“What did you find out about me, Ménalque?”
“Do you want to know? But there’s no need to be alarmed! You know your
friends and mine well enough to be sure there is no-one I can talk to
about you. You saw how well your lecture was understood?”
“But,” said I, a little impatiently, “there’s nothing yet to prove that
I can talk to you better than to them. Come on then! What is it you
found out about me?”
“First of all, that you had been ill.”
“But there’s nothing in that to ...”
“Oh, yes! That in itself is very important. Then I was told you liked
going out alone, without a book (that’s what started me wondering), or,
when you were not alone, you preferred the company of children to that
of your wife ... Don’t blush like that, or I shan’t go on.”
“Go on without looking at me.”
“One of the children--his name was Moktir, if I remember right--(I
have scarcely ever seen a handsomer boy, and never a greater little
swindler) seemed to have a good deal to say about you. I enticed him--I
bribed him to confide in me ... not an easy thing to do, as you know,
for I think it was only another lie, when he said he was not lying that
time.... Tell me whether what he told me about you is true.”
In the meantime, Ménalque had got up and taken a little box out of a
drawer.
“Are these scissors yours?” he said, opening the box and taking out
a shapeless, twisted, rusty object, which, however, I had little
difficulty in recognizing as the pair of scissors Moktir had purloined.
“Yes, they are; they were my wife’s scissors.”
“He pretends he took them when your head was turned away one day he
was alone in the room with you; but that’s not the point; he pretends
that at the moment he was hiding them in his burnous, he saw you were
watching him in the glass and caught the reflection of your eyes
looking at him. You saw the theft and said nothing! Moktir was very
much astonished at this silence--and so was I.”
“And I am too at what you have just said. What! Do you mean to say he
knew I had caught him at it?”
“It isn’t that that matters; you were trying to be more cunning than
he; it’s a game at which children like that will always get the better
of us. You thought you had him, and in reality, it was he who had
you.... But that’s not what matters. I should like an explanation of
your silence.”
“I should like one myself.”
Some time passed without a word from either of us. Ménalque, who was
pacing up and down the room, lighted a cigarette absent-mindedly and
then immediately threw it away.
“The fact is,” said he, “there’s a ‘sense,’ as people say, ‘a sense’
which seems to be lacking in you, my dear Michel.”
“The ‘moral sense,’” said I, forcing myself to smile.
“Oh, no! simply the sense of property.”
“You don’t seem to have much of it yourself.”
“I have so little of it that, as you see, nothing in this place is
mine; not even--or rather, especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have
a horror of rest; possessions encourage one to indulge in it, and
there’s nothing like security for making one fall asleep; I like life
well enough to want to live it awake, and so, in the very midst of my
riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which
means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify my life. I will not say I
like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want it to demand
at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health....”
“Then what do you blame me for?” I interrupted.
“Oh, how little you understand me, my dear Michel; for once that I am
foolish enough to try and make a profession of faith!... If I care
little for the approbation or disapprobation of men, Michel, it is not
in order to approve or disapprove in my turn; those words have very
little sense for me. I spoke of myself too much just now.... I was
carried away by thinking you understood me.... I simply meant to say
that, for a person who has not got the sense of property, you seem to
possess a great deal. Isn’t that rather serious?”
“And what is this great deal I possess?”
“Nothing, if you take it in that way.... But are you not beginning a
course of lectures? Have you not an estate in Normandy? Have you not
just settled yourself--and luxuriously too--in an apartment at Passy?
You are married? Are you not expecting a child?”
“Well!” said I, impatiently, “it merely proves that I have succeeded in
making my life more dangerous than yours.”
“Yes, merely,” repeated Ménalque ironically; then, turning abruptly, he
put out his hand:
“Well, good-bye now; I don’t think any more talk tonight would be of
much use. But I shall see you again soon.”
Some time went by before I saw him again.
Fresh work, fresh preoccupations took up my time; an Italian scholar
brought to my notice some new documents he had discovered which were
important for my lectures and which I had to study at some length.
