"Everything that you can imagine," was his answer.
He introduced me to her. She was very pleasant, on easy terms with me,
as was natural, and begged me to look upon their house as my own. I felt
that he, Blérot, did not belong to me any longer. Our intimacy was
altogether checked, and we hardly found a word to say to each other.
I soon took my leave, and shortly afterwards went to the East, and
returned by way of Russia, Germany, Sweden, and Holland, after an
absence of eighteen months from Paris.
The morning after my arrival, as I was walking along the boulevards to
breathe the air once more, I saw a pale man with sunken cheeks coming
towards me, who was as much like Blérot as it was possible for a
physically emaciated man to be to a strong, ruddy, rather stout man. I
looked at him in surprise, and asked myself: "Can it possibly be he?"
But he saw me, and came towards me with outstretched arms, and we
embraced in the middle of the boulevard.
After we had gone up and down once or twice from the Rue Druot to the
Vaudeville Theater, just as we were taking leave of each other--for he
already seemed quite done up with walking--I said to him:
"You don't look at all well. Are you ill?"
"I do feel rather out of sorts," was all he said.
He looked like a man who was going to die, and I felt a flood of
affection for my old friend, the only real one that I had ever had. I
squeezed his hands.
"What is the matter with you? Are you in pain?"
"A little tired; but it is nothing."
"What does your doctor say?"
"He calls it anæmia, and has ordered me to eat no white meat and to take
tincture of iron."
A suspicion flashed across me.
"Are you happy?" I asked him.
"Yes, very happy; my wife is charming, and I love her more than ever."
But I noticed that he grew rather red and seemed embarrassed, as if he
was afraid of any further questions, so I took him by the arm and pushed
him into a café, which was nearly empty at that time of day. I forced
him to sit down, and looking him straight in the face, I said:
"Look here, old fellow, just tell me the exact truth."
"I have nothing to tell you," he stammered.
"That is not true," I replied firmly. "You are ill, mentally perhaps,
and you dare not reveal your secret to anyone. Something or other is
doing you harm, and I mean you to tell me what it is. Come, I am waiting
for you to begin."
Again he got very red, stammered, and turning his head away, he said:
"It is very idiotic--but I--I am done for!"
As he did not go on, I said:
"Just tell me what it is."
"Well, I have got a wife who is killing me, that is all," he said
abruptly, almost desperately.
I did not understand at first. "Does she make you unhappy? How? What is
it?"
"No," he replied in a low voice, as if he were confessing some crime; "I
love her too much, that is all."
I was thunderstruck at this brutal avowal, and then I felt inclined to
laugh, but at length I managed to reply:
"But surely, at least so it seems to me, you might manage to--to love
her a little less."
He had got very pale again, and at length made up his mind to speak to
me openly, as he used to do formerly.
"No," he said, "that is impossible; and I am dying from it I know; it is
killing me, and I am really frightened. Some days, like to-day, I feel
inclined to leave her, to go away altogether, to start for the other end
of the world, so as to live for a long time; and then, when the evening
comes, I return home in spite of myself, but slowly, and feeling
uncomfortable. I go upstairs hesitatingly and ring, and when I go in I
see her there sitting in her easy chair, and she says, 'How late you
are,' I kiss her, and we sit down to dinner. During the meal I think to
myself: 'I will go directly it is over, and take the train for
somewhere, no matter where;' but when we get back to the drawing-room I
am so tired that I have not the courage to get up out of my chair, and
so I remain, and then--and then--I succumb again."
I could not help smiling again. He saw it, and said: "You may laugh, but
I assure you it is very horrible."
"Why don't you tell your wife?" I asked him. "Unless she be a regular
monster she would understand."
He shrugged his shoulders. "It is all very well for you to talk. I don't
tell her because I know her nature. Have you ever heard it said of
certain women, 'She has just married a third time?' Well, and that makes
you laugh like you did just now, and yet it is true. What is to be done?
It is neither her fault nor mine. She is so, because nature has made her
so; I assure you, my dear old friend, she has the temperament of a
Messalina. She does not know it, but I do; so much the worse for me. She
is charming, gentle, tender, and thinks that our conjugal intercourse,
which is wearing me out and killing me, is natural and quite moderate.
She seems like an ignorant schoolgirl, and she really is ignorant, poor
child.
"Every day I form energetic resolutions, for you must understand that I
am dying. But one look of her eyes, one of those looks in which I can
read the ardent desire of her lips, is enough for me, and I succumb at
once, saying to myself: 'This is really the end; I will have no more of
her death-giving kisses,' and then, when I have yielded again, like I
have to-day, I go out and walk on ahead, thinking of death, and saying
to myself that I am lost, that all is over.
"I am so mentally ill that I went for a walk to Père Lachaise cemetery
yesterday. I looked at all the graves, standing in a row like dominoes,
and I thought to myself: 'I shall soon be there,' and then I returned
home, quite determined to pretend to be ill, and so escape, but I could
not.
"Oh! You don't know what it is. Ask a smoker who is poisoning himself
with nicotine whether he can give up his delicious and deadly habit. He
will tell you that he has tried a hundred times without success, and he
will, perhaps, add: 'So much the worse, but I had rather die than go
without tobacco.' That is just the case with me. When once one is in the
clutches of such a passion or such a vice, one must give oneself up to
it entirely."
He got up and gave me his hand. I felt seized with a tumult of rage, and
with hatred for this woman, this careless, charming, terrible woman; and
as he was buttoning up his coat to go out I said to him, brutally
perhaps:
"But, in God's name, why don't you let her have a lover, rather than
kill yourself like that?"
He shrugged his shoulders without replying, and went off.
For six months I did not see him. Every morning I expected a letter of
invitation to his funeral, but I would not go to his house from a
complicated feeling of contempt for him and for that woman; of anger, of
indignation, of a thousand sensations.
One lovely spring morning I was walking in the Champs Elysées. It was
one of those warm days which makes our eyes bright and stir up in us a
tumultuous feeling of happiness from the mere sense of existence.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and turning round I saw my old
friend, looking well, stout and rosy.
He gave me both hands, beaming with pleasure, and exclaimed:
"Here you are, you erratic individual!"