“Would the gentleman like to see M. Duval?” asked the gardener, walking alongside me.
“Yes.”
“It’s just that I’m pretty sure he’s not back yet; otherwise I would have seen him here already.”
“You therefore are convinced he has not forgotten Marguerite?”
“Not only am I convinced, but I would also bet that his wish to move her grave is nothing more than the desire to see her again.”
“What do you mean?”
“The first thing he said to me when he came to the cemetery was, ‘What do I have to do to see her again?’ That could only take place if the grave were moved, and I explained to him all the forms he would need to fill out to make the change, because, you know, to transfer the dead from one grave to another, you must first identify them, and only the family is authorized to make that identification, and it must be done in the presence of a police commissioner. It’s to get this authorization that M. Duval has gone to Mlle Gautier’s sister, and his first visit will obviously be to us.”
We had arrived at the cemetery gate; I thanked the gardener again, put some money in his hand and went to the address he had given me.
Armand was not back.
I left word for him, asking him to come see me upon his return, or to let me know how I could find him.
The next day, in the morning, I received a letter from Duval, who informed me of his return and asked me to drop by, adding that, worn out with exhaustion, he was unable to leave his house.
CHAPTER VI
I found Armand in bed.
When he saw me he extended a burning hand.
“You have a fever,” I told him.
“It’s nothing; I’m tired out from my journey, that’s all.”
“You’re coming from Marguerite’s sister’s house?”
“Yes, who told you?”
“I know all about it, and did you get what you wanted?”
“Yes again, but who told you about the trip and about the purpose I had in making it?”
“The gardener at the cemetery.”
“Did you see the grave?”
I hardly dared answer, as the tone in which he asked the question proved to me that the man who asked it was still captive to the emotion I had witnessed, and that for a long time to come, whenever his thoughts or the words of another would bring him back to this painful subject, this emotion would overpower his will.
I contented myself therefore by responding with a nod of the head.
“Has he taken good care of it?” Armand asked.
Two fat tears rolled down the cheeks of the invalid, who turned his head to hide them from me. I pretended not to see them and tried to change the conversation.
“You’ve been gone three weeks,” I said.
Armand passed his hand across his eyes and said, “Just three weeks.”
“Your trip was long.”
“Oh! I wasn’t traveling all the time. I was sick fifteen days; otherwise I would have come back a long time ago, but I’d hardly got there when fever took me, and I was forced to keep to my bed.”
“And you left again before you had recovered.”
“If I’d stayed eight days more in that part of the country, I would have died there.”
“But now that you’re back, you’ve got to take care of yourself; your friends will come see you. Me, first of all, if you permit.”
“In two hours I will get up.”
“What folly!”
“I must.”
“What do you have to do that’s so urgent?”
“I must go see the police commissioner.”
“Why don’t you send someone else on this mission that’s bound to make you sicker still?”
“It’s the only thing that can cure me. I must see her. Ever since I learned of her death, and above all ever since I saw her grave, I can’t sleep. I cannot comprehend that this woman I left so young and so beautiful is dead. I must assure myself of it in person. I must see what God has made of this creature I loved so much, and perhaps the horror of the sight will replace the despair of my memory. You will accompany me, won’t you, if it is not too tedious for you?”
“What did you tell her sister?”
“Nothing. She seemed astonished that a stranger would want to buy a plot and have a tomb made for Marguerite, and immediately signed the authorization I asked for.”
“Believe me, you must put this off until you are fully recovered.”
“Oh! I’ll be fine; don’t worry. Anyway, I would go crazy if I didn’t finish off this task that I’ve determined to do; my sorrow makes it imperative. I swear to you, I will be calm again only once I have seen Marguerite. Perhaps it’s a thirst brought on by the fever that consumes me, an insomniac dream, a product of my delirium, but if seeing her meant I would have to become a Trappist monk afterward like M. de Rancé, I would still want to see her.”
“I understand,” I told Armand. “I am at your disposal. Have you seen Julie Duprat?”
“Yes. Oh! I saw her the very day of my first return.”
“Did she give you the documents Marguerite had left for you?”
“Here they are.”
Armand pulled out a roll of papers from beneath his pillow, and put it back immediately.
“I know by heart what those papers contain,” he told me. “For three weeks I have reread them ten times a day. You will read them too, but later, when I’m calmer, and when I will be able to make you understand everything these confessions reveal about her heart and her love. At the moment I have a favor to ask you.”
“Which is?”
“You have a carriage downstairs?”
“Yes.”
“Could you please take my passport and go ask at the post office if there are any letters for me? My father and my sister must have written to me in Paris, and I left with such precipitate haste that I didn’t take time to check before I left. Once you’re back we’ll go together to alert the police commissioner to tomorrow’s ceremony.”
Armand gave me his passport, and I went to rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
There were two letters for Duval; I took them and came back.
When I returned, Armand was dressed and ready to go out.
“Thank you,” he said, taking his letters. “Yes,” he added, after having looked at the addresses. “Yes, it’s from my father and my sister. They must have been perplexed by my silence.”
He opened the letters, and seemed more to divine their contents than to read them, as they were four pages each, and he folded them back up after an instant.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll write back tomorrow.”
We went to see the police commissioner, to whom Armand gave the authorization from Marguerite’s sister.
