Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Then at table, in the course of the conversation, I dropped a word or two to Baryton. At first my bit of information didn’t seem to interest him. He let it pass. I thought he’d forgotten all about it, but then one evening he himself brought it up and asked me to bring him a folder when I had a chance.

  Between two English literature sessions, we often played Japanese billiards or bouchon in one of the isolation rooms situated just above the concierge’s lodge and equipped with good iron bars.

  Baryton excelled in games of skill. Parapine regularly challenged him to play for drinks and as regularly lost. We spent whole evenings in that improvised little game room, especially in the winter when it was raining, so as not to mess up the chief’s big drawing rooms. Sometimes an excitable patient would be put in the same little room for observation, but not very often.

  While Parapine and the boss were matching their skills at bouchon on the carpet or on the floor, I would amuse myself, if you want to call it that, trying to experience the same sensations as a prisoner in his cell. That was one sensation I had never known. If you really want to, you can work up friendly feelings toward the few people who pass through those suburban streets. At the end of the day, your heart goes out to the bit of movement created by the streetcars, bringing back docile clusters of office workers from Paris. Their debacle ends at the first bend in the street, right after the grocery store. Then they flow quietly into the darkness. You’ve barely had time to count them. But Baryton seldom let me daydream at my leisure. In the middle of his game of bouchon* he’d come to life with some ridiculous question.

  “How do you say ‘impossible’ in English, Ferdinand?”

  When it came to improving his English, he was insatiable. With every ounce of his native imbecility he aspired to perfection. No approximations or concessions for him. But then luckily events took a turn which brought me deliverance.

  In the course of our readings in the history of England, I saw that he was losing some of his assurance and even the greater part of his optimism. As we were feeling our way into the Elizabethan poets, his mind and personality underwent great though imponderable changes. At first I found it hard to believe, but in the end I, like everyone else, was obliged to see Baryton as he had become, in truth a pitiful spectacle. His mind, formerly razor-edged to the point of severity, had begun to wander, leading him into incredible, interminable digressions. Little by little, he developed the habit of daydreaming for hours on end, he’d be right there in his Institute, before our very eyes, and his thoughts would be off in the distance … Though he had long and decisively repelled me, I felt a certain remorse at seeing him go to pieces like that. I felt partly responsible for his decline … I felt that his spiritual confusion had something to do with me … So much so that one day I suggested interrupting our study of literature, on the pretext that a break would give us time and leisure to renew our documentary sources … He wasn’t fooled by my feeble ruse. His response was a friendly but categorical refusal … He was determined to carry on with the discovery of spiritual England under my guidance … Just as he had begun … What could I say? … I acquiesced. He was afraid the hours of life remaining to him might not suffice for complete success … In short, though I feared the worst, I was obliged to pursue our dismal academic peregrination to the best of my ability.

  The fact is that Baryton was no longer himself. The persons and things around us became fantasmagoric and slow, losing their importance and even the colors they had formerly worn for us, and taking on a dreamlike, ambivalent softness …

  Baryton had come to concern himself only occasionally and more and more languidly with the administrative details of his own establishment, though it was his life work and for over thirty years the object of his literally passionate interest. He now relied entirely on Parapine to manage the administrative end. The increasing confusion of his mind, which he still tried to conceal in public, soon became obvious to us, a physical reality.

  One day Gustave Mandamour, a policeman we knew in Vigny because we sometimes employed him for certain heavy work, and undoubtedly the least discerning person I have ever come across though I’ve known many of his kind, asked me if the boss hadn’t received some terrible news … I did my best to reassure him, but without conviction.

  Baryton had lost his interest in gossip and chitchat. All he wanted was not to be disturbed on any pretext whatever … At the very beginning of our studies we had perused, too quickly to his way of thinking, Macaulay’s compendious History of England, a seminal work in sixteen volumes. At his command and under quite alarming conditions, we went back to it. Chapter by chapter.

