year, it was ready to receive visitors. Large houses of white stone awaited them.

They waited in vain. The other towns on the shores of the lake prevented their unexpected rival from prospering. The hotels remained empty. The casino sacked its unnecessary musicians. The rails of the tramways were buried by dust. It was a disaster; there were bankruptcies, lawsuits, miseries. Many of the inhabitants left.

Day after day, Brigitte watched that failure of her young apostolate. She no longer dared sing. Her voice, resounding strangely amid the new and deserted architecture, seemed absurd. The religious old man died. First she saw solitude form around her; then people detested her, insulted her, branded her with the shame of the defeat, as they had once glorified her for the hope. Was it not she, with her deliriant songs, who had unleashed the madness whose punishment it was now necessary to endure? She was threatened with brutal vengeance.

The nuns offered her the sanctuary of the convent; she would adopt the customs of women who renounce life; she would move silently beneath the arches of the cloister where the images of victorious death had taken refuge before her; she would slowly accustom her eyes and her soul to them; and if she sang again, she would sing, in a modest and constrained voice, the canticles of spiritual life and abnegation.

But she refused, saying that she ought to redeem her sin, and, since she had harmed the people of the town, would now devote her zeal and her strength to serving them.

Thus it was that Brigitte, after having counted on the beautiful ardors of life, had become that poor girl dressed in black who toiled at her task, recited her prayers of contrition, made humble reverences and asked for forgiveness. She never said a word except to indicate her repentance and implore mercy. As the Bridge of Death had disappeared, demolished by her song—as a town in the Bible had collapsed to the sound of trumpets—she no longer spoke except in whispers, and she took from one bank to the other, with her heavy boat, the people who no longer had the route of the bridge. She distributed her petty fortune and for her nourishment she abandoned herself to the aleatory charity of a few good people who thanked her, confusedly.

Michel saw her, and loved her.

He loved her for having wanted to live, and for having renounced it. He loved her soul and her face, because her soul had followed the route that leads from fervor to despair, and her face was as beautiful as a faithful mirror that had retained, and united with delicacy, the two images of delight and grief.

Michel watched her from the bank, inattentive to him, entirely devoted alternately to the task of Martha and the dream of Mary: she realized the most beautiful gospel. And he dared not call her, and climb into the boat she manned.

One day, he did dare. She made him the reverence, begged his pardon and applied herself to the oars. He dared not say anything to her—and when he had arrived at the other bank, he went away, timidly, and wandered around the village that the mountains covered with shadow. He wandered there, not knowing how to occupy himself.

He climbed a mountain path and, from an eminence, gazed at the lake where Brigitte was maneuvering her boat. The day was gray and overcast. On the lake, which was the color of slate, the black-clad Brigitte seemed to be the daughter of the funeral ferryman who carried the living to the realm of the dead; she seemed to be death herself, who had taken the place of Charon, a young death, slightly affected and very gentle.

Michel loved Brigitte, and death.

He went back down to the lake and climbed into the boat. Brigitte did not appear to recognize him, and was not embarrassed by his gaze. He said to her: “You’re tired, Brigitte. Give me the oars.”

She took advantage of the gesture that bent her over the oars to bow profoundly, and replied: “I beg your pardon.”

She continued to row as if Michel had not said anything at all.

Michel went on: “You’ve renounced life, after having loved life more than anyone, Brigitte. I’m the brother of your mourning.”

She did not reply.

He added: “Teach me your despairing wisdom.”

She remained obstinately silent. When the boat reached the bank, she made the same invariable salutation, begged the same pardon, kissed the wood of the pile with the same pious humility as usual and ran back to her boat, where she recited her rosary.

Michel loved her amorously, and did not obtain a single word from her. But he thought about her incessantly and wanted to combine his bewildered melancholy with the calm melancholy of Brigitte. He loved her enough to be egotistical and to disdain as a vain scruple the dread of alarming Brigitte, quiet at last, with the company of his unreason. At any rate, she did not seem to notice him. Not once did she raise her eyes toward him.

Every morning, Michel came to the lake. He only went away when his awkwardness and the occasional mocking smiles of passers by commanded him to, but he went away with difficulty and came back in haste, in order to watch Brigitte again, in order to believe that he was near her.

Silence, however, separated them.

That damp region softened Michel, disposed him to the mildness of renunciation. At the edge of the lake, he savored a kind of languid peace. There was an entire week of clouds and mist; the mountains were veiled by them. One could no longer make out the trees except as motionless phantoms in the mist. The old and recent buildings became confused therein and formed vast masses scarcely darker than the air. And on the lake, heavy vapors spread out like long, trailing scarves that would flutter in a slight breeze. The landscape was simplified; forms and colors lost their angles, their bright ridges and their reflections.

Michel became slowly accustomed to that sojourn, the horizon as bleak as if it were that of life itself, the environment of perpetual twilight like the one in which he felt his life draining away.

If the clouds occasionally parted, allowing the sun’s rays to fall and uncovering the mountain, he no longer looked at anything but the lake. He feared the rest; he could only tolerate the water where Brigitte had her path.

The water had become his scenery. He loved the stream and the eddies; he loved to imagine it, depending on the weather, heavier or lighter; sometimes cheerful, when the breeze pleated little hasty waves thereon, sometimes overwhelmed by an infinite lassitude, and more often still abandoned indifferently to incomprehensible fatalities.

His eye learned to be content with the frail hazards that changed the aspect of the water. He did not ask for anything more.

And as he became enamored of spiritual poverty, he also became more intimately enamored of Brigitte, who was the soul of that resigned scenery. He spoke to her silently, saying to her: “Brigitte, you pray, and God probably doesn’t hear you; but you pray, and that’s sufficient.”

Or: “Brigitte, you work with your arms and you exhaust yourself, and no one thanks you for it; but you work, and that’s sufficient.”

And: “Brigitte, you’re going to die, and then it will be as if you had never prayed, and never worked. The people you take from one bank to the other will die, and then it will be as if you had left those on the other bank there, and those on this bank here. But all of that is only waiting for death and pretending not to think about it. Unless you’re death yourself, gentle death, Brigitte who does not speak and does not smile, the death that summons us: and here we are.”

He had acquired the habit of talking to Brigitte like that, without her hearing his words, without the words even being pronounced. Brigitte’s silence did not embarrass him; he believed that he was conversing with her, so mysteriously certain was he of the communion of their souls. He was the lover of everything he knew about her, of everything he could divine and everything he could imagine. He was the lover of her silence. He loved her as a singular mute, whose gaze might have more significance than words; he loved her as a shadow that might be realized beneath the appearances on an intangible body; and he loved her as a dead woman whose body and soul might strangely endure, the body attenuated, the soul taciturn; and he loved her as the death that had taken on the aspect of a grim young woman, obliging and beautiful.

“Unless you are the gentle death that awaits us, Brigitte: and here we are...Brigitte, here I am!”

And he climbed into the boat, saluted by gentle death. Gentle death plied the oars and rowed toward the other bank. Michel, in that company, sensed his will dissolve and his individuality vanish; he experienced a kind of joy in that, analogous to the sentiment recluses call by the bizarre name of “jubilation,” which is the rhapsody of their piety.

When the boat had reached the middle of the lake, gentle death suddenly swerved, entered the current of the river and followed it, leaving the banks, drawing away.

Michel looked at her; he did not see any change in her face; the rhythm of the oars was the same, and there was absolutely nothing to indicate a sudden resolution, desire or caprice. There was nothing but the abrupt and new direction of the boat. Michel did not make a gesture or say a word. The unexpected voyage enchanted him, and he abandoned himself to the desire of gentle death. Soon, he stopped wondering where he was going; he ceased to be astonished; such was, he thought, the road of his destiny, which Brigitte was guiding.

The scenery was gradually transformed. There were no villages on the banks. The lake shrank. There was the river, framed between mountains and bordered by shady trees. The town was far away; Michel forgot it, as Brigitte seemed to have forgotten it. He believed that he was being taken by gentle death to her own home, in the distant abode of sleep.

Suddenly the boat swerved, as before; it came about. Brigitte was troubled then. She blushed, and seemed to be having difficulty collecting herself.

“I beg your pardon,” she said—and she forced the pace of the oars, heading toward the town.

“Why go back to the town?” Michel asked.

But she said nothing, and the vigorous regularity of the thrusts of the oars testified to a decision that Michel had to accept.

Afterwards, he thought that death had wanted to take him, but had rejected him—and he was saddened by that.

* * * *

The next day, as dusk approached, he was on the shore of the lake. Dusk was aflame in the clouds; the blaze was coming closer and closer, launching red, pink and yellow fire, calcinating the profound masses from which it emerged in vivid splendor, leaving nothing but ashes, which it scattered. There were collapses; the rubble turned violet before fading away into the nocturnal gloom.

From the other bank, already dark, Michel saw Brigitte’s boat set off. In the bow, Brigitte was rowing; her black form was heaped over the water. Then, in the middle of the boat, a woman was standing: a tall woman, clad in a red cloak; a long golden veil hung over her head; she was wearing the colors of the sun. When she passed into the reflection of the crepuscular flames, she seemed to ignite like the clouds—and Brigitte, beside her, was the night, the gentle night.

The passenger was not looking at Brigitte. She was examining the scenery, manifestly pleased to find it worthy of her. Brigitte did not raise her eyes.

