The Guy De Maupassant Megapack: 144 Novels and Short Stories

by Guy de Maupassant

  “I was ready, but exclaimed: ‘I quite forgot to order my carriage.’ ‘I have one,’ she said; ‘it is his, which was waiting for him!’ She wrapped herself up, so as to completely conceal her face, and we started.

  “When she was by my side in the carriage she suddenly seized my hand, and crushing it in her delicate fingers, she said, with a shaking voice, that proceeded from a distracted heart: ‘Oh! if you only knew, if you only knew what I am suffering! I loved him, I have loved him distractedly, like a madwoman, for the last six months.’ ‘Is anyone up in your house?’ I asked. ‘No, nobody except those, who knows everything.’

  “We stopped at the door, and evidently everybody was asleep. We went in without making any noise, by means of her latch-key, and walked upstairs on tiptoe. The frightened servant was sitting on the top of the stairs with a lighted candle by her side, as she was afraid to remain with the dead man, and I went into the room, which was in great disorder. Wet towels, with which they had bathed the young man’s temples, were lying on the floor, by the side of a washbasin and a glass, while a strong smell of vinegar pervaded the room.

  “The dead man’s body was lying at full length in the middle of the room, and I went up to it, looked at it, and touched it. I opened the eyes and felt the hands, and then, turning to the two women, who were shaking as if they were freezing, I said to them: ‘Help me to lift him on to the bed.’ When we had laid him gently on it, I listened to his heart and put a looking-glass to his lips, and then said: ‘It is all over.’ It was a terrible sight!

  “I looked at the man, and said: ‘You ought to arrange his hair a little.’ The girl went and brought her mistress’ comb and brush, but as she was trembling, and pulling out his long, matted hair in doing it, Madame Lelievre took the comb out of her hand, and arranged his hair as if she were caressing him. She parted it, brushed his beard, rolled his mustaches gently round her fingers, then, suddenly, letting go of his hair, she took the dead man’s inert head in her hands and looked for a long time in despair at the dead face, which no longer could smile at her, and then, throwing herself on him, she clasped him in her arms and kissed him ardently. Her kisses fell like blows on his closed mouth and eyes, his forehead and temples; and then, putting her lips to his ear, as if he could still hear her, and as if she were about to whisper something to him, she said several times, in a heartrending voice:

  “‘Good-by, my darling!’

  “Just then the clock struck twelve, and I started up. ‘Twelve o’clock!’ I exclaimed. ‘That is the time when the club closes. Come, madame, we have not a moment to lose!’ She started up, and I said:

  “‘We must carry him into the drawing-room.’ And when we had done this, I placed him on a sofa, and lit the chandeliers, and just then the front door was opened and shut noisily. ‘Rose, bring me the basin and the towels, and make the room look tidy. Make haste, for Heaven’s sake! Monsieur Lelievre is coming in.’

  “I heard his steps on the stairs, and then his hands feeling along the walls. ‘Come here, my dear fellow,’ I said; ‘we have had an accident.’

  “And the astonished husband appeared in the door with a cigar in his mouth, and said: ‘What is the matter? What is the meaning of this?’ ‘My dear friend,’ I said, going up to him, ‘you find us in great embarrassment. I had remained late, chatting with your wife and our friend, who had brought me in his carriage, when he suddenly fainted, and in spite of all we have done, he has remained unconscious for two hours. I did not like to call in strangers, and if you will now help me downstairs with him, I shall be able to attend to him better at his own house.’

  “The husband, who was surprised, but quite unsuspicious, took off his hat, and then he took his rival, who would be quite inoffensive for the future, under the arms. I got between his two legs, as if I had been a horse between the shafts, and we went downstairs, while his wife held a light for us. When we got outside I stood the body up, so as to deceive the coachman, and said: ‘Come, my friend; it is nothing; you feel better already I expect. Pluck up your courage, and make an effort. It will soon be over.’ But as I felt that he was slipping out of my hands, I gave him a slap on the shoulder, which sent him forward and made him fall into the carriage, and then I got in after him. Monsieur Lelievre, who was rather alarmed, said to me: ‘Do you think it is anything serious?’ To which I replied: ‘No,’ with a smile, as I looked at his wife, who had put her arm into that of her husband, and was trying to see into the carriage.

  “I shook hands with them and told my coachman to start, and during the whole drive the dead man kept falling against me. When we got to his house I said that he had become unconscious on the way home, and helped to carry him upstairs, where I certified that he was dead, and acted another comedy to his distracted family, and at last I got back to bed, not without swearing at lovers.”

  The doctor ceased, though he was still smiling, and the young woman, who was in a very nervous state, said: “Why have you told me that terrible story?”

  He gave her a gallant bow, and replied:

  “So that I may offer you my services if they should be needed.”

  DREAMS

  They had just dined together, five old friends, a writer, a doctor and three rich bachelors without any profession.

  They had talked about everything, and a feeling of lassitude came over them, that feeling which precedes and leads to the departure of guests after festive gatherings. One of those present, who had for the last five minutes been gazing silently at the surging boulevard dotted with gas-lamps, with its rattling vehicles, said suddenly:

  “When you’ve nothing to do from morning till night, the days are long.”