The feeling that my first lesson had been misunderstood stimulated me
to shed a different and more powerful light on the succeeding ones;
I was thus led to enounce as a doctrine what I had at first only
tentatively suggested as an ingenious hypothesis. How many assertions
owe their strength to the lucky circumstance that as suggestions they
were not understood? In my own case, I admit I cannot distinguish what
proportion of obstinacy may have mingled with my natural propensity
for asserting my opinions. The new things I had to say seemed to me
especially urgent because of the difficulty of saying them, and above
all of getting them understood.
But, alas, how pale words become when compared with deeds! Was not
Ménalque’s life, Ménalque’s slightest action a thousand times more
eloquent than my lectures? How well I understood now that the great
philosophers of antiquity, whose teaching was almost wholly moral,
worked by example as much--even more than by precept!
The next time I saw Ménalque was in my own house, nearly three weeks
after our first meeting. We had been giving a crowded evening party,
and he came in almost at the end of it. In order to avoid being
continually disturbed, Marceline and I had settled to be at home on
Thursdays; in this way it was easier to keep our doors shut for the
rest of the week. Every Thursday evening then, those people who called
themselves our friends used to come and see us; our rooms were large
enough to hold a good many guests and they used to stay late. I think
that what attracted them most was Marceline’s exquisite charm and the
pleasure of talking to each other, for as to myself, from the very
beginning of these parties, there was nothing I could find either to
say or to listen to, and it was with difficulty I concealed my boredom.
That evening, I was wandering aimlessly from the drawing-room to the
smoking-room, from the antechamber to the library, caught by a sentence
here and there, observing very little but looking about me more or less
vaguely.
Antoine, Etienne and Godefroi were discussing the last vote in the
Chamber, as they lolled on my wife’s elegant armchairs. Hubert and
Louis were carelessly turning over some fine etchings from my father’s
collection, entirely regardless of how they were creasing them. In the
smoking-room, Mathias, the better to listen to Leonard, had put his
red-hot cigar down on a rosewood table. A glass of curaçoa had been
spilt on the carpet. Albert was sprawling impudently on a sofa, with
his muddy boots dirtying the cover. And the very dust of the air one
breathed came from the horrible wear and tear of material objects....
A frantic desire seized me to send all my guests packing. Furniture,
stuffs, prints, lost all their value for me at the first stain; things
stained were things touched by disease, with the mark of death on them.
I wanted to save them, to lock them up in a cupboard for my own use
alone. How lucky Ménalque is, thought I, to have no possessions! The
reason I puffer is that I want to preserve things. But after all, what
does it really matter to me?...
There was a small, less brilliantly lighted drawing-room, partitioned
off by a transparent glass door, and there Marceline was receiving
some of her more intimate friends; she was half reclining on a pile
of cushions and looked so fearfully pale and tired that I suddenly
took fright and vowed that this reception should be the last. It was
already late. I was beginning to take out my watch, when I suddenly
felt Moktir’s little scissors in my pocket.
“Why did the little wretch steal them,” thought I, “if it was only to
spoil and destroy them at once?”
At that moment someone touched me on the shoulder; I turned quickly; it
was Ménalque.
He was almost the only person in evening dress. He had just arrived. He
asked me to present him to my wife; I should certainly not have done so
of my own accord. Ménalque was distinguished looking--almost handsome;
his face was like a pirate’s, barred by an enormous drooping moustache,
already quite grey; his eyes shone with a cold flame that denoted
courage and decision rather than kindness. He was no sooner standing
before Marceline than I knew she had taken a dislike to him. After he
had exchanged a few banal words of courtesy with her, I carried him off
to the smoking-room.
I had heard that very morning of the new mission on which the
Colonial Office was sending him; the newspapers, as they recalled his
adventurous career, seemed to have forgotten their recent base insults
and now could find no words fine enough to praise him with. Each was
more eager than the other to extol and exaggerate his services to his
country, to the whole of humanity, as if he never undertook anything
but with a humanitarian purpose; and they quoted examples of his
abnegation, his devotion, his courage, as if such encomiums might be
considered a reward.