The passenger was beautiful and richly dressed. Soon, Michel was able to make out her pearl necklace, her golden chains and, even brighter, the whiteness of her cheerful face. With her fist on her hip, she stood tall, advancing like a conqueror. She resembled one of those figureheads that ancient mariners set on the prows of their ships and painted in bright colors, boldly cleaving the waves.

In the boat of gentle death, however, she was an image of life, or life itself.

Thus death brought life to Michel, who loved one and began to admire the other.

When the passenger got out of the boat, Brigitte made her reverence, as she did to everyone. In order not to be lacking in courtesy and because she was joyful, the passenger replied with another reverence; with the tips of her gloved fingers she picked up the hem of her red cloak, but while Brigitte bowed her head profoundly she kept her head high, laughing with brilliant teeth.

And thus, on the shore of a defunct town where the setting sun was lavishing its phantasmagorias, with attentive ceremony, those two strangers, life and death saluted one another.

After that, the passenger wanted to give the ferrywoman a coin, but Brigittie, with a polite gesture, turned away. And thus death refused life’s gift.

Michel followed the double performance. He loved Brigitte and was touched to see her so humble, so poor; he pitied the little black heap that was Brigitte, returned to her prayers in the boat—but when the traveler departed in the direction of the village it seemed to him than an unaccustomed solitude descended upon the edge of the lake. When night fell, it fell upon a desert that the lantern in Brigitte’s boat hardly illuminated. And Michel could no longer succeed in confining himself in the silence that the passage of life had left in drawing away; in the penumbra that the brightness of life had left, in drawing away; in the bleak reverie in which death had installed him.

He said, silently: “Adieu, Brigitte—and until tomorrow! I’ll come back tomorrow, at daybreak, in order to see you and be near you, in the shadow of your quietude, Brigitte.”

And he was sincere, with a hint of hypocrisy. He went away hoping to meet the passenger who had the face of life again.

* * * *

The traveler had booked a room in the same hotel—or, rather, inn—as him, where a great racket was made by her automobile, which had come by another route, with her chauffeur, her footman, her chambermaid, a dog as big as a bear and another dog as small as a rat.

After spending a few minutes in his room Michel went down to the dining-room and found the usual guests there: tradesmen, petty clerks, people who talked loudly. A little later, the traveler arrived—and in her company there was a wonderment, mingled with mockery and concupiscence. She was dressed in white, with her neck uncovered and her arms bare, all the way from the hands, sparkling with rings, to the rounded plump elbows. She was a brunette and wore a large hat analogous to those worn by shepherds in pastoral allegories; her hair had beautiful waves and hid the tops of her ears. Her skin was so white that the contrast between her face and her hair resembled that between ivory and jet. She was so supple that every one of her movements animated her entire body and her corsage outlined the grace of her throat. She was so cheerful that she amused herself by unfolding a napkin as thick as cardboard, and had such an easy familiarity that she was soon chatting with her neighbor, who, in everyday life, was a commercial representative for a chocolate manufacturer.

She asked him: “I believe that there are pleasant walks in the vicinity?”

The other said no, that it was a dirty place. She burst out laughing. Her laughter was like an avalanche of roses. Michel savored her voice, like a surprising sensuality: its crystal sonorities, its twittering; its sudden outburst; its numerous and varied musical notes. He savored it like a delicacy—and if the words were sometimes trivial, he only heard their magnificent sound, their delightful song.

He also noticed that the stranger had a peculiar accent, which emphasized words and gave sentences a poetic rhythm, often concluding them in a confused, pretty, half-stammered melody. Often, laughter accompanied a sentence from beginning to end, and then one might have thought that a garland of roses was unfurling along a motto of levity.

When the diners had retired, one after another, the stranger, who was drinking coffee, remained, and Michel, who had no pretext for remaining, stayed nevertheless. He had placed himself facing the stranger and was contemplating her indiscreetly.

“You don’t drink coffee?” she asked him.

He said no, and she replied: “I always do, in order not to sleep. Sleep kills half of life, and I like to live every hour.”

“You don’t sleep at all?” he said.

“As little as I can. Sleep is death, and I’m life.”

He already knew that—that she was life itself. The statement did not astonish him; he merely admired the fact that life had come to him, in that inn in a mountain village, when he was near to dying.

“Who are you?” she asked him.

He did not reply straight away; he experienced a veritable difficulty in remembering what he was, the name he bore—everything that composes and distinguishes a person.

He hesitated, and the stranger said: “Me, I’m La Métienka.”

The syllables were not unknown to Michel, but he no longer knew to what memory they were connected.

“La Métienka, the dancer,” she added. “And you?”

With ridiculous timidity, he said: “Michel Bedée.”

It seemed to him that the syllables of his own name were less familiar than the dancer’s name; it seemed to him that they fell into the silence like stones into water—but La Métienka opened her eyes wide and clapped her hands.

“Michel Bedée? Sirium?”

He confessed that he was Michel Bedée, and that he had once discovered sirium—yes, yes, undoubtedly, but long ago! He scarcely remembered sirium and was no longer anything but a vagabond wandering at random....

“At random,” he repeated, “at random!”

La Métienka was delighted. “Come to my room,” she said. “We’ll talk.”

She led him away. He followed her willingly.

La Métienka’s room was not the kind of inn room that Michel had. When he went into it, Michel marveled at the perfumes the light, the fabrics that ornamented the walls, the picture-frames, the large white fur carpeting the floor and an entire décor of luxurious living.

“There!” said La Métienka. “I travel with my manias. Like a gipsy, I take everything I need with me through the world—except that I don’t need much, to be content.” She added: “I can’t travel any other way. It’s because of the evening. In the afternoon, with the sun, everything is beautiful and joyful, but in the evening, if there is nothing to do but shut myself in with poor things, I become sad and nostalgic. Nostalgia is a sadness too, and sadness is death. La Métienka refuses death.”

They sat down in armchairs, the silk cushions of which underwent metamorphoses.

“You dance, then?” asked Michel.

“Yes, I dance!” And she laughed because Michel Bedée did not know that. “You haven’t seen me!”

He confessed that he had not—but he went out so rarely.

“That’s true,” she said, “you’re a scientist! Although scientists are wrong not to go out, I assure you. They’re supposed to explain life, and they’re unfamiliar with it. Then, very often, their philosophies have something enclosed and desiccated about them. It’s not life, in truth, it’s nothing.”

Michel agreed with her. For a moment, he remembered the tower that he had once built for his ideas. His ideas were lodged there, in the tall and narrow tower, but La Métienka had not danced there.

“Yes,” she related, “I dance wherever I’m summoned, in music-halls or elsewhere, but for money. I need money; poverty is death. What I dance, people don’t know. They don’t understand it—but they feel it, all the same.”

“What do you dance?”

“I dance the will to live, and the negation of the will to live. I’m a disciple of Schopenhauer. Look, he’s my master; he never leaves me.”

From a table within arm’s reach she picked up three red-bound volumes.

“Here he is. My lovers leave me; my master, no. You know how he defined music: ‘the immediate objectification of the will.’ He would have defined dancing in the same way, if he had seen La Métienka dance. He’s dead, poor man.”

She had a momentary hint of chagrin—but she continued: “The will to live is not immobile, nor does it make the grand gestures that accompany speech: the words come after or not at all. Nor does it make disorder; there is a rhythm in nature, which is its work. Then it dances—and I imitate its dance. Or rather, when I dance, I am the will to live that is dancing.”

Michel listened with surprise.

“You understand, don’t you? Another time, I’ll explain to you why I also dance the negation of the will to live. It’s not death. I’ll explain it to you...if you like.”

Certainly! But La Métienka went on, swiftly: “Your turn! Tell me about sirium.”

Michel felt an immediate annoyance. What did he still know about sirium? Must he dig into the rubble of his memory to search for the shreds of that old story?

“Oh no!” he said. “Please!”

She laughed—but she insisted. She was teasing, gracefully demanding. And Michel was obliged, in the end, to list the properties of sirium. That intimidated him too; the technical terminology embarrassed him.

“Have no fear,” said La Métienka. “I understand.”

When he had related the principal facts, with a bleak slowness, La Métienka was enchanted.

She concluded: “Sirium is evidently the will to live. Or, if you prefer, sirium is the manifest objectification of the will to live, like my dancing, like me. I shall dance sirium.”

Michel had not expected that adventure at all. He laughed at it.

“Don’t laugh,” said La Metineka. “You’ll see. If the dance grips me, if I’m possessed by the will to live, my legs, my arms and my entire body are animated by a movement born of itself, which has no resource but within itself and which multiples by itself; and it is not energy that is lost or squandered or transformed but energy that spreads out and retains its plenitude. The eyes that watch me are avid to receive it; and the bodies that feel me close by quiver; and the souls flourish.”

Michel yielded to the ardor of these promises. All the same, he objected: “Except that you get tired?”

“Oh, you haven’t seen La Métienka dance!” she cried.

Immediately, she was on her feet. She called out; the chambermaid and the footman came in. The furniture was moved back to the walls or carried into the next room, along with the white fur that served as a carpet. That clearance left a fairly large space, which La Métienka measured, pacing back and forth.

“Remove this too,” she said, “and this. No, put that armchair over there is the corner, for Monsieur Bedée. There—that’s good.”