  “And the nights too,” assented the guest who sat next to him. “I sleep very little; pleasures fatigue me; conversation is monotonous. Never do I come across a new idea, and I feel, before talking to any one, a violent longing to say nothing and to listen to nothing. I don’t know what to do with my evenings.”

  The third idler remarked:

  “I would pay a great deal for anything that would help me to pass just two pleasant hours every day.”

  The writer, who had just thrown his overcoat across his arm, turned round to them, and said:

  “The man who could discover a new vice and introduce it among his fellow creatures, even if it were to shorten their lives, would render a greater service to humanity than the man who found the means of securing to them eternal salvation and eternal youth.”

  The doctor burst out laughing, and, while he chewed his cigar, he said:

  “Yes, but it is not so easy to discover it. Men have however crudely, been seeking for—and working for the object you refer to since the beginning of the world. The men who came first reached perfection at once in this way. We are hardly equal to them.”

  One of the three idlers murmured:

  “What a pity!”

  Then, after a minute’s pause, he added:

  “If we could only sleep, sleep well, without feeling hot or cold, sleep with that perfect unconsciousness we experience on nights when we are thoroughly fatigued, sleep without dreams.”

  “Why without dreams?” asked the guest sitting next to him.

  The other replied:

  “Because dreams are not always pleasant; they are always fantastic, improbable, disconnected; and because when we are asleep we cannot have the sort of dreams we like. We ought to dream waking.”

  “And what’s to prevent you?” asked the writer.

  The doctor flung away the end of his cigar.

  “My dear fellow, in order to dream when you are awake, you need great power and great exercise of will, and when you try to do it, great weariness is the result. Now, real dreaming, that journey of our thoughts through delightful visions, is assuredly the sweetest experience in the world; but it must come naturally, it must not be provoked in a painful, manner, and must be accompanied by absolute bodily comfort. This power of dreaming I can give you, provided you promise that you will not abuse it
.”

  The writer shrugged his shoulders:

  “Ah! yes, I know—hasheesh, opium, green tea—artificial paradises. I have read Baudelaire, and I even tasted the famous drug, which made me very sick.”

  But the doctor, without stirring from his seat, said:

  “No; ether, nothing but ether; and I would suggest that you literary men should use it sometimes.”

  The three rich bachelors drew closer to the doctor.

  One of them said:

  “Explain to us the effects of it.”

  And the doctor replied:

  “Let us put aside big words, shall we not? I am not talking of medicine or morality; I am talking of pleasure. You give yourselves up every day to excesses which consume your lives. I want to indicate to you a new sensation, possible only to intelligent men—let us say even very intelligent men—dangerous, like everything else that overexcites our organs, but exquisite. I might add that you would require a certain preparation, that is to say, practice, to feel in all their completeness the singular effects of ether.

  “They are different from the effects of hasheesh, of opium, or morphia, and they cease as soon as the absorption of the drug is interrupted, while the other generators of day dreams continue their action for hours.

  “I am now going to try to analyze these feelings as clearly as possible. But the thing is not easy, so facile, so delicate, so almost imperceptible, are these sensations.

  “It was when I was attacked by violent neuralgia that I made use of this remedy, which since then I have, perhaps, slightly abused.

  “I had acute pains in my head and neck, and an intolerable heat of the skin, a feverish restlessness. I took up a large bottle of ether, and, lying down, I began to inhale it slowly.

  “At the end of some minutes I thought I heard a vague murmur, which ere long became a sort of humming, and it seemed to me that all the interior of my body had become light, light as air, that it was dissolving into vapor.

  “Then came a sort of torpor, a sleepy sensation of comfort, in spite of the pains which still continued, but which had ceased to make themselves felt. It was one of those sensations which we are willing to endure and not any of those frightful wrenches against which our tortured body protests.

  “Soon the strange and delightful sense of emptiness which I felt in my chest extended to my limbs, which, in their turn, became light, as light as if the flesh and the bones had been melted and the skin only were left, the skin necessary to enable me to realize the sweetness of living, of bathing in this sensation of well-being. Then I perceived that I was no longer suffering. The pain had gone, melted away, evaporated. And I heard voices, four voices, two dialogues, without understanding what was said. At one time there were only indistinct sounds, at another time a word reached my ear. But I recognized that this was only the humming I had heard before, but emphasized. I was not asleep; I was not awake; I comprehended, I felt, I reasoned with the utmost clearness and depth, with extraordinary energy and intellectual pleasure, with a singular intoxication arising from this separation of my mental faculties.

  “It was not like the dreams caused by hasheesh or the somewhat sickly visions that come from opium; it was an amazing acuteness of reasoning, a new way of seeing, judging and appreciating the things of life, and with the certainty, the absolute consciousness that this was the true way.

  “And the old image of the Scriptures suddenly came back to my mind. It seemed to me that I had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, that all the mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find myself under the sway of a new, strange and irrefutable logic. And arguments, reasonings, proofs rose up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately displaced by some stronger proof, reasoning, argument. My head had, in fact, become a battleground of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with invincible intelligence, and I experienced a huge delight at the manifestation of my power.

