Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

“Then the others?”

  “To begin with, there were only two: my professor, and he of course doesn’t count, and there was the man I told you about, a solid sort of a person, whom my mother saddled me with.”

  “No more?”

  “I swear it.”

  “And Chevalier?”

  “Chevalier? He? Good gracious, no! You wouldn’t have had me look at him!”

  “And the solid sort of person found by your mother, he, too, does not count any more?”

  “I assure you that, with you, I am another woman. It’s the solemn truth that you are the first to possess me. It’s queer, all the same. Directly I set eyes on you I wanted you. Quite suddenly I felt I must have you. I felt it somehow. What? I should find it very hard to say. Oh, I didn’t stop to think. With your conventional, stiff, frigid manners, and your appearance, like a curly-haired little wolf, you pleased me, that was all! And now I could not do without you. No, indeed, I couldn’t.”

  He assured her that on her surrender he had been deliciously surprised; he said all sorts of pretty, caressing things, all of which had been said before.

  Taking his head in her hands, she said:

  “You have really the teeth of a wolf. I think it was your teeth that made me want you the first day. Bite me!”

  He pressed her to his bosom, and felt her firm supple body respond to his embrace. Suddenly she released herself:

  “Don’t you hear the gravel creaking?”

  “No.”

  “Listen: I can hear a sound of footsteps on the path.”

  Sitting upright, her body bent forward, she strained her ears.

  He was disappointed, excited, irritated, and perhaps his self-esteem was slightly hurt.

  “What has come over you? It’s absurd.”

  She cried very sharply:

  “Do hold your tongue!”

  She was listening intently to a slight sound, near at hand, as of breaking branches.

  Suddenly she leapt from the bed with such instinctive agility, with a movement so like the rapid spring of a young animal, that Ligny, although by no means of a literary turn of mind, thought of the cat metamorphosed into a woman.

  “Are you crazy? Where are you going?”

  Raising a corner of the curtain, she wiped the moisture from the corner of a pane, and peered out through the window. She saw nothing but the night. The noise had ceased altogether.

  During this time, Ligny, lying moodily against the wall, was grumbling:

  “As you will, but, if you catch a cold, so much the worse for you!”

  She glided back into bed. At first he remained somewhat resentful; but she wrapped him about with the delicious freshness of her body.

  When they came to themselves they were surprised to see by one of their watches that it was seven o’clock.

  Ligny lit the lamp, a paraffin lamp, supported on a column, with a cut-glass container inside which the wick was curled up like a tape-worm. Félicie was very quick in dressing herself. They had to descend one floor by a wooden staircase, dark and narrow. He went ahead, carrying the lamp, and halted in the passage.

  “You go out, darling, before I put the lamp out.”

  She opened the door, and immediately recoiled with a loud shriek. She had seen Chevalier standing on the outer steps, with arms extended, tall, black, erect as a crucifix. His hand grasped a revolver. The glint of the weapon was not perceptible; nevertheless she saw it quite distinctly.

  “What’s the matter?” demanded Ligny, who was turning down the wick of the lamp.

  “Listen, but don’t come near me!” cried Chevalier in a loud voice. “I forbid you to belong to one another. This is my dying wish. Good-bye, Félicie.”

  And he slipped the barrel of the revolver into his mouth.

  Crouching against the passage wall, she closed her eyes. When she reopened them, Chevalier was lying on his side, across the doorway. His eyes were wide open, and he seemed to be gazing at them with a smile. A thread of blood was trickling from his mouth over the flagstones of the porch. A convulsive tremor shook his arm. Then he ceased to move. As he lay there, huddled up; he seemed smaller than usual.

  On hearing the report of the revolver, Ligny had hurriedly come forward. In the darkness of the night he raised the body, and immediately lowering it gently to the ground he attempted to strike matches, which the wind promptly extinguished. At last, by the flare of one of the matches, he saw that the bullet had carried away part of the skull, that the meninges were laid bare over an area as large as the palm of the hand; this area was grey, oozing blood, and very irregular in shape, its outlines reminding Ligny of the map of Africa. He was conscious of a sudden feeling of respect in the presence of this dead man. Placing his hands under the armpits, he dragged Chevalier with the minutest precautions into the room at the side. Leaving him there, he hurried through the house in quest of Félicie, calling to her.