The chambermaid and the footman left. Michel was alarmed by these preparations, and was even more to when La Métienka unfastened her dress and corsage and appeared in a fine lace underskirt, her arms bare and her cleavage half-uncovered.

“Watch me!” she said.

She extended her arms, stood up on the points of her feet. And, without moving, she began to sing a sort of bizarre cantilena, the words of which he did not understand and the harmony of which had the appearance of ponderously lifting up the masses of primal chaos. Then her arms moved, as if, during the primary animation, elementary confusions were being detached.

The dancer’s eyes were closed; they gradually opened. Her lips were only slightly parted to let out the breath of the monotonous cantilena; the cantilena was exalted, and the beautiful mouth quivered in a joyful smile. Her body escaped the ground, took flight, and, if it fell back, it was only to rebound. It ran and it galloped; it evoked the running of maenads, the fury of bacchantes, the fearful and furtive coquetry of nymphs; it evoked the universal joy of animals that indulge their savage velocities in the forests, the lightness of young women parading their farandoles on beaches.

La Métienka danced with her entire body. She had no more need of song to accompany the mime, the prodigious music of her dance. She arched herself and outlined the forms of mountains. She undulated and had the tidal ebb and flow of the sea. She floated and had the marvelous lightness of the air.

She spun on her axis and the light posed vivid reflections and the fluttering of her layers of lace; they seemed to rise up to her raised arms, to her agitating hands, on which the rings shone like flames, after having multiplied the prowess of her ardor; but then one might have thought that her languor was even more ardent, as if everything around her were following her rhythm, the appearance of her repose indicating the paroxysm of the general frenzy. And she set off again, as if, around her, the things were slowing down, and it was necessary to shake them up again.

The tresses of her hair came undone, and danced with her, long and supple; sometimes they leapt, sometimes they followed her like a scarf of darkness. And her breasts were palpitating passionately, white and proud, in the gestures of the dance.

Toward the end of the dance, La Métienka sang again, and it was a great melodious clamor that ended by fading away into silence when the dance had already faded into immobility.

La Métienka came to Michel, and he looked at her avidly; he was subject to a fascination of his senses and his mind. His entire being had participated in the crazed exuberance of that young woman, who enlivened ideas with a fine enthusiasm; and he surrendered himself to her.

She said: “La Métienka is not tired. She is not even warm. Touch her hands, touch her arms.”

And Michel touched her, with his tremulous fingers; he obeyed her, and the contact of the white, cool skin frightened him.

She went on: “La Métienka would dance again, if she had not preferred to come to say to you: ‘Tire La Métienka, then, if you are brave enough!’”

Then, all thought capsized within Michel’s head, and such was the tumult of the blood in his veins that he heard a loud ringing of bells in his ears. He took La Métienka in his arms and, falling into the hollow of an armchair, he felt her, utterly amorous, on his knees, against his breast, against his cheek. He marveled that she was so light to carry, so soft to hold.

And he recited deliriant litanies to her: “La Métienka is the sun that warms me...La Métienka is a spring where I shall drink...La Métienka is a flower whose perfume intoxicates me. Métienka, you are life!”

She poured into him all the delights of sensuality. For the first time since he had become a man, he knew the pleasure of collective ecstasy; for the first time, love did not appear to him as the fraternal companion of death.

He said to La Métienka: “Métienka, I love you!”

She replied: “Don’t love me. Love is the fraternal companion of death. La Métienka is life. Don’t love me; profit from the life that is given to you. All that is but pleasure—and love would kill the pleasure.”

But he forgot, amid the kisses, the prudence of refraining from love. He confused love and sensuality.

* * * *

Michel had beautiful days with La Métienka. He spent them in joyful lust.

They went for walks—and the landscape seemed completely different to Michel. An extraordinary festival had been installed there, a festival of trees, mountains, air and water. If he had loved nature before, it had been to borrow a melancholy sentiment therefrom, compounded of subtle memories and savant delicacies of sorrow—but now nature was no longer anything but joy.

La Métienka celebrated, in philosophy, the will to live, which she was also able to dance. Thus she celebrated sirium, the primary emanation of the will to live—and Michel consented to it. He made sparse utterances in that regard, and La Métienka laughed at the disorder of his ideas. He laughed with her.

But one day, La Métienka said to him: “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

He did not want to go, and he wept like a child whose caprice has been frustrated. “Why not stay?” he asked.

“Forever?”

“Yes, forever! If happiness is here, we won’t find it elsewhere.”

She replied: “The will to live doesn’t settle; it is movement.” She added: “And then, you know, the Baron’s demanding me; I have no desire to lose him. He has a heart of gold!” She burst out laughing. “Gold, you hear? And gold is necessary to life!”

She had not yet mentioned the Baron to him in such a peremptory fashion. Michel protested; he made a scene. La Métienka treated him like a little boy who is saying nothing but stupid things—and then she took pity on him, and gently told him the most consoling things she could contrive.

When he resisted such persuasive remonstrations, she became impatient. “I told you not to love me. I thought you were more intelligent. And in that case, goodbye—I’m leaving on my own.”

But at the idea of letting her leave without him, his rebellion was such that he soon accepted whatever La Métienka wished. He even begged her to forgive his violence; he repented of it and promised to be good from now on.

She was able to soothe Michel and divert his bitterness.

They left the next day. They were going to Paris, Michel with chagrin, La Métienka without regret.

Michel was still afraid of the passing time; by virtue of scarcely moving and staying in the same environment of joy or sadness, he forgot that the hours were hurrying madly, but whenever a episode in his life came to an end—and this one was the only one that had satisfied him completely!—he saw the end of everything and despaired.

La Métienka, for her part, counted on the inexhaustible resources of life, on the abundance of chance; she had no sentiment of the past. In short, their imaginations did not inhabit the same portion of time. They had met one another, momentarily, at the point where the domains of their souls were adjacent, and then—now—they were drawing apart.

La Métienka had a whim; to go away, they would cross the lake. The road that they had selected for the journey began on the other shore. The automobile made a long detour and would wait for them over there.

They crossed the lake in Brigitte’s boat.

Michel experienced the double attraction of his two companions, life and death. It as life that was leading him; it was death that, docile to the desires of life, was transporting them both—but he did not know whether death would abandon him completely or retain him.

He observed that, while rowing, Brigitte was watching him, and that she was also watching the beautiful, triumphant Métienka amused by the promise of tomorrows. La Métienka did not neglect him, however. She said to him: “Look how the clouds are racing. That one, hemmed with sunlight, is going more rapidly than the others. The others are trying to catch up with it; they’re hurrying. One of them is going to fall upon the mountain; it’s dead; the others are hurrying. It’s a superb folly that exalts them, the folly of the one that had stolen the fragments of the sun and decorated itself with them. It’s drawing them all along. How beautiful it is, Michel! It’s necessary, therefore, that you kiss me.”

Michel kissed her lips, red with life. It seemed to him that gentle death leaned more profoundly over her oars, and, chastely, avoided seeing the ardent conduct of the lovers.

They got out of the boat. Brigitte made the reverence. La Métienka paid no heed to it; the journey was calling to her.

Michel said to Brigitte: “Adieu, Brigitte. I don’t know why I’m going, but I’m going; it’s a fact that I observe with astonishment.”

Brigitte said nothing. She stayed to hear Michel out, though, and Michel said to her then: “I’ll never forget you, Brigitte; and when I die, I shall believe that your boat is carrying me away, and that you are at the oars. Adieu; and since you pray, pray for me.”

Brigitte listened in silence.

But La Métienka, in the automobile, shouted for Michel. “Well, Michel, come on!”

He came. And when he arrived, La Métienka, laughing, asked him: “Are you not in love with that girl, my dear?”

He did not know what to say. She added: “That girl who is pretty and who has the face of death. I detest her. I don’t want the face of death to be pretty.”

And Michel said: “Are you jealous?”

“Oh,” she said, “you annoy me!”

And they left.

Brigitte, in her boat, prayed.

* * * *

In Paris, Michel initially had the impression of no longer being anything but a stranger in the city that was familiar to him and the appearance of whose streets and houses he recognized. He had no domicile, and took a room in a hotel, like a traveler passing through. He did not know, in any case, whether he would be living in Paris henceforth; he did not think about it. On the first day, he was rather surprised to be there.

Principally, however, he thought about La Métienka, and he suffered because of her, no longer having her. At the railway station he had been obliged, by her order, to pretend not to know her; the Baron was waiting. He saw the Baron, a fat blond man with curly hair. Even his beard was golden. He watched La Métienka, very seductive in his presence. And he had gone away, as La Métienka wished.

In his room, now, he belonged to his jealousy; he could imagine only too clearly the Baron’s pleasure, La Métienka’s complaisance.

She had said: “I’ll try to come to see you tomorrow.”

“Today!”

“No, not today. What do you expect?”

Then he understood that she had reserved the entire day and night for her lover—and he was annoyed, with the result that, in her turn, she was annoyed too. And then, he had been so tormented, with such sincere pain that, in order not to see his tears, she had promised to come to see him the same day.

He waited for her, and she did not come. But as she might have come, he dared not go out, and waited, absurdly, until nightfall for the faintest noise in the corridor, the rolling of carriage-wheels in the street, the purr of automobiles. His fingers quivered and the joints of his knuckles ached. He looked at the time and marched back and forth, counting on the duration of those short trajectories to occupy the series of minutes.

His night was weighed down by fever and disturbed by insomnia.