  It seemed to me that Baryton was more and more dangerously contaminated by meditation. When we came to that merciless passage where the Pretender Monmouth disembarks on the blurred shores of Kent … Where his venture starts revolving around itself … Where Monmouth the Pretender no longer knows exactly what he’s pretending to … Or what he wants to do … Or what he has come here for … Where he starts telling himself that he’d be glad to beat it … but he doesn’t know where to or how … when defeat rises up before him … in the pale dawn … When the sea carries his last ships away … When for the first time Monmouth starts thinking … then likewise the lowly Baryton couldn’t get to the end of his own decisions … He read and reread that passage and mumbled it over again … Overwhelmed, he closed the book and came over and lay down beside us.

  For a long time, with half-closed eyes, he ran through the whole text from memory, and then in his English accent, the best among the Bordeaux accents I had given him to choose from, he recited it again …

  Face to face with Monmouth’s adventure, where all the pitiful absurdity of our puerile and tragic nature discloses itself in the mirror of Eternity, Baryton was seized with vertigo. Only the merest thread had attached him to our common lot, and now that thread snapped … From that moment on, I can say without exaggerating, he ceased to be one of us … He’d had it …

  Late that night he asked me to join him in his directorial office … At that point I expected him to communicate some monumental decision, my immediate dismissal, for instance … Not at all … On the contrary, the decision he had arrived at was entirely favorable to me. Believe it or not, I was so unaccustomed to being surprised by good news that a tear or two escaped me … Baryton chose to interpret my emotion as sadness. That reversed the roles, and he began to comfort me …

  “Will you doubt my word, Ferdinand, if I assure you that it took far more than courage on my part to resolve to leave this Institute? … I, whose sedentary habits are known to you. I, a man on the brink of old age, whose whole career has consisted of long, tenacious, scrupulous verification of innumerable slow or sudden inspirations? … In the space of a very few months, I have come to abjure all that … It seems hardly believable … Yet here I am, body and soul, in such a state of detachment, of exultation … Ferdinand! Hurrah, as you say in English! My past has ceased to exist! I shall be reborn, Ferdinand! Neither more nor less! I am going away! Oh, kind friend, your tears are powerless to attenuate the definitive disgust I feel for everything that has kept me here for so many lackluster years … Enough! I can bear it no longer! I repeat, I am going away! Fleeing! Escaping! True, I am torn! I know it! I bleed! I can see it! And yet, Ferdinand, not for anything in the world, do you hear me, Ferdinand? Not for anything would I turn back! … Even if I had dropped an eye somewhere in this muck, I would not come back to pick it up! That’s the long and the short of it! Do you doubt my sincerity now?”

  I doubted nothing whatsoever. Baryton was unquestionably capable of anything. Besides, I am sure that in the state he had worked himself up into, any contradiction on my part would have been fatal to his reason. I left him alone for a little while. But then, on second thought, I tried to influence him just a little, risked a last attempt to bring him back to us … by means of a slightly transposed, amiably oblique … argument …

  “I beg you, Ferdinand, a
bandon all hope of my going back on my decision! It is irrevocable, I tell you! You will give me no end of pleasure by never speaking of it again … For the last time, Ferdinand, do you wish to please me? At my age, I know, a sense of mission is most unusual … That’s a fact … But when it comes, it’s irremediable …”

  Those were his very words, almost the last he uttered. I cite them verbatim.