  He found her in the bedroom, with her head buried under the bed-clothes of the unmade bed, crying: “Mamma! Mamma!” and repeating prayers.

  “Don’t stay here, Félicie.”

  She went downstairs with him. But, on reaching the hall, she said:

  “You know very well that we can’t go out that way.”

  He showed her out by the kitchen door.

  CHAPTER VII

  Left alone in the silent house, Robert de Ligny relit the lamp. Serious and even somewhat solemn voices were beginning to speak within him. Moulded from childhood by the rules of moral responsibility, he now experienced a sensation of painful regret, akin to remorse. Reflecting that he had caused the death of this man, albeit without intending it or knowing it, he did not feel wholly innocent. Shreds of his philosophic and religious training came back to him, disturbing his conscience. The phrases of moralists and preachers, learned at school, which had sunk to the very depths of his memory, suddenly rose in his mind. Its inward voices repeated them to him. They said, quoting some old religious orator: “When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world, we render ourselves liable to commit the most reprehensible actions. We perceive, from the most frightful examples, that voluptuousness leads to crime.”

  These maxims, upon which he had never reflected, suddenly assumed for him a precise and austere meaning. He thought the matter over seriously. But since his mind was not deeply religious, and since he was incapable of cherishing exaggerated scruples, he was conscious of only a passable degree of edification, which was steadily diminishing. Before long he decided that such scruples were out of place and that they could not possibly apply to the situation. “When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world.... We perceive, from the most frightful examples....” These phrases, which only a little while ago had reverberated through his soul like a peal of thunder, he now heard in the snuffling and throaty voices of the professors and priests who had taught them to him, and he found them somewhat ridiculous. By a natural association of ideas he recalled a passage from an ancient Roman history — which he had read, when in the second form, during a certain course of study, and which had impressed itself on his mind — a few lines concerning a lady who was convicted of adultery and accused of having set fire to Rome. “So true it is,” ran the historian’s comment, “that a person who violates the laws of chastity is capable of any crime.” He smiled inwardly at this recollection, reflecting that the moralists, after all, had queer ideas about life.

  The wick, which was charring, gave an insufficient light. He could not manage to snuff it, and it was giving out a horrible stench of paraffin. Thinking of the author of the passage relating to the Roman lady, he said to himself: “Sure enough, it was a queer idea that he got hold of there!”

  He felt reassured as to his innocence. His slight feeling of remorse had entirely evaporated, and he was unable to conceive how he could for a moment have believed himself responsible for Chevalier’s
death. Yet the affair troubled him.

  Suddenly he thought: “Supposing he were still alive!”

  A while ago, for the space of a second, by the light of a match blown out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor’s skull. But what if he had seen incorrectly? What if he had taken a mere graze of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull? Does a man retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and horror? A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even particularly serious. It had certainly seemed to him that the man was dead. But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?

  He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and muttered:

  “This lamp is enough to poison one.”

  Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr. Socrates, as to the origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally:

  “This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils.”

  Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his brains but merely shot off an ear. These instances applied to Chevalier with striking exactitude.

  “Supposing he were not dead.”

  He wished and hoped against all evidence that the unfortunate man might still be breathing, that he might be saved. He thought of fetching bandages, of giving first aid. Intending to re-examine the man lying in the front room, he raised the lamp, which was still emitting an insufficient light, too suddenly, and so extinguished it. Whereupon, surprised by the sudden darkness, he lost patience and exclaimed:

  “Confound the blasted thing!”

  While lighting it again, he flattered himself with the idea that Chevalier, once taken to hospital, would regain consciousness, and would live, and seeing him already on his feet, perched on his long legs, bawling, clearing his throat, sneering, his desire for his recovery became less eager; he was even beginning to cease to desire it, to regard it as annoying and inconsiderate. He asked himself anxiously, with a feeling of real uneasiness:

  “What in the world would he do if he came back, that dismal actor fellow? Would he return to the Odéon? Would he stroll through its corridors displaying his great scar? Would he once more have to see him prowling round Félicie?”

