They passed at first along some of those shady roads, bordered by
gardens, which cause Cannes to resemble a kind of English Park, and then
reached the highway to Antibes, running along the seashore. Forestier
acted as guide. He had already pointed out the villa of the Court de
Paris, and now indicated others. He was lively, with the forced and
feeble gayety of a doomed man. He lifted his finger, no longer having
strength to stretch out his arm, and said, "There is the Ile Sainte
Marguerite, and the chateau from which Bazaine escaped. How they did
humbug us over that matter!"
Then regimental recollections recurred to him, and he mentioned various
officers whose names recalled incidents to them. But all at once, the
road making a turn, they caught sight of the whole of the Golfe Juan,
with the white village in the curve of the bay, and the point of Antibes
at the further side of it. Forestier, suddenly seized upon by childish
glee, exclaimed, "Ah! the squadron, you will see the squadron."
Indeed they could perceive, in the middle of the broad bay, half-a-dozen
large ships resembling rocks covered with leafless trees. They were
huge, strange, mis-shapen, with excrescences, turrets, rams, burying
themselves in the water as though to take root beneath the waves. One
could scarcely imagine how they could stir or move about, they seemed so
heavy and so firmly fixed to the bottom. A floating battery, circular
and high out of water, resembling the light-houses that are built on
shoals. A tall three-master passed near them, with all its white sails
set. It looked graceful and pretty beside these iron war monsters
squatted on the water. Forestier tried to make them out. He pointed out
the Colbert, the Suffren, the Admiral Duperre, the Redoubtable, the
Devastation, and then checking himself, added, "No I made a mistake;
that one is the Devastation."
They arrived opposite a species of large pavilion, on the front of which
was the inscription, "Art Pottery of the Golfe Juan," and the carriage,
driving up the sweep, stopped before the door. Forestier wanted to buy a
couple of vases for his study. As he felt unequal to getting out of the
carriage, specimens were brought out to him one after the other. He was
a long time in making a choice, and consulted his wife and Duroy.
"You know," he said, "it is for the cabinet at the end of the study.
Sitting in my chair, I have it before my eyes all the time. I want an
antique form, a Greek outline." He examined the specimens, had others
brought, and then turned again to the first ones. At length he made up
his mind, and having paid, insisted upon the articles being sent on at
once. "I shall be going back to Paris in a few days," he said.
They drove home, but as they skirted the bay a rush of cold air from one
of the valleys suddenly met them, and the invalid began to cough. It was
nothing at first, but it augmented and became an unbroken fit of
coughing, and then a kind of gasping hiccough.
Forestier was choking, and every time he tried to draw breath the cough
seemed to rend his chest. Nothing would soothe or check it. He had to be
borne from the carriage to his room, and Duroy, who supported his legs,
felt the jerking of his feet at each convulsion of his lungs. The warmth
of the bed did not check the attack, which lasted till midnight, when,
at length, narcotics lulled its deadly spasm. The sick man remained till
morning sitting up in his bed, with his eyes open.
The first words he uttered were to ask for the barber, for he insisted
on being shaved every morning. He got up for this operation, but had to
be helped back into bed at once, and his breathing grew so short, so
hard, and so difficult, that Madame Forestier, in alarm, had Duroy, who
had just turned in, roused up again in order to beg him to go for the
doctor.
He came back almost immediately with Dr. Gavaut, who prescribed a
soothing drink and gave some advice; but when the journalist saw him to
the door, in order to ask his real opinion, he said, "It is the end. He
will be dead to-morrow morning. Break it to his poor wife, and send for
a priest. I, for my part, can do nothing more. I am, however, entirely
at your service."
Duroy sent for Madame Forestier. "He is dying," said he. "The doctor
advises a priest being sent for. What would you like done?"
She hesitated for some time, and then, in slow tones, as though she had
calculated everything, replied, "Yes, that will be best--in many
respects. I will break it to him--tell him the vicar wants to see him,
or something or other; I really don't know what. You would be very kind
if you would go and find a priest for me and pick one out. Choose one
who won't raise too many difficulties over the business. One who will be
satisfied with confession, and will let us off with the rest of it all."
The young fellow returned with a complaisant old ecclesiastic, who
accommodated himself to the state of affairs. As soon as he had gone
into the dying man's room, Madame Forestier came out of it, and sat down
with Duroy in the one adjoining.