  “Perhaps, my dear Monsieur Baryton,” I nevertheless ventured to break in. “Perhaps in the end this sort of impromptu holiday you are preparing to take will be nothing more than a rather romantic episode, a welcome diversion, a happy intermezzo in the course of your undoubtedly somewhat austere professional activity … perhaps after tasting a different life … more varied, less banally methodic than the life we lead here, then perhaps you will simply come back to us, pleased with your journey, surfeited with the unforeseen … And then, quite naturally, you will resume your place at our head … proud of your recent acquisitions … refreshed in a word, and henceforth, no doubt, prepared to accept, to look with indulgence upon the daily monotony of our laborious routine … An older and a wiser man! If you’ll forgive me, Monsieur Baryton, for putting it that way …”

  “Oh Ferdinand, you flatterer! … Somehow you still manage to touch my masculine pride, which, I discover, remains sensitive, exigent in fact, despite all my weariness and past trials … No, Ferdinand! With all your ingenuity you cannot in one moment make the abominably hostile and painful essence of our whole striving look benign to me. And moreover, Ferdinand, the time for hesitation, is past, it is too late to turn back! … I have been drained, I admit it, I shout it from the rooftops, Ferdinand: drained! stultified! defeated! by forty years of prudent paltriness! … That is far too much! What I aim to do? You want to know? … No reason why I shouldn’t tell you, you, my last friend, you who have been willing to take a disinterested part in the sufferings of a defeated old man … What I want, Ferdinand, is to try and lose my soul, as you might try to lose a mangy dog, your stinking dog, the companion who disgusts you, and to get far away from him before you die … To be alone at last … At peace … Myself …”

  “But, my dear Monsieur Baryton, I have never, in any of your words, caught an inkling of the violent despair whose uncompromising demands you have suddenly revealed to me. I am amazed! On the contrary, your daily remarks still strike me as perfectly pertinent … All your spirited, fruitful suggestions … Your splendidly judicious and methodical medical treatments … I would search your daily actions in vain for any sign of depression, of defeat … Really and truly, I discern nothing of the kind …”

  But for the first time since I’d known him, Baryton derived no pleasure from my compliments. He went so far as to dissuade me, quite amiably, from pursuing the conversation in a laudatory vein.

  “No, my dear Ferdinand, I assure you … True, your last professions of friendship have given my last moments here an unhoped-for sweetness, and yet with all your kindness you cannot reconcile me to the memory of a past which overwhelms me and which this place stinks of … At any cost and, do you hear? under any conditions, I am determined to go away …”

  “But Monsieur Baryton, this institution, what will we do with it? Have you thought of that?”

  “Yes, of course I’ve thought of it, Ferdinand … You will take over the management for as long as I’m away, that’s all! … Haven’t you always had excellent relations with our clientele? They will gladly accept you as director … Everything will be splendid, you’ll see, Ferdinand … Parapine, since he can’t abide conversation, will take care of the mechanical end, the apparatus, the laboratory … He has a way with those things … So everything’s in the best of order … And you know, I’ve stopped believing that anyone’s presence is indispensable … Even on that score, you see, my friend, I’ve changed considerably …”

  True enough, he was unrecognizable.

  “But aren’t you afraid, Monsieur Baryton, that your departure will provoke malicious comments on the part of your competitors in the region? … In Passy, for instance? In Montretout? … In Gargan-Livry? All those people around us … Always keeping an eye on us! … Those indefatigably treacherous colleagues! … What construction will they put on your noble voluntary exile? … What will they call it? An escapade? How do I know? Mischief? Flight? Bankruptcy? …”

  That eventuality had no doubt given him occasion for long and painful reflections. It still troubled him, and he turned pale before my eyes at the thought of it …

  His daughter, Aimee, our little halfwit, was in for a pretty rough time. He was entrusting her to the care of an aunt in the provinces, a total stranger if the truth be known. So, once his private affairs had been settled, Parapine and I would only have to look after his interests and property as best we could. Adrift in a ship without a captain!

  After all he had told me, I thought it permissible to ask him which way he was heading in his quest for adventure …

  “To England, Ferdinand!” he replied, without batting an eyelash.

  So much had happened to us in so short a time, I thought we’d have trouble digesting it, but it was clear that we’d have to adapt quickly to our new mode of life.

  The very next day Parapine and I helped him with his luggage. The passport with all its little pages and visas startled him somewhat. He had never seen a passport before. But while he was at it, he’d have liked to apply for a few spares. We managed to convince him that this was impossible.