  He held the lighted lamp close to the body and recognized the livid bleeding wound, the irregular outline of which reminded him of the Africa of his schoolboy maps.

  Plainly death had been instantaneous, and he failed to understand how he could for a moment have doubted it.

  He left the house and proceeded to stride up and down in the garden. The image of the wound was flashing before his eyes like the impression caused by too bright a light. It moved away from him, increasing in size against the black sky; it took the shape of a pale continent whence he saw swarms of distracted little blacks pouring forth, armed with bows and arrows.

  He decided that the first thing to do was to fetch Madame Simonneau, who lived close at hand, in the Boulevard Bineau, in the residential part of the café. He closed the gate carefully, and went in search of the housekeeper. Once on the boulevard, he recovered his equanimity. He felt most uncomfortable about the accident; he accepted the accomplished fact, but he cavilled at fate in respect of the circumstances. Since there had to be a death, he gave his consent that there should be one, but he would have preferred another. Toward this one he was conscious of a feeling of disgust and repugnance. He said to himself vaguely:

  “I concede a suicide. But what is the good of a ridiculous and declamatory suicide? Couldn’t the fellow have killed himself at home? Couldn’t he, if his determination was irrevocable, have carried it out discreetly, with proper pride? That is what a gentleman would have done in his position. Then one might have pitied him, and respected his memory.”

  He recalled word for word his conversation with Félicie in the bedroom an hour before the tragedy. He asked her if she had not for a time been Chevalier’s mistress. He had asked her this, not because he wanted to know, for he had very little doubt of it, but in order to show that he knew it. And she had replied indignantly: “Chevalier? He? Good gracious no! You wouldn’t have had me look at him!”

  He did not blame her for having lied. All women lie. He rather enjoyed the graceful and easy manner with which she had cast the fellow out of her past. But he was vexed with her for having given herself to a low-down actor. Chevalier spoilt Félicie for him. Why did she take lovers of that type? Was she wanting in taste? Did she not exercise a certain selection? Did she behave like a woman of the town? Did she lack a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may not do? Didn’t she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Félicie for the accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus.

  Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the waiters in the café, the grocer’s assistants, the girls at the laundry, the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the corpse. He instructed her to cover it with a sheet, and to hold herself at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please God, what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a social circle which is obsequious to the constituted authorities and respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him to unpleasantness.

  “You ought not to have done it,” she told him. “When anyone has killed himself, you must never touch him before the police come.”

  Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement having passed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circumstances of that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and the occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary’s he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.

  At nine o’clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden with his secretary and a policeman. The municipal physician, Monsieur Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a candle.

  He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had just dined.

  “The bullet, a large calibre bullet,” he said, “penetrated by way of the palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous.”

  He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:

  “Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction.”

  However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thi
n man with a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was howling outside the garden gate.

  “The direction of the wound,” said the doctor, “as well as the fingers of the right hand, which are still contracted, are more than ample proof of suicide.”

  He lit a cigar.

  “We are sufficiently informed,” remarked the commissary.

  “I regret, gentlemen, to have disturbed you,” said Robert de Ligny, “and I thank you for the courteous manner in which you have carried out your official duties.”

  The secretary and the police agent, Madame Simonneau showing the way, carried the body up to the first floor.

  Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel was biting his nails and looking into space.

  “A tragedy of jealousy,” he remarked, “nothing is more common. We have here in Neuilly a steady average of self-inflicted deaths. Out of a hundred suicides thirty are caused by gambling. The others are due to disappointment in love, poverty, or incurable disease.”

  “Chevalier?” inquired Dr. Hibry, who was a lover of the theatre, “Chevalier? Wait a minute! I have seen him; I saw him at a benefit performance, at the Variétés. Of course! He recited a monologue.”

  The dog howled outside the garden gate.

  “You cannot imagine,” resumed the commissary, “the disasters caused in this municipality by the pari mutuel. I am not exaggerating when I assert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every hairdresser’s shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors, threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?”