La Métienka did not come the next day, and Michel wrote to her. She arrived, furious: “The Baron might have seen that letter—and what then?”

“Then,” said Michel, “that’s what I want.”

Passion drove him crazy.

She arrived furious, but even more charmed by that love, which she ignited by desire as much as by joy. She intoxicated Michel with the magnificent gift of her ingenious fervor—but when she announced that she was going home, to the Baron’s house, Michel argued and protested.

She ran away, and Michel was not quick enough to run after her. He called to her from the window. In order not to howl, he stuck his fist between his teeth.

Afterwards, La Métienka became skillful in taming that fury. With lies and calculated promises, with jokes, with sensuality, with cynicism, she exhausted an inconvenient jealousy, and debased Michel to the extent that she obtained his patience.

She even introduced him to the Baron, and Michel accepted his dinner invitations, evenings at the theater and cabarets. He made the decision not to be foolish, and to allow people to laugh at him because he was a dreamer, a simpleton, and taciturn.

La Métienka called him “her philosopher”—and, in fact, he was no longer Michel Bedée, but La Métienka’s philosopher and the lover of her heart. He was also the Baron’s parasite—one of his parasites, for the fat fellow had a court, an entourage of flunkeys, which cost him dear.

One evening, La Métienka made her debut in a concert hall. Michel was in front of the stage, with the Baron. As people were looking at the Baron, the enormous ruby on his chest, his exceedingly “Parisian” face, they also saw Michel, and he was recognized; the newspapers and magazines had published his portrait when he had discovered sirium. Michel noticed that people were talking about him; he sensed that they were scornful of him, or believed that they were, and he was momentarily ashamed; then he pretended to think that he provoked those multitudes, and was scornful of them. Then he repeated desperately to himself that “there is nothing vile in the house of Jupiter, in the house of Unity.” What did that crowd of imbeciles matter? And why should he blush and tremble?

The Baron said to him: “You know, Bedée, you’re having a little too much success—you’re going to spoil La Métienka’s entrance. Kindly slip behind me into the back of the box.”

Michel was glad to hide, but when La Métienka appeared on the stage, he forgot everything else. The applause that burst out resounded in his ears like the sound of glory and made him want to cry, so involved was he in that triumph.

Modestly, the Baron did not applaud.

And when La Métienka danced, Michel watched her, curious to know whether she would smile at him or the Baron, whom he detested at that moment. She did not smile at the Baron or at him; she did not even glance at them—but she surrendered herself to the anonymous crowd, carried it away with her in her movement, threw it from one extreme of the stage to the other at a run, causing it to dread her departure and animating it with the delight of her returns.

Michel was jealous of the crowd, but then he melted into the vehement crowd, and, in its midst, received the prodigality of smiles, gestures, swoons and graces that La Métienka distributed generously.

Afterwards, there as a splendid supper at La Métienka’s home, with the Baron’s friends, their mistresses—people who wanted to laugh. The Baron did things well, and they supped amid a profusion of flowers.

La Métienka was drunk, on the wine, the flowers and the success. She sang in Russian, turbulent songs whose pantomime indicated obscenity. She became sleepy and recited phrases from Schopenhauer, which, thus presented, seemed a trifle equivocal. And the Baron, with a jesting eye and innocent soul, affirmed that he did not understand; then people searched for hidden meanings.

La Métienka declared: “Don’t you think they’re stupid, my little Michel?” And she begged Michel to come and undress her, because she was tired—but the Baron protested, and there were offensive remarks, ridiculous remarks.

Michel left, and outside, in the fresh air, he felt that he was as drunk as La Métienka. He wanted her; his concupiscent hands wanted her, and searched in front of him as he walked. He retraced his steps and slyly hid himself as best he could at the corner of the house next door, to wait stupidly. He did not go home until dawn, and then went to the window; the day had a difficult genesis, amid a confusion of gray and yellow vapors. Michel was sickened by the wretched aspect of the pregnant sky, giving birth in a sickly dawn.

And he went to bed. He slept heavily, as if exhausted.

He slept late into the afternoon, but someone knocked on his door. He woke up, shouted “Come in”—and saw, fresh and radiant, La Métienka.

“No, no, you’re not dreaming,” she said, “it’s me.”

And she had come running, because the Baron had forbidden her to see Michel again.

“Oh, oh, I shall still see you!” she affirmed. “Except, my dear Michel, let’s be prudent!”

And she only had two minutes, All the same, yes, all the same, she couldn’t go like that, no, no. She had wanted Michel since the night before...no, since the morning...one no longer knew, with these nocturnal follies...and so much the worse for the Baron!

She had, indeed, wanted Michel since the morning, and it was her morning desire that she contented. When she had gone, still cheerful out of habit, she was no longer launched into the future by a new desire—and Michel did not retain her. They had arrived together at full satiation and separated indifferently.

“I’ll come again next week,” said La Métienka.

“Yes.”

“Adieu, my darling!”

“Adieu, my beauty!”

And Michel was disgusted by those words, which were nothing but polite hypocrisy; he wiped the lamentable kiss of their farewell from his lips. Then he did not miss La Métienka at all—but for want of diversion, he missed the occupation of his days and his heart by the mad love of that woman.

* * * *

Henceforth, there was nothing for him to do but wander through the streets of the city like a lost dog. He knew the horrible ennui of afternoons that drag on and on, the distress of metropolitan dusks, the desolate gleam of the first lights that star the half-light of the declining day; he knew the fatigue of vain walking.

More than once, passers-by greeted him; he did not try to remember their names or faces. Unknown to him, the newspapers had announced his return. He was hardly alive, but the little that he lived did not place him in reality; he belonged neither to time nor space. He endured, and drifted at random.

One evening, however, the whim took him to go and see his house, out there in Auteuil. By the time he arrived there it was dark, and he walked alongside the walls like a thief. That house, however, which was no longer his own, he distinguished from the others with a singular emotion. It was not only his eyes that found it again; an extraordinary movement of his heart identified it to him—and he looked at it for a long time.

It was exactly as he had left it, in the midst of clumps of trees. Since his departure, however, the trees had shed their dead leaves; now, in spring, their new verdure was forming large bouquets.

There was light in all the windows of the house. Genevieve was there, watching over the patients: Genevieve and Pierre Dauzanne.

”Genevieve Dauzanne.” Michel repeated that name, which astonished him. He half-expected the garden gate to open, and that Genevieve Dauzanne would come out; she would not see him but he would see her.

Genevieve did not come out. After a few minutes, Michel left. He was not devastated, but he had sensed the continuation of life without him.

Life had forgotten him; and he also forgot it.

The next morning, led by hazard, he went into a church. The organ was playing and the choir singing, for a funeral. There were black drapes and candles around a catafalque, forming a kind of fragment of nocturnal sky, fallen upon the dead man to reclaim him from the earth.

Michel sat down among the people who were paying amicable tribute to the dead man. The church pleased him. He recognized its atmosphere, its odor; he felt that he was surrounded by memories; he thought that after strange adventures, he had returned to Brittany, and that the lumber of his childhood was welcoming him kindly. He experienced a sort of gratitude, a kind of soft tenderness, and yielded to its charm.

Once, when he had quit the vicinity of the church, when he had left the gentle shadow that it spread over his mother’s garden, he had been languishing for a long time in the midst of holy customs and their sadness; they were like a heavy cloak upon him. Young, and counting on marvels, he had thrown away that cloak and had departed, curious and full of hope—but here he was, back again, his soul bare and shivering; the mantle of mourning made him envious.

In the same way that he had once diverted himself from a poignant ennui by squandering himself among the perpetual novelties of ideology and nature, now it was the past that astonished him and tempted him with a bizarre attraction. The episodes of the liturgy led him through the paths of his memory. He followed the course of the Latin phrases; sometimes he anticipated the words and the tune, and was content when the words arrived in the places assigned to them.

When the Dies irae burst forth, he submitted to the grim declamation of the psalm as to a tempestuous fatality. He surrendered passionately to the universal death that was passing, the storm that kills, that hastens to kill, to kill everything, since everything is nothing but pain.

Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla!

Ashes! Final ashes, scattered in the wind of the supreme cyclone: ashes in which the residue of beings and things is annihilated; the ashes of peoples and individuals, the ashes of monuments and dwellings; the ashes of thought and its inventions; the ashes of effort and its works; the ashes of hope and its deceptions; the ashes of barbaric or ingenious frenzy; the ashes of the general devastation, the dissolution of the All and its miseries, the final and ultimately sterile ashes!

That tragic malediction of life did not frighten Michel. His mind accepted it easily. He had always heard it proffered, in churches, with the vehemence of the spiritualism that bloodies the flesh in order to disengage the soul. And this time, the fury of the cantors shook him more profoundly; but the paradoxical doctrine of the life that the living blaspheme found him ready for persuasion.

The infinite plaint, the desolate appeal, the tremulous prayer of the Requiem went, beyond his present soul, to search for his erstwhile soul. Lamb of God, who bears the sins of the world, grant him eternal rest.

Lamb of God, who bears the sins of the world, Michel thought. The sins of the world—that’s life. Lamb of God, give us eternal rest. Eternal rest—that’s death. Lamb of God, let us die.

Michel’s reverie calmed him, as if he were lulled by a tender and continual nursery song, a song to induce sleep—rest and sleep, death and darkness.