  One last time he stumbled over the question: should he take hard collars or soft collars away with him and how many of each? This problem, still undecided, brought us almost to train time. All three of us jumped into the last streetcar for Paris. Baryton took only a small suitcase, intending to travel light and preserve his mobility wherever he went.

  On the platform he was impressed by the noble elevation of the car steps on the international trains. Hesitating to mount those majestic structures, he contemplated the car as though gazing at a monument. We helped him a little. Having taken a second-class ticket, he made a comparative, practical, and cheerful observation: “First is no better,” he said.

  We shook hands with him. The time was at hand. The whistle blew, and the train pulled out on the dot with an enormous jolt and crashing of steel, abominably mutilating our farewells. He had barely time to say: “Good-bye, boys!” and his hand broke loose, carried away from ours …

  Then his hand was waving in the smoke, rushing through the noise, already in darkness, further and further down the rails, white …

  In a way we weren’t sorry to see him go, but all the same the house seemed very empty without him.

  In the first place, the way he’d gone made us sad, in spite of ourselves so to speak. It wasn’t natural. After such a blow we wondered what might happen to us.

  But we didn’t have time to wonder very long. Only a few days after we’d taken Baryton to the station, I’m informed that there’s someone asking to see me personally in the office. Abbé Protiste.

  So I tell him the news, and what news! Especially the way Baryton had run out on us to go gallivanting around in the septentrional regions … When Protiste heard that, he couldn’t get over it, and when it finally sank in, the altered situation meant only one thing to him, namely, the advantage I could derive from it. “Such trust on the part of your director,” he kept saying over and over, “strikes me as the most flattering sort of promotion, my dear doctor.”

  I tried to calm him down, but once launched he persisted in his view of the matter and predicted that the most glorious of futures lay in wait for me, a magnificent medical career, as he put it. I couldn’t stop him.

  Nevertheless, though with considerable difficulty, we finally got back to serious matters, that is, to the city of Toulouse, whence he had arrived only the day before. Of course I gave him his turn to speak and tell me all he knew. I even pretended to be astonished, nay, stupefied, when he told me about the old woman’s accident.

 
; “What?! What’s that?!” I interrupted. “Dead? Heavens above! When did this happen?”

  Little by little, he had to come clean.

  Without telling me in so many words who had pushed the old woman down her little staircase, he said nothing to deter me from guessing … It seems she hadn’t had time to say boo. We understood each other … It was a good job, handled with care. This time he had done for her … He hadn’t botched his second try.

  Luckily everyone in the neighborhood had thought Robinson was still stone-blind. So they hadn’t suspected anything more than an accident, a very tragic one to be sure, but quite understandable when you thought it over, given the circumstances, the old woman’s age and the time of day, the late afternoon when she must have been tired … Just then I had no desire to hear more. He had told me plenty.

  But it wasn’t so easy getting the Abbé to change the subject. The thing was on his mind. He kept coming back to it, apparently in the hope that I’d make some kind of slip and give myself away … Nothing doing! He could keep trying … So after a while he gave up and contented himself with talking about Robinson and his health … His eyes … In that department he was much better … But his morale was still low. In fact his morale was terrible! In spite of the kindness and affection the two women never stopped showing him … he never stopped complaining about his own hard lot and life in general.

  It didn’t surprise me to hear Protiste telling me all that. I knew Robinson. He had a lowdown, ungrateful nature. But I distrusted the Abbé even more … I didn’t say a word while he was talking to me. All his confiding didn’t get him anywhere.

  “I must admit, doctor, that your friend, in spite of a material life that has become pleasant and easy and the prospect of a happy marriage, has disappointed all our hopes … Once again he is succumbing to the same fatal penchant for escapades, the perverse impulses you detected in the past? … What do you think of those tendencies of his, my dear doctor?”