"It has quite upset him," said she. "When I spoke to him about a priest
his face assumed a frightful expression as if he had felt the
breath--the breath of--you know. He understood that it was all over at
last, and that his hours were numbered." She was very pale as she
continued, "I shall never forget the expression of his face. He
certainly saw death face to face at that moment. He saw him."
They could hear the priest, who spoke in somewhat loud tones, being
slightly deaf, and who was saying, "No, no; you are not so bad as all
that. You are ill, but in no danger. And the proof is that I have called
in as a friend as a neighbor."
They could not make out Forestier's reply, but the old man went on, "No,
I will not ask you to communicate. We will talk of that when you are
better. If you wish to profit by my visit--to confess, for instance--I
ask nothing better. I am a shepherd, you know, and seize on every
occasion to bring a lamb back to the fold."
A long silence followed. Forestier must have been speaking in a faint
voice. Then all at once the priest uttered in a different tone, the tone
of one officiating at the altar. "The mercy of God is infinite. Repeat
the Comfiteor, my son. You have perhaps forgotten it; I will help you.
Repeat after me: 'Comfiteor Deo omnipotenti--Beata Maria semper
virgini.'"
He paused from time to time to allow the dying man to catch him up. Then
he said, "And now confess."
The young wife and Duroy sat still seized on by a strange uneasiness,
stirred by anxious expectation. The invalid had murmured something. The
priest repeated, "You have given way to guilty pleasures--of what kind,
my son?"
Madeleine rose and said, "Let us go down into the garden for a short
time. We must not listen to his secrets."
And they went and sat down on a bench before the door beneath a rose
tree in bloom, and beside a bed of pinks, which shed their soft and
powerful perfume abroad in the pure air. Duroy, after a few moments'
silence, inquired, "Shall you be long before you return to Paris?"
"Oh, no," she replied. "As soon as it is all over I shall go back
there."
"Within ten days?"
"Yes, at the most."
"He has no relations, then?"
"None except cousins. His father and mother died when he was quite
young."
They both watched a butterfly sipping existence from the pinks, passing
from one to another with a soft flutter of his wings, which continued to
flap slowly when he alighted on a flower. They remained silent for a
considerable time.
The servant came to inform them that "the priest had finished," and they
went upstairs together.
Forestier seemed to have grown still thinner since the day before. The
priest held out his hand to him, saying, "Good-day, my son, I shall call
in again to-morrow morning," and took his departure.
As soon as he had left the room the dying man, who was panting for
breath, strove to hold out his two hands to his wife, and gasped, "Save
me--save me, darling, I don't want to die--I don't want to die. Oh! save
me--tell me what I had better do; send for the doctor. I will take
whatever you like. I won't die--I won't die."
He wept. Big tears streamed from his eyes down his fleshless cheeks, and
the corners of his mouth contracted like those of a vexed child. Then
his hands, falling back on the bed clothes, began a slow, regular, and
continuous movement, as though trying to pick something off the sheet.
His wife, who began to cry too, said: "No, no, it is nothing. It is only
a passing attack, you will be better to-morrow, you tired yourself too
much going out yesterday."
Forestier's breathing was shorter than that of a dog who has been
running, so quick that it could not be counted, so faint that it could
scarcely be heard.
He kept repeating: "I don't want to die. Oh! God--God--God; what is to
become of me? I shall no longer see anything--anything any more. Oh!
God."
He saw before him some hideous thing invisible to the others, and his
staring eyes reflected the terror it inspired. His two hands continued
their horrible and wearisome action. All at once he started with a sharp
shudder that could be seen to thrill the whole of his body, and jerked
out the words, "The graveyard--I--Oh! God."
He said no more, but lay motionless, haggard and panting.
Time sped on, noon struck by the clock of a neighboring convent. Duroy
left the room to eat a mouthful or two. He came back an hour later.
Madame Forestier refused to take anything. The invalid had not stirred.
He still continued to draw his thin fingers along the sheet as though to
pull it up over his face.
His wife was seated in an armchair at the foot of the bed. Duroy took
another beside her, and they waited in silence. A nurse had come, sent
in by the doctor, and was dozing near the window.
Duroy himself was beginning to doze off when he felt that something was
happening. He opened his eyes just in time to see Forestier close his,
like two lights dying out. A faint rattle stirred in the throat of the
dying man, and two streaks of blood appeared at the corners of his
mouth, and then flowed down into his shirt. His hands ceased their
hideous motion. He had ceased to breathe.