He remembered his mother, whom he had forgotten. He remembered her with no more sorrow that one experiences with regard to the distant past. He remembered that she was dead, and asleep in eternal rest.

He also remembered his sister, whom he had forgotten, and who was dead to the world, to the sins of life, and who was participating, in a distant convent, in eternal rest.

And he remembered himself, as if he were dead too, and dead long enough for even his regret to have died.

All those dead people, the song of eternal rest prayed for, and with its prayer, lulled them, sent them to sleep.

Michel continued thinking about them, candidly and softly, until the end of the mass. Then he went out. On the parvis, he waited, not knowing what he was waiting for. He was no longer thinking about anything precisely; his thoughts had gradually dispersed into a singular lethargy.

When the coffin was carried to the hearse he thought that it was his own coffin, and when the hearse moved off, he accompanied the cortege; and he thought that he was following his own funeral procession.

He thought about himself for some time, as people who were following the funeral procession devoted the initial chatter of the route to the dead man.

“He was a jolly good fellow,” someone said.

And Michel began to feel kindly toward the jolly good fellow who was himself, now.

“He didn’t have much luck,” added another friend.

“No,” murmured Michel, “he didn’t have much luck; but he was a jolly good fellow, very simple, very kind.”

And he would gladly have exchanged a few memories of the jolly good fellow, very simple and very kind, with his neighbors in the cortege—except that they were already talking about something else. Then Michel, too, stopped thinking about the dead man, the dead man who was himself.

Afterwards, he abandoned the cortege.

* * * *

He ate lunch in a little restaurant in an outlying district. He ordered his meal, as if he were not dead, and ate very attentively. Then he resumed walking, aimlessly, his arms swinging.

He encountered a crowd that was gathering at a narrow doorway and not getting through easily. He joined the queue. When people jostled him, he jostled back, jogged elbows, was artful, disdained insults and went in.

He perceived that he was in a large malodorous hall, where people were smoking and shouting, and he missed the open air—but there was no possibility of getting out; the crowd continued to flow in and it was impossible to go against the current.

Michel saw a stage in front of him covered in red twill, decorated with red flags; a kind of theater, rather wretched; a puppet-show of unaccustomed dimensions.

Two memories mingled in Michel’s confused mind: the memory of the puerile Punch-and-Judy show in which his childhood had loved to see the policeman thrashed—and what joy when that policeman died, head hanging down, over the edge of the little stage!—and the memory of that other, enticing marionette, the pink and white Métienka, who exerted herself and fluttered. Michel fused them willingly!

He did not know and scarcely wondered what was going to be performed—the polemic of the puppet-show and the policeman or La Métienka’s dance. He did not distinguish between the two spectacles clearly enough for it to be necessary to choose.

A poster he perceived, however, changed the course of his ideas. That poster was, like all the rest, red—the red of ox-blood. And in black letters, it advertised a great social gathering, entitled Science and the Revolution.

Michel looked around. The hall, broad and deep, was packed with men and women, pell-mell. There were even children, several at the teat.

One of Michel’s neighbors annoyed him, because he spat a little too frequently; he spat after each of the puffs he took on his short pipe. Michel remembered very exactly that he had never bee able to abide contact with the so-called “working class” and he regretted being a virtual prisoner of badly-dressed and violent people.

He read the names of the listed orators. They were: Citizen Lourdelot, député; Citizen Lionel Dupont “of the Society of Painters”; and Citizen Flandreau, “astronomer.” Michel remembered Flandreau, who had once been a fellow student; he remembered him, and he did not want to see him—but he would see him, among others, and that was that.

There was a movement of enthusiasm in the audience when the dignitaries of science and the revolution appeared on the stage. Lourdelot was in the lead. He had a coarse face, black-haired and bearded; he was corpulent; if he represented the starving in Parliament, he evidently did not let himself go hungry—but he had a rather timid, not to say pusillanimous, air about him. His small eyes, which did not sparkle overmuch between thick eyelids, consulted the audience anxiously. There was applause, and he was satisfied. Then, in a corner of the room, someone whistled; he became uneasy. The whistler, however, having received convincing digs in the ribs, fell silent, and Lourdelot, reassured, was triumphant.

Citizen Lionel Dupont, very tall and long-legged, slim-waisted and broad-shouldered, neatly dressed, tried to smile with jovial bonhomie that was neither in his character nor within reach of his talent. He had devoted the greater part of his existence to painting portraits of rich ladies; for imitating furs and fabrics he had no rival, and he had been in favor in the salons when he had suddenly been seized by the desire to change his clientele for another: the State. The lovely women of Paris, London, New York and Chicago had enriched him; the State would give him honors, the presidency of committees, influence and medals. So, he had applied himself to decorative painting; for the walls of national monuments he composed many republican panels, in which the people sympathize with a black-and-red-striped president, with députés of the left, with naked symbols of truth, justice and progress, and he spoke out rudely against bourgeois capitalism. He did not do it easily; involuntarily, his language conserved a singular subtlety. When he announced the coming of the Great Day, he sounded like a fop prattling about a great party. He perceived that; it embarrassed him. However, he experienced a perverse and delicious satisfaction in associating with the workers and paining the bosses, for the salons did not hold it against him; indeed, they welcomed him with more enthusiasm, as a more singular individual, very dangerous, whom they put on a semblance of domesticating.

And Flandreau, a small, brisk and wiry man, going gray, insinuated himself. He came in third, but was the foremost among the orators of the red table. As Lourdelot was applauded, Flandreau bowed, and people then applauded the smiling fellow’s advanced politeness.

After the orators came a dozen hearty fellows: former workers who no longer worked, having found good sinecures in syndical politics. They sat down, framing the orators, like a benevolent guard.

Lourdelot got up and proposed the singing of the Internationale. Everyone stood up. Michel, remaining seated, received sharp admonitions in his arms and back. He obeyed. And they sang.

The song dragged on, like a mediocre litany. Flandreau’s shrill voice passed through it like an odd thread in a weave. Lourdelot went at it wholeheartedly. Lionel Dupont, a trifle disorientated, contented himself with beating time, sometimes out of step.

Michel listened to that bleak canticle with astonishment. He was unmoved by it. He had the vague impression of being present at the celebration of a strange religion, a new religion whose rites did not concern him. The church, in any case, shocked him by its ugliness, and the sight of the officiants displeased him.

After the song, when the time came for the speeches, he did not think he was hearing a sermon; the puppet-theater was substituted for the church, and Lourdelot’s pantomime seemed droll to him. The enormous fellow did not have the room to fling his arms around as he wished. Lionel Dupont, who was to his right, and Flandreau, to his left, realized that and did their best to move away, making signs to their neighbors to move along, taking their chairs in both hands and hopping like fleas. They became tightly-packed, but Lourdelot seemed to swell up as he obtained more space, with the result that he bumped into them several times.

Now that he was speaking he no longer seemed timid. He spoke loudly, as fearful children sing in the dark; the formidable sound of his voice tranquilized him. What he said was of no importance, but he said it with so much zeal that one would not have believed that he was repeating himself mechanically for the hundredth time. He rolled out romantic metaphors, which floated over his speech like banners, and the banners were soon so numerous that they became confused, like flags with which a façade has been excessively decorated: the façade can no longer be seen and the colors of the flags mingle.

Michel did not try to make sense of it; he submitted to Lourdelot’s verbal flux; when people applauded, he applauded too, having no reason to protest against the overabundant, innocent words that he did not understand. A sudden contradictor surprised him; he even wondered what the man could have to complain about. The polemicist was silenced, and Michel thought that quite right.

After half an hour, Lourdelot shut up. Michel counted that to his credit; Lourdelot’s silence was a gift that cost the benefactor; besides which, there was no reason why a Lourdelot speech should terminate at one point rather than another; the orator had plenty of breath, and what he had repeated he could repeat endlessly. Michel appreciated the good manners; if the rain stops when the sky is still cloudy, one is pleased. One would be even more pleased if the clouds had disappeared, because one fears that the rain might start again. Michel could see that Lourdelot was still charged with eloquence; he suspected a further downpour.

In fact, Lourdelot got up again. He seemed to be struggling with difficulty against the din of applause. He swayed backwards and forwards, his belly posed on the red table. Michel applauded in order that he would remain silent.

He spoke, but it was only to hand the floor to Citizen Lionel Dupont, “the great and generous artist, the superb thinker.”

Citizen Dupont was not an improviser. He took a sheet of paper from his pocket, covered with scribbling in pencil, and read it awkwardly. The little phrases flowed as best they could. After Lourdelot’s muddy and violent torrent, it was a rather pure, gracious stream, but which ran over pebbles.

As the speech was having no success, Dupont experienced a need to change direction. He screwed up his text, stuffed it in his trouser pocket, altered his voice and cried: “Hurrah for revolution by science! Hurrah for science for humanity! Hurrah for humanity for itself!”

Michel excused him. Truly, an orator cannot push abnegation to the point of refusing all assent.

And the floor was Citizen Flandreau’s.

He was not hampered by literature, but he claimed a long tradition of dissipated scientists, the anticlerical and unfortunate Galileo and the democratic republican Arago, whom he outbid. His eloquence consisted of talking loudly and rapidly. He was not timid, and he addressed himself to the crowd as if to an audience of schoolchildren, except that she stammered slightly.

