The little room adjoining the closet where I sleep has been set apart
for those whose cries or effluvia make them intolerable to the rest. As
it is small and encumbered, it will only admit a single stretcher, and
men are brought in there to die in turn.
But lately, when the Chateau was reigning gracefully in the midst of
verdure, the centre of the great star of alleys piercing its groves
of limes and beeches, its owners occasionally entertained a brilliant
society; and if they had under their roof some gay and lovely milk-white
maiden, they gave her this little room at the summit of the right wing,
whence the sun may be seen rising above the forests, to dream, and
sleep, and adorn herself in.
To-day, the facade of the Chateau seems to be listening, strained
and anxious, to the cannonade; and the little room has become a
death-chamber.
Madelan was the first we put there. He was raving in such a brutal and
disturbing manner, in spite of the immobility of his long, paralysed
limbs, that his companions implored us to remove him. I think Madelan
neither understood nor noticed this isolation, for he was already given
over to a deeper solitude; but his incessant vociferation, after he was
deprived of listeners, took on a strange and terrible character.
For four days and four nights, he never ceased talking vehemently; and
listening to him, one began to think that all the life of the big body
that was already dead, had fled in frenzy to his throat. For four nights
I heard him shouting incoherent, elusive things, which seemed to be
replies to some mysterious interlocutor.
At dawn, and from hour to hour throughout the day, I went to see him
where he sprawled on a paillasse on the floor, like some red-haired
stricken beast, with out-stretched limbs, convulsed by spasms which
displaced the dirty blanket that covered him.
He lost flesh with such incredible rapidity that he seemed to be
evaporating through the gaping wound in the nape of his neck.
Then I would speak to him, saying things that were kindly meant but
futile, because conversation is impossible between a man who is being
whirled along by the waters of a torrent, and one who is seated among
the rushes on the bank. Madelan did not listen to me, and he continued
his strange colloquy with the other. He did not want us or any one else;
he had ceased to eat or to drink, and relieved himself as he lay, asking
neither help nor tendance.
One day, the wind blew the door of the room to, and there was no key to
open it. A long ladder was put up to the window, and a pane of glass was
broken to effect an entrance. Directly this was done, Madelan was heard,
continuing his dream aloud.
He died, and was at once replaced by the man with his skull battered in,
of whom we knew nothing, because when he came to us he could neither see
nor speak, and had nothing by way of history but a red and white ticket,
as large as the palm of a child's hand.
This man spent only one night in the room, filling the silence with
painful eructations, and thumping on the partition which separated him
from my bed.
Listening alertly, with the cold air from the open window blowing on
my face, I heard in turn the crowing of the cocks in the village, the
irregular breathing of Philippe, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion not
far from me, and the blows and the death-rattle of the man who took so
long to die. He became silent, however, in the morning, when the wind
began to drop, and the first detonation of the day boomed through the
vault-like quiet of the darkness.
Then we had as our neighbour the hospital orderly, Sergeant Gidel, who
was nearing his end, and whose cruel hiccough we had been unable to
alleviate for a week past. This man knew his business, he knew the
meaning of probe, of fever, of hardened abdomen. He knew too that he had
a bullet in the spinal cord. He never asked us for anything, and as
we dared not tell him lies, we were overcome by a kind of shame in his
presence. He stayed barely two days in the room, looking with dim eyes
at the engravings on the walls, and the Empire bureau on which vases
were piled.
But what need is there to tell of all those whom this unhappy room
swallowed up and ejected?