  “It lasted a long, long time. I still kept inhaling the ether from my flagon. Suddenly I perceived that it was empty.”

  The four men exclaimed at the same time:

  “Doctor, a prescription at once for a liter of ether!”

  But the doctor, putting on his hat, replied:

  “As to that, certainly not; go and let some one else poison you!”

  And he left them.

  Ladies and gentlemen, what is your opinion on the subject?

  SIMON’S PAPA

  Noon had just struck. The school door opened and the youngsters darted out, jostling each other in their haste to get out quickly. But instead of promptly dispersing and going home to dinner as usual, they stopped a few paces off, broke up into knots, and began whispering.

  The fact was that, that morning, Simon, the son of La Blanchotte, had, for the first time, attended school.

  They had all of them in their families heard talk of La Blanchotte; and, although in public she was welcome enough, the mothers among themselves treated her with a somewhat disdainful compassion, which the children had imitated without in the least knowing why.

  As for Simon himself, they did not know him, for he never went out, and did not run about with them in the streets of the village, or along the banks of the river. And they did not care for him; so it was with a certain delight, mingled with considerable astonishment, that they met and repeated to each other what had been said by a lad of fourteen or fifteen who appeared to know all about it, so sagaciously did he wink. “You know—Simon—well, he has no papa.”

  Just then La Blanchotte’s son appeared in the doorway of the school.

  He was seven or eight years old, rather pale, very neat, with a timid and almost awkward manner.

  He was starting home to his mother’s house when the groups of his schoolmates, whispering and watching him with the mischievous and heartless eyes of children bent upon playing a nasty trick, gradually closed in around him and ended by surrounding him altogether. There he stood in their midst, surprised and embarrassed, not understanding what they were going to do with him. But the lad who had brought the news, puffed up with the success he had met with already, demanded:

  “What is your name, you?”

  He answered: “Simon.”

  “Simon what?” retorted the other.

  The child, altogether bewildered, repeated: “Simon.”

  The lad shouted at him: “One is named Simon something—that is not a name—Simon indeed.”

  The child, on the brink of tears, replied for the third time:

  “My name is Simon.”

  The urchins began to laugh. The triumphant tormentor cried: “You can see plainly that he has no papa.”

  A deep silence ensued. The children were dumfounded by this extraordinary, impossible, monstrous thing—a boy who had not a papa; they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt that hitherto inexplicable contempt of their mothers for La Blanchotte growing upon them. As for Simon, he had leaned against a tree to avoid falling, and he remained as if prostrated by an irreparable disaster. He sought to explain, but could think of nothing-to say to refute this horrible charge that he had no papa. At last he shouted at them quite recklessly: “Yes, I have one.”

  “Where is he?” demanded the boy.

  Simon was silent, he did not know. The children roared, tremendously excited; and those country boys, little more than animals, experienced that cruel craving which prompts the fowls of a farmyard to destroy one of their number as soon as it is wounded. Simon suddenly espied a little neighbor, the son of a widow, whom he had seen, as he himself was to be seen, always alone with his mother.

  “And no more have you,” he said; “no more have you a papa.”

  “Yes,” replied the other, “I have one.”

  “Where is he?” rejoined Simon.

  “He is dead,” declared the brat, with superb dignity; “he is in the cemetery, is my papa.”

  A murmur of approval rose among the little wretches as if this fact of possessing a papa dead in a cemetery had caused their comrad
e to grow big enough to crush the other one who had no papa at all. And these boys, whose fathers were for the most part bad men, drunkards, thieves, and who beat their wives, jostled each other to press closer and closer, as though they, the legitimate ones, would smother by their pressure one who was illegitimate.

  The boy who chanced to be next Simon suddenly put his tongue out at him with a mocking air and shouted at him:

  “No papa! No papa!”

  Simon seized him by the hair with both hands and set to work to disable his legs with kicks, while he bit his cheek ferociously. A tremendous struggle ensued between the two combatants, and Simon found himself beaten, torn, bruised, rolled on the ground in the midst of the ring of applauding schoolboys. As he arose, mechanically brushing with his hand his little blouse all covered with dust, some one shouted at him:

  “Go and tell your papa.”

  Then he felt a great sinking at his heart. They were stronger than he was, they had beaten him, and he had no answer to give them, for he knew well that it was true that he had no papa. Full of pride, he attempted for some moments to struggle against the tears which were choking him. He had a feeling of suffocation, and then without any sound he commenced to weep, with great shaking sobs. A ferocious joy broke out among his enemies, and, with one accord, just like savages in their fearful festivals, they took each other by the hand and danced round him in a circle, repeating as a refrain:

  “No papa! No papa!”

  But suddenly Simon ceased sobbing. He became ferocious. There were stones under his feet; he picked them up and with all his strength hurled them at his tormentors. Two or three were struck and rushed off yelling, and so formidable did he appear that the rest became panic-stricken. Cowards, as the mob always is in presence of an exasperated man, they broke up and fled. Left alone, the little fellow without a father set off running toward the fields, for a recollection had been awakened in him which determined his soul to a great resolve. He made up his mind to drown himself in the river.