Michel had always thought him loquacious, but he admired the casual manner of the astronomer, who emerged from his astronomy so easily. First, Flandreau put religion on trial. He was blunt, condemning Catholic priests as sorcerers, accusing them of spreading lies that profited their cupidity and oppressed the people. Michel did not like that at all. Flandreau drew a picture of the Court of Rome that excited the enthusiastic and sympathetic hilarity of the audience. Michel was offended by it; he became impatient.

Flandreau began mocking the ceremonies of the Church—mass, communion, candles and incense. He recounted anecdotes that delighted his public, who stamped their feet in satisfaction. Michel restrained himself from shouting at Flandreau that he was an imbecile. Beside him, the pipe-smoker was no longer spitting; he was listening, open-mouthed, and sometimes wiped the back of his hand over his lips, which drooled slightly as he laughed.

Secondly—for the astronomer’s speech developed like a gross theorem—Flandreau sang the praises of science. He opposed to the absurd mummery of the Roman sorcerers the serene activity of scientists, their perfect disinterest, their studious thought. And while religion speculated cynically upon the naivety of multitudes, science cared for them; the discoveries of scientists became the remedies that human infirmity demands. Here was placed, willy-nilly, a digression on the “infamous comedy” of Lourdes; that was indispensable to animate an audience that was becoming less amused. Its amusement was renewed. Then Flandreau, who had not forgotten his theme, came back to science, the incomparable healer of all ills

“Two years ago,” he announced, “a man of genius found a new substance, sirium....”

Michel shivered.

“Sirium has, since then, cured dozens of sick people who would otherwise have died....”

“They’ll die all the same,” Michel muttered.

His neighbor gave him a dirty look. “What! They’ll die?” he said.

“Yes, they’ll die!” Michel replied.

The other gave the impression of getting a joke. “Ah! For sure!” And he laughed.

Michel was listening to Flandreau, who was prophesying without precaution the miracles of sirium.

“Dozens of sick people have been cured; hundreds will be cured; thousands will be cured; millions will be cured. And then all the sick will be cured. There will be no more disease. And what will have done that? Science. Who will it harm? Priests, because priests are the parasites of disease and death; they live on it. Sirium will have killed those two scourges of humankind, disease and religion.”

Michel felt provoked. All the stupidities that Flandreau was spreading offended him. He stood up and said: “I request to speak.”

He was booed—but Flandreau recognized him. “Citizens,” he declared, “citizens....”

As Michel remained standing, cries for him to sit down came from every direction. The tumult was such that Lourdelot intervened—but Flandreau claimed supremacy. He shouted: “Citizens, we have the great honor of counting among us the man of genius that I cited just now, Citizen Michel Bedée, the inventor of sirium, the savior of those unfortunate hosts....”

Michel protested, but his denial was lost in the din of unleashed enthusiasm.

Flandreau went on: “Citizen Bedée, do us the honor of coming to sit with us on the podium; your place is here.

Then, speaking while standing up, he grabbed the back of his chair and, with a forceful gesture and planted it between Citizen Lourdelot and himself. Lourdelot, who had nothing to say, shrank.

Michel had no desire to go up on stage, but the favor of the audience carried him there. When he was there, Lourdelot congratulated him and Lionel Dupont immediately wanted to be introduced to him. Michel bowed. He was angry; he was impatient to say why. He began: “Citizens....”

He regretted the word when Flandreau interrupted him. “I request Citizen Bedée’s permission to finish my speech. Afterwards, we will gladly give him the floor.”

In the audience people were shouting “Bedée!” and “Flandreau!”

Loudelot rose to his feet. “Citizen Flandreau has the floor, for the continuation of his admirable discourse.” He knew how much one suffers from not speaking, and came to the aid of his comrade; the few words he spoke did him good.

Flandreau reached his third point: the substitution of scientific morality for religious morality.

Michel had difficulty restraining himself, and when Flandreau paused for breath, he said to him: “There is no scientific morality.”

Flandreau was bewildered. “Not yet!” he said. And he developed his idea of a morality founded on the integral truth. It was not humorous. He had intended to extract jokes from that philosophy—but Michel was inhibiting him. Because of Michel, he dared not give in to his broad comedy. He was torn between the demands of the crowd and the fear of a contradiction that he divined—with the result that he became tedious. Then the audience, curious about Michel, stopped listening. Michel was the only one listening to what he was saying, and Michel was exasperated by it. It was necessary for Lourdelot to intervene several times to calm him down.

Michel wanted to respond to every statement; he was agitated. Lourdelot, becoming anxious, would gladly have closed the session when Flandreau fell silent amid the general indifference—but the audience demanded Citizen Bedée.

Michel cried, brutally: “Messieurs, you are being deceived!”

Flandreau, who was expecting it, attempted to laugh, but Lourdelot was annoyed. He tried to express his annoyance, but someone shouted: “Let Citizen Bedée speak.”

“You are being deceived,” Michel went on. “Science is not that at all, not at all! There are some here who are talking to you about science as something that exists. That’s not true. Science does not exist!”

Flandreau continued smiling, but his mouth was strangely contracted and his hands were trembling so much that, in order to occupy them with some movement that seemed voluntary, he tapped his fingertips against one another. He smiled, but he was not amused. Lionel Dupont was the one who was amused; he was secretly amused, with a slightly epicurean expression. His recent mania for brazen anarchism found a more malign pleasure in that swift demolition of science than the facile ideative edifices of a Lourdelot, let alone a Flandreau. Michel’s words procured him a kind of quasi-sensual joy.

Lourdelot, however, was bewildered. He examined the audience with a genuine anguish. It was not yet certain how it would react to this bizarre incident. It was hesitant. It seemed very cheerful, for the time being. But if it admitted Michel Bedée’s statements, the meeting would turn against the organizers, and if it evicted the killjoy, there would at least be a row, perhaps a brawl. The good Lourdelot did not like that. He leaned over behind Michel Bedée toward his comrade Flandreau and consulted him with a glance. Flandreau pulled a disdainful face.

Lourdelot, whom anxiety made decisive, rose to his feet. “Citizens!” he cried.

But in the first row of the audience, a pale and furious individual shouted, energetically: “Let Citizen Bedée speak!”

Lourdelot started again: “Citizens!”

“Let Citizen Bedée speak!” repeated the other, which an obstinacy that evidently would not yield.

Lourdelot argued: “I have the responsibility for this meeting. Citizen Bedée is not on the list of speakers. I do not have the right....”

Someone in the distance shouted: “Shut up!”

And the fanatic in the first row repeated: “Let Citizen Bedée speak!”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” was shouted on all sides.

Lourdelot wondered whether he ought not to close the session. People thought that he was backing down. Already, there was laughter in the auditorium. Besides which, Flandreau was unflinching, and Lionel Dupont had no intention of renouncing such a diversion. Crestfallen, Lourdelot fell back into his seat, with an expression of reluctant patience.

And Michel went on: “No, science does not exist. If it existed, with the evidence that is its very character, there would be no skeptics, there would be no infidels; it would impose itself. What they are calling science is merely a petty labor scarcely begun, which does not advance and which is always beginning over. You have heard my sirium praised. Well, here is the truth. My sirium demonstrates that the scientific hypothesis most assured thus far, is unsustainable, and worthless. Everything has to be remade. Yes, it will be remade, and perhaps I have remade it. I have my hypothesis; one of these days, another discovery will demolish it; I expect that; I desire it.”

He seemed brave. People applauded, and someone shouted: “Bravo! Bravo, Bedée!”

Lourdelot was at a loss; he no longer knew where things were headed.

And Michel, hitting his stride, did not stop. “Now, I ask you,” he continued, “What good can it be to you—to you—that sirium produces heat and electricity without diminishing its mass or its volume? What can it matter to you—to you—whether the law of conservation of energy is exact or false? It’s a conversation for the astronomer Flandreau and me...and then again, no, it’s none of his business!”

There was an outburst of laughter, because Flandreau scowled.

“You’ve been told that sirium cures sick people. I don’t deny it. I don’t say anything—it’s not my business. But because physicians and pharmacists sometimes utilize the discoveries of scientists, that’s no reason for anyone to excite you in the name of a science that doesn’t exist. There is no connection whatsoever between science and politics, between science and social life, between science and your labor as workers. There is no connection whatsoever between science and your pains, between science and your joys. There is no connection whatsoever between science and you.”

That offended several vanities in the audience. There were protests in places. Lourdelot, who sensed support, said: “I reject energetically that entirely aristocratic notion of science. The people will approve.”

“Let Citizen Bedée speak!” shouted the petty fanatic.

“You’re being duped!” Michel went on. “I know where science is, and I swear to you that it has found nothing—nothing at all, absolutely nothing—that engages you to live from now on otherwise than you have been living. Science isn’t much, but in any case, it’s something other than life. If someone tells you that in Peking, some mandarin had had his fingernails cut, you wouldn’t get excited about that. When someone tells you that I’ve discovered sirium, it’s of no greater importance for you. It’s something else. I tell you that it’s something else!”

He became animated, and took on the tone of an impetuous prophet. “Science...science is inhuman. It would be the unique marvel, if it existed and if we were pure intelligences to contemplate it. Science is the eternal diversion of God.”

“Down with the clergy!” someone bellowed.