His wife understood this, and uttering a kind of shriek, she fell on her
knees sobbing, with her face buried in the bed-clothes. George,
surprised and scared, mechanically made the sign of the cross. The nurse
awakened, drew near the bed. "It is all over," said she.
Duroy, who was recovering his self-possession, murmured, with a sigh of
relief: "It was sooner over than I thought for."
When the first shock was over and the first tears shed, they had to busy
themselves with all the cares and all the necessary steps a dead man
exacts. Duroy was running about till nightfall. He was very hungry when
he got back. Madame Forestier ate a little, and then they both installed
themselves in the chamber of death to watch the body. Two candles burned
on the night-table beside a plate filled with holy water, in which lay a
sprig of mimosa, for they had not been able to get the necessary twig of
consecrated box.
They were alone, the young man and the young wife, beside him who was no
more. They sat without speaking, thinking and watching.
George, whom the darkness rendered uneasy in presence of the corpse,
kept his eyes on this persistently. His eye and his mind were both
attracted and fascinated by this fleshless visage, which the vacillating
light caused to appear yet more hollow. That was his friend Charles
Forestier, who was chatting with him only the day before! What a strange
and fearful thing was this end of a human being! Oh! how he recalled the
words of Norbert de Varenne haunted by the fear of death: "No one ever
comes back." Millions on millions would be born almost identical, with
eyes, a nose, a mouth, a skull and a mind within it, without he who lay
there on the bed ever reappearing again.
For some years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, hoped like all the
world. And it was all over for him all over for ever. Life; a few days,
and then nothing. One is born, one grows up, one is happy, one waits,
and then one dies. Farewell, man or woman, you will not return again to
earth. Plants, beast, men, stars, worlds, all spring to life, and then
die to be transformed anew. But never one of them comes back--insect,
man, nor planet.
A huge, confused, and crushing sense of terror weighed down the soul of
Duroy, the terror of that boundless and inevitable annihilation
destroying all existence. He already bowed his head before its menace.
He thought of the flies who live a few hours, the beasts who live a few
days, the men who live a few years, the worlds which live a few
centuries. What was the difference between one and the other? A few more
days' dawn that was all.
He turned away his eyes in order no longer to have the corpse before
them. Madame Forestier, with bent head, seemed also absorbed in painful
thoughts. Her fair hair showed so prettily with her pale face, that a
feeling, sweet as the touch of hope flitted through the young fellow's
breast. Why grieve when he had still so many years before him? And he
began to observe her. Lost in thought she did not notice him. He said to
himself, "That, though, is the only good thing in life, to love, to hold
the woman one loves in one's arms. That is the limit of human
happiness."
What luck the dead man had had to meet such an intelligent and charming
companion! How had they become acquainted? How ever had she agreed on
her part to marry that poor and commonplace young fellow? How had she
succeeded in making someone of him? Then he thought of all the hidden
mysteries of people's lives. He remembered what had been whispered about
the Count de Vaudrec, who had dowered and married her off it was said.
What would she do now? Whom would she marry? A deputy, as Madame de
Marelle fancied, or some young fellow with a future before him, a higher
class Forestier? Had she any projects, any plans, any settled ideas? How
he would have liked to know that. But why this anxiety as to what she
would do? He asked himself this, and perceived that his uneasiness was
due to one of those half-formed and secret ideas which one hides from
even one's self, and only discovers when fathoming one's self to the
very bottom.
Yes, why should he not attempt this conquest himself? How strong and
redoubtable he would be with her beside him!
How quick, and far, and surely he would fly! And why should he not
succeed too? He felt that he pleased her, that she had for him more than
mere sympathy; in fact, one of those affections which spring up between
two kindred spirits and which partake as much of silent seduction as of
a species of mute complicity. She knew him to be intelligent, resolute,
and tenacious, she would have confidence in him.
Had she not sent for him under the present grave circumstances? And why
had she summoned him? Ought he not to see in this a kind of choice, a
species of confession. If she had thought of him just at the moment she
was about to become a widow, it was perhaps that she had thought of one
who was again to become her companion and ally? An impatient desire to
know this, to question her, to learn her intentions, assailed him. He
would have to leave on the next day but one, as he could not remain
alone with her in the house. So it was necessary to be quick, it was
necessary before returning to Paris to become acquainted, cleverly and
delicately, with her projects, and not to allow her to go back on them,
to yield perhaps to the solicitations of another, and pledge herself
irrevocably.
The silence in the room was intense, nothing was audible save the
regular and metallic tick of the pendulum of the clock on the
mantelpiece.