AFTER THE WEDDING
Mathilde and Surdon came hurrying into the room and were not less
terrified than I was to discover Cordélia in this statue-like
condition. The only thing which we could be certain about was that she
was not dead. I cannot remember all that we attempted, Mathilde and
I, to “bring her back to her senses,” while Surdon went to fetch the
nearest doctor.
We carried Cordélia in her state of insensibility on to the balcony. We
brought her back again. We tried the effects of cold and heat in turn.
We placed hot bricks to her feet and cold compresses to her forehead.
What alarmed us more than anything else was the complete rigidity in
which she lay in our arms, and nothing that we could do succeeded in
relaxing the tension.
I employed a phrase just now with the full meaning of which I
was unacquainted. I said that Cordélia fell on my shoulder in a
cataleptic-like sleep. That was true, but I more or less learned for
the first time the meaning of catalepsy from the village doctor whom
Surdon brought back.
And even then I failed to grasp the significance of what he was saying
except that Cordélia was suffering from a nervous malady which had
reached the critical point, and must have been brought about by great
mental and physical strain and the unwonted excitement of a wedding
day. He did not tell us anything new from this point of view, for it
was in this sense that we regarded her illness. To what other cause
could we, in our ignorance, attribute it save to excitement and fatigue?
Unfortunately this blockhead of a doctor proved his inability to awaken
Cordélia. After blowing on her eyes without effect he seemed greatly
perplexed. He knew more about it than we did, perhaps, but he was as
powerless as we were. To our stormings and complaints he could but
reply: “She will wake up of her own accord just as she fell asleep.”
And he counseled me to have patience.
Have patience!... He was the limit!... I asked him in a voice strained
with anxiety, how long this torpor could last. His only answer was to
shake his head. He exasperated me.
“But, look here, will it last one hour—two hours?”
“One can never tell.... One can never tell.”
“Still it can’t go on for a couple of days, I suppose?” I cried,
incensed.
“Well, there have been such cases, but generally speaking....”
I could have struck him. And yet he was a worthy man who strove to
comfort me, to persuade me that the case was not very serious, to lead
me to hope that we were confronted with a phenomenon which, if due
precautions were taken, might not recur, and, moreover, would yield to
treatment. And at the finish he recommended me to consult a specialist
in nervous diseases. Having said so much, he gave me the slip.
I at once sent Surdon in the car to Rouen, whence he was to bring back
Dr. Thurel, celebrated in the district for certain unusual cures which
bordered on the miraculous.
I turned Mathilde out of the room, for since the doctor’s remedies
and her own nostrums were of no avail, she imagined that we were the
victims of the devil, and she wearied me with her lamentations and
exorcisms. I had the utmost difficulty in preventing her from going for
the priest. What a honeymoon!
Left alone before the sofa on which Cordélia’s statue-like form lay, I
felt less affected by the pitiable spectacle of my beloved than by a
sort of almost childish frenzy against the fate which had played this
trick upon me. Heaven knows I deserved to be pitied! To have waited
so long for this day and to pass it with a woman who had been turned
to stone! By what fatality had Cordélia fallen asleep at the very
moment when she was in my arms? It was indeed, to use my uncle’s words,
“utterly silly.”
In my intense selfishness, knowing now that Cordélia’s life was in no
danger, I mourned rather for myself than for her. I was, so I thought,
the victim.... Thus many men when they are balked of something on which
they have set their hearts, or when the object of their desire escapes
them, act like brutes. I am ashamed when I think of myself cursing
Heaven in this room in which Cordélia and I were “at last alone.” I
am bound to say, however, in my own favor, that by degrees this blind
resentment which arose in me against things in general, gave way to a
feeling of great compassion and sorrow for the beloved being who still
slept.
As the hours slipped away I was oppressed by an ever-increasing
anguish. Now I kept watch over Cordélia as though she were dead,
and I bowed in wonder before this great mystery, which was not less
terrifying than the mystery of death itself. Poor, poor, poor Cordélia!