“Look, I wanted to devote all my thought to science. Look at me—pity me. I’ll tell you what I’ve done, in order to devote all my thought to science. I’ve left my mother’s house, the cathedral of my childhood, the comfortable life that my parents and grandparents had carefully prepared for me. I’ve left my house, my homeland, my wife. I’ve left my memories, my affections, my loves. I’ve left everything. I’ve left myself. I locked myself away in a place that had no pleasures to distract me. I offered my head to ideas. They took up residence there as if they were at home; and they threw me out. I’ve become this: a man who has lost myself. I’m no longer anything but a vagabond, because I’ve left my location to ideas. Logically, it would have been necessary to die, but the body continued to live after I had lost myself, and it’s the body that is wandering, in search of myself.”

They thought he was mad; it seemed obvious.

“When I tell you that I’m searching for it, no—I don’t want it any longer. Alas, where could I lodge it, now that ideas have taken complete possession of my head? I know full well where it is; it’s where everyone’s self is: in the shadow of a church, in the maternal house. So I’m warning you: science is inhuman; humanity has nothing to do with science. Don’t you be fooled! Remain in the shadow of a church, in the house of memory and habit where you were born. Cultivate your god.”

“Down with the clergy!”

“You’ve been told that religions are nothing but lies. Don’t believe it. You’ve been deceived. Religions, I tell you, are human truths, just as science is inhuman.”

The audience was restless. There were shouts, but Michel paid no heed to them.

“The ingenious religions, which have lived and suffered in the course of the centuries with humankind, which have amused themselves with it, the good and beautiful religions, invite you. Don’t venture beyond their holy bounds; don’t emerge from their walls, papered with ex-votos. Beware of committing the folly of which I repent: don’t be men who have lost themselves. I say to you, I tell you this: say your prayers, in imitation of the ones your old mother said.”

There was whistling; there was howling—and when Michel tried to continue speaking, he was shouted down. His arms beat the air; he sketched grand gestures and, without being aware of it, without thinking about it, he slowly and broadly made the sign of the cross, crying: “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so let it be”

The crowd rushed upon him. The first to arrive grabbed him. Lourdelot abandoned him to them. Dupont was not a fighting man and Flandreau soon gave up on defending him. Michel was abused and shaken. He was thrown outside.

He was left there, more dead than alive.

* * * *

He was there, standing up, his legs like jelly, leaning back against a wall, his clothing ripped, his hands bloody, shivering and weeping, when a strange face appeared that he had difficulty recognizing at first.

“Michel!”

It was the Alchemist.

“Michel! My little Michel! Come on!”

But Michel could not move; he feared that he might fall if he moved. A policeman helped the old man to hold him up; they took him under the arms and led him to a fiacre.

The Alchemist sat down beside Michel, the policeman next to the coachman. In a pharmacist’s shop, Michel fainted. While the pharmacist laid him on the ground, fanned him and took care of him, the policeman questioned the witness, for his report.

“Monsieur Bedée,” the Alchemist replied. “Yes, Monsieur Bedée the scientist.... I was there by chance.... No, I don’t know where he lives. I came to Paris to see him six days ago, but it was impossible to discover his address. He’s been traveling for several months.... Then, in passing, I went into that lecture hall.... I don’t know what happened.... That’s all I can tell you. The rest has nothing to do with me.”

The policeman persisted,

“I tell you that the rest has nothing to do with me. It wasn’t me who mistreated Monsieur Bedée. I came to his aid, as best I could, through a furious crowd.”

Michel came round. He was asked for his address; he gave it. The pharmacist certified that he was not seriously injured—just bruises. A little rest, calm....

It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Sunday strollers were out and about. There was a crowd at the door of the pharmacy that scarcely parted as the Alchemist and Michel went through. Hatless and in rags, Michel advanced like a drunken man. The Alchemist had the roof of the cab raised. The adventure put him to the torture; he, who had once stood up so bravely to the wrath of an entire town, was ashamed of his tatterdemalion companion. More than anything else, he was tormented by the frightful anxiety that Michel might heave gone mad.

They remained silent all the way back to the hotel and went up to Michel’s room amid the mocking gazes of waiters and maids.

“Go to bed,” said the Alchemist. “I’ll help you.”

Like a sick child, Michel allowed him to do it. When he was in bed, he closed his eyes. Ideas came and went in his mind, not pausing. And he went to sleep.

The Alchemist sat in an armchair and watched him sleep, mouth open, like an abandoned corpse: Michel Bedée, his pupil, the mid of genius whose science he had awakened, the mind of genius, who had gone mad.

The minutes dragged like hours; the Alchemist filled them with his chagrin.

He consulted himself as to whether he ought to call a doctor; the old hatred he had for men of that profession restrained him. Then again, if Michel had gone mad, was he to be locked up like a vulgar lunatic in a padded cell? Were the death-throes of that admirable brain to be prolonged? What was the point?

Besides, Michel was not mad. The speech he had given, his odious speech, did not reveal mental alienation; the ideas followed one another rigorously. No, Michel had not gone mad. But in that case, he had, while fully lucid, blasphemed science. The Alchemist did not know whether he pitied Michel or whether, on principle, he hated him. In a state of uncertainty he watched over him, monitored his respiration, and observed the movement of his muscles, which contracted at times.

He would have liked to interrogate him, to ask him, gently: “What’s wrong, Michel? What’s wrong with your thinking? Tell me what has happened to your mind, to the most beautiful, strong and subtle mind of the epoch? If something has frightened you, tell me. Perhaps it’s something simple that has frightened you; I’ll explain it to you....”

Michel’s sleep irritated him. It seemed to him that if he could talk to Michel for a little while he could bring him back to a true sense of reality. He coughed—but was immediately fearful of the sight of Michel sitting up in bed and talking nonsense. He remained silent, avoiding movement. Except that he feared that, in that strange sleep, so sudden and so absolute, Michel might sink, as a man fallen into water might drown.

He waited—and he thought about Michel’s work, the manuscript from Rijnsburg of which he was the custodian. It was, in the clearest form, the most powerful effort of reasoning furnished by a human mind since Leibniz. It was a prodigious monadology, taken further than any other, founded on the most rich and new experience, rich in unexpected facts and surprising promises.

Michel, Michel, the Alchemist said to himself, you were the great honor of science. Your genius was radiant. You were our enlightenment!

There were two brief raps at the door. The Alchemist dared not respond. He got up without making a noise, and carefully opened the door.

“Monsieur Bedée? Have I made a mistake?”

“Come in,” said Michel’s voice.

La Métienka came in, astonished to find Michel in such a posture. Michel looked at her, and made no reply.

“Monsieur Bedée is ill,” said the Alchemist. “I hope that it’s nothing, but he needs rest.”

La Métienka had a thousand questions.

“He needs rest,” replied the Alchemist—and he indicated well enough that he had no comment to make other than that affirmation. La Métienka put her gloves, her umbrella and her feather boa down on a table, and sat down next to the bed on a chair.

Michel closed his eyes. Then, suddenly, he raised his head, sat up on his elbow and, looking at La Métienka, he said: “Go away, my beautiful Métienka, go away!”

“No,” she said.

“Yes, yes. Go away. I no longer want you. It’s necessary that you go away. Your place isn’t with me. Go away, be kind. Go where I tell you to go. Go back, quickly, to where we were. Go to the lake. Call Brigitte. Tell her to come, and to hurry, because I’m waiting for her.”

La Métienka listened in amazement. She did not reply. Michel saw her embarrassment, and saw her consult the old man with her eyes. The latter was pale, his jaws clenched, and he was trembling.

Michel was speaking as if in a kind of dream. He smiled slightly, to say to La Métienka: “You won’t go to fetch Brigitte for me? Are you jealous, my beautiful Métienka?”

She too tried to smile, but she could not; her painted lips made a grimace of dolor over her pretty teeth.

“Adieu,” said Michel, then. “Adieu, my beautiful Métienka. And enjoy yourself, out there. You need to enjoy yourself, or what would you do?”

She did not go away. She wanted to away, but she was held back by a sentiment of politeness. Her head was thrown back, her nostrils pinched with horror, as if she feared an odor of death and was avoiding it.

“Go away! Go away! Go away!” Michel shouted.

He was beginning to get angry.

“Go away, Métienka, if you don’t want me to throw you out. Go away—and if you refuse to go in search of Brigitte for me, well, Brigitte will come of her own accord. I’m not worried about Brigitte; she’ll come when you’re gone. But go!”

La Métienka stood up. She held out her hand to Michel.

“No, no, go away!”

Michel let himself fall back on the pillow. He hid his face there and breathed deeply.

The Alchemist accompanied La Métienka to the door. He bowed to her, and she disappeared.

“Has she gone?” Michel asked.

“Yes,” the Alchemist replied. “Who is she?”

“Didn’t you recognize her? Oh, that’s true—you don’t know her! No, no. How could you know her? An old scientist, always enclosed by the thick walls of his laboratory. It’s true, its true—you don’t know her, my poor old master!” He burst out laughing and said: “That’s funny!”

“Who is she?” asked the Alchemist.

“Well, she’s life!”

“Ah!” said the Alchemist, with an expression of good faith. “And this Brigitte you were asking for, who’s she?”

“You know her. She’s coming. She’s not far away. You’ll see her. She’s charming. She’s death.”

The Alchemist said nothing. Michel’s mind was wandering.

“You see,” Michel continued. “In a country—I don’t know which—I encountered life and death. I hesitated between those two women, who both tempted me. I took life first; she was less patient. Now I’m waiting for the other. You’ll see her. She’s a strange girl, all dressed in black, with a black hood. She has a rosary in her hands. She makes reverences to you and begs your pardon. I’ve loved her for a long time. She’s blonde. The tresses of her blonde hair, beside her black hood, make a delightful contrast. And her voice! It’s a voice that speaks to souls, in a whisper.”

“Get some rest!” said the Alchemist.

Michel rested for some time. He was lying on his back, and looking straight ahead, vaguely. The Alchemist drew away slightly, and read the papers that he took out of his pocket, making no noise, so as to leave Michel in the solitude in which he was languishing.

Suddenly, however, Michel asked him: “Did you understand?”

“What?”

“What I said to you just now?”

“Yes!”

“I don’t believe it. That would astonish me, because all that is no business of a scientist. What I said to you is, however, the main thing—but it’s exactly what you’ve neglected during your entire life. What an adventure!”

A little later, he added: “There’s something I don’t understand, though—which is what you’re doing here, with me?”

The Alchemist was pleased by the surprise that Michel exhibited: a judicious surprise. It seemed to him that the sick man was returning to a true sentiment of reality; it was a good sign.

Then, in short sentences, easy to understand, he recounted how he had come to Paris because of the article in the newspapers that had announced the return of the illustrious scientist. And then....

But Michel interrupted him.

“I don’t say no. Anyway, what does it matter? Except, when Brigitte comes, you’ll go away?”

The Alchemist, disconcerted, had no response.

“Before then, however,” Michel said, “I have a few things to say to you. Firstly, I have to forgive you. You’ve done me a great deal of harm. Yes, all the harm, it’s you who’ve done it. I didn’t ask you for anything. I was a child, like the others. I had my mother and my sister. I was a good child, who liked to stay close to his mother’s dress. And you called me outside. I came. Oh, you didn’t seem like a siren, to look at you!”

Michel laughed, almost mechanically.”

“It wasn’t you who were calling me; it was your mistress, science! Oh, she’s pretty, your mistress!”

The Alchemist shivered. Michel took pity on him. “I forgive you. It isn’t your fault. You were an old man who had a very demanding mistress, who wasn’t sufficient to satisfy her. For that mistress, science, you procured a young man—and that was me, unfortunately. We left, she and I. The most cynical thing, of course, is that you protected our amours, and you accompanied us; you installed us together, out there, in a solitude in which she would have me all to herself, to slake her avid ardor. I was married, but so what? The demoiselle had need of my services. Anyway, don’t distress yourself, since I forgive you.”

Evening was approaching. The Alchemist switched on the electric lights. Then he closed the curtains at the window. There was a small chandelier in the ceiling, and a lamp on the night-stand.

Michel, his eyes bright with fever, spoke without pause. One idea led to another, often a long way, and there was an uninterrupted procession.

“Brigitte does better. She too was expelled, wounded; no one loves her, no one talks to her, no one thanks her, everyone scorns her. And it’s she who, instead of forgiving, asks forgiveness. Me, I forgive you, that’s all. But when Brigitte comes I shall say to her: ‘Brigitte, give me your hands, let me mingle my fingers with yours, and we’ll both recite the same rosary....’ To begin with, she’ll move away, because she’s a little skittish. That’s quite natural: she’s a young woman! But I’ll be able to convince her. And we’ll go together through the streets of the city, reciting our rosary, in order that the people of the city might learn from us that they should do it like that, and not otherwise. We’ll go everywhere, into the outlying districts, into the public meetings. We’ll be threatened. And Brigitte, with her reverences, will mollify the most ferocious. But beside her, I shall say: ‘In he name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I assure you that there is no other science than reciting, in a modest voice, one’s rosary in the presence of Brigitte, who is death. Science is an inhuman lie....”

“No!” cried the Alchemist, involuntarily.

“If you prefer,” Michel went on, “I’ll say: ‘Science is an inhuman truth....’ Oh no, that’s too much! Master, you’re putting words in my mouth. I’ll say: ‘Science is a small scrap of inhuman truth; but here, in the rosary, is all human hope. Scorn science, and say your rosary, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so let it be!’ That’s what I shall do. I forgive you, yes, but it’s necessary, all the same, that others shouldn’t be duped by you, as I was. I’ll be an apostle of repentance, against science.”

“Shut up, Michel,” said the Alchemist. “That’s blasphemy.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, it’s blasphemy! It’s you, however, who wrote these sublime pages....”

“Oh, let’s talk about them!”

“Yes, these pages where there is a summation of truth—the most powerful that ever emerged from a human brain....”

“Tear them up; I repent. Give them to me, so that I can tear them up. Give them to me, give them to me!”

He escaped from the bed, furious—but he was so weak that the Alchemist was able to reckon with him and lie him down. He said to him: “Come on, Michel, my little Michel, try to sleep. It’s late and you need rest.”

“Yes, I need rest!” Michel confessed, in a weak voice. “I need an immense rest. Only, Brigitte hasn’t arrived. What time is it?”

“Sleep, sleep, Close your eyes. Don’t think abut anything. Sleep.”

Michel complained about the light; the Alchemist switched off the chandelier. The lamp was also irritating Michel; and he promised to go to sleep if the lamp were extinguished.

They were both in the dark, the Alchemist immobile in an armchair, and Michel restless beneath his sheets, the Alchemist devastated, as if in confrontation with a disaster, and Michel sincerely docile, trying to go to sleep.

He did not succeed. After a short time, he declared: “A curse upon science! Get her out of here; she’s torturing me.”

“Be quiet and go to sleep,” replied the Alchemist.

“I tell you she’s torturing me. Save me from science. A curse on her!”

“Be quiet and go to sleep,” repeated the Alchemist, brutally this time.

“A curse on her! A curse on her!”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Thus their vehement contradiction alternated in the gloom. Now the Alchemist was no longer looking after Michel. He renounced him, and, in the final analysis, was defending insulted science against him.

He renounced Michel, because, all things considered, what else could he do? Michel—the real Michel—was dead. What was left of Michel was worthless.

And the two voices of the two men who could not see one another disputed violently for and against science, with mystical and hateful phrases.

Michel no longer forgave the Alchemist; and the Alchemist no longer spared Michel; he reproached him for his apostasy, the shameful discourse at the public meeting and that girl, La Métienka, and that other girl, Brigitte—in brief, all the debauchery in which the genius of the scientist been besmirched, debased. And Michel replied with sarcasm, imprecations and prayers.

Afterwards, he went to sleep, exhausted.

The Alchemist heard him breathing strongly and steadily. When he was certain that Michel was asleep, he got up from his armchair, walking on tiptoe, picked up his hat and went out.

* * * *

He came back some time afterwards.

He opened the door with infinite precaution, approached the bed and listened. Michel was asleep.

He took a candle from the mantelpiece, put it on the floor and placed his hat in front of it like a screen, so that the light would not wake Michel. He knelt down and began to maneuver various small objects, including a hypodermic syringe and a bottle, without making a noise. He filled the syringe with potassium cyanide, He stood up and approached Michel.

Michel was asleep. His neck was free and his arms were outside the covers, limply stretched out.

The Alchemist looked at him and thought: He won’t even know that he’s dying. He’ll continue to sleep. You won’t wake up again, Michel!

He gazed at the delicate features, the high forehead where the unkempt hair outlined a fringe. He gazed at the little moustache, the thin lips quivering in the breath of respiration, the palpitating nostrils. He gazed at the face that he loved, the face that remained so young and had not been spoiled either by hard work, or the rude alarms of thought, or the vicissitudes of existence. He murmured: “Poor little Michel, my child!”

And tears came to his eyes.

However, he was afraid of abandoning himself to more emotion than he needed to do what he had resolved to do.

It’s necessary, he thought.

With a rapid gesture, he passed his fingers over his eyes; he stiffened himself; he waited a second for his will to obtain sovereignty over his entire body; he braced himself firmly on his legs; he leaned over Michel, and pushed back the sleeper’s sleeve. The sleeper moved. Immediately, with a curt thrust, the Alchemist plunged the sharp point of the syringe into the flesh of the arm. The sleeper started slightly—and that was all.

The act accomplished, the Alchemist pulled Michel’s sleeve down. He buttoned the cuff. He parted the hair that was hiding the beautiful amplitude of the forehead. He arranged the head in such a way that it was not tilted toward either shoulder, and he said, in a tremulous voice: “Like that, you’re handsome!”

Then he fell into the armchair and sobbed.

Then he spoke, aloud: “Poor child, who didn’t have the strength of your genius. Poor child, who had, with that genius, all the weakness of humanity! Science will never be done if human heads are too weak too bear its admirable commencements. Adieu, Michel, man of genius and poor child!”

The Alchemist took a pen and paper. He wrote:

I have killed Michel Bedée, who was a genius, with an injection of potassium cyanide. The work of his genius will be found in my laboratory. I have killed him because he went mad and blasphemed science; he would have dishonored it, after having honored it. It was necessary that the madman not be able to debase the work and memory of the sublime scientist.

He added:

I loved him; he had been my pupil.

He signed it. He placed the edge of the candlestick on the top of the sheet that he had covered with his attentive handwriting. He reread the lines. Then he wrote:

And I am killing myself likewise.

He lay down on a chaise-longue, pricked himself, and died. And in the chamber poorly lit by candlelight, the terrible master and his extraordinary pupil began to sleep their eternal slumber.