In exchange the commissioner gave him a release to give to the caretaker of the cemetery; it was agreed that the transfer would take place the next day at ten in the morning, that I would drop by Armand’s an hour beforehand, and that we would go together to the cemetery.
I, too, was curious to attend this spectacle, and I swear I did not sleep at all that night.
Judging from the thoughts that haunted me, it must have been a long night for Armand as well. When I entered his home the next day at nine o’clock, he was horribly pale but seemed to be calm.
He smiled at me and gave me his hand.
His candles had burnt down to the end, and before going out, Armand took up a thick letter, addressed to his father, in which he no doubt had confided his impressions of the night.
Half an hour later we arrived at Montmartre.
The commissioner was already waiting for us.
We walked slowly in the direction of Marguerite’s grave. The commissioner was first in line; Armand and I followed a few steps behind.
Fr
om time to time I could feel my companion’s arm shudder convulsively, as if he had been overtaken by sudden shivering. I would look at him then, and he would understand my look and smile at me, but from the time we left his home we did not exchange one word.
A little before we reached the grave, Armand stopped to wipe his face, which was beaded with perspiration.
I took advantage of this break to breathe, because I myself felt as if my heart were squeezed in a vise.
What is the source of the melancholy pleasure one takes in this sort of spectacle! When we arrived at the grave, the gardener had removed all the flowerpots, the wrought-iron trellis had been removed, and two men were digging up the earth.
Armand leaned against a tree and watched.
It seemed as if all his life were passing before his eyes.
Suddenly one of the two shovels struck stone.
With this noise Armand recoiled as from an electric shock and gripped my hand with such force that he hurt me.
A gravedigger took a broad shovel and emptied the grave little by little; then when there was nothing left but the rocks that covered the coffin, he threw them behind him one by one.
I watched Armand, fearing at every minute that the intense emotions he was so visibly undergoing might break him; but he kept watching, his eyes fixed and open as if in rapture, and only a gentle tremor in his cheeks and lips proved he was the victim of a violent nervous shock.
As for me, I can say only one thing, which is that I was sorry I had come.
When the bier was completely uncovered, the commissioner said to the gravediggers, “Open it.”
The men obeyed as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
The coffin was made of oak, and they began to unscrew the upper casing that covered it. The dampness of the earth had rusted the screws, and it was not without effort that the coffin was opened. An odor of infection seeped out, in spite of the aromatic plants that had been strewn within.
“O my God! My God!” murmured Armand, and again he turned pale.
Even the gravediggers drew back.
A large white shroud covered the corpse, outlining some of its sinuous curves. This shroud was almost completely eaten away at one end; a foot of the dead woman stuck through.
I was very nearly sick, and at the hour in which I write these lines, the memory of this scene appears to me again in its daunting reality.
“Let’s hurry,” the commissioner said.
One of the two men extended a hand and began undoing the shroud, and seizing one end he brusquely uncovered the face of Marguerite.
It was terrible to see; it is horrible to describe.
Her eyes were nothing more than two holes, her lips had disappeared, and her white teeth were crowded one against the other. Her long, dry black hair was stuck to her temples, veiling somewhat the green cavities of her cheeks, and yet I could recognize in this visage the white, pink, and joyful face I had so often seen.
Armand, unable to avert his gaze from this face, had brought his handkerchief to his mouth and was biting it.
As for me it seemed as if a circlet of iron were bound around my head, a veil covered my eyes, buzzing filled my ears, and all I could do was open a small vial I had brought by chance and inhale deeply the salts it contained.
In the midst of this daze, I heard the commissioner say to M. Duval, “Do you make the identification?”
“Yes,” the young man replied dumbly.
“Close it up and take it away,” said the commissioner.
The gravediggers threw the shroud back over the face of the dead woman, closed the coffin, and each took it by one end and headed toward the designated place.
Armand did not move. His eyes were riveted on the empty pit; he was as pale as the corpse we had just seen. You would have said he’d been turned to stone.
I understood what was likely to happen once his grief had subsided, reduced by distance from the spectacle; as a result I left his side.
I approached the commissioner.
“Is the presence of the gentleman still necessary?” I asked, indicating Armand.
“No,” he said, “and I would actually advise you to take him away, because he looks ill.”
“Come,” I said to Armand, taking his arm.
“What?” he said, looking at me as if he didn’t recognize me.
“It’s over,” I said. “You’ve got to go, my friend—you’re pale, you’re cold, you’ll kill yourself with this distress.”
“You’re right. Let’s get out of here,” he responded mechanically, without taking a step.
I grabbed him by the arm and led him off.
He let himself be guided like a child, murmuring only now and again, “Did you see her eyes?”
And he turned around, as if that vision had summoned her back.
But his step became irregular; he was no longer able to advance except by jolts. His teeth chattered; his hands were cold; a violent nervous agitation spread across his entire body.
I spoke to him; he did not answer.
All he could do was let himself be guided.
He had hardly sat down when the shivering increased, and he had a true nervous fit, in the middle of which, for fear of frightening me, he murmured while pressing my hand, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing; I just wish I could cry.”
I heard his chest heave, and a flush spread to his eyes, but tears would not come.
I made him breathe the smelling salts that had served me, and when we arrived at his place, only the shivering still manifested itself.
With help from the servant I put him to bed, had a big fire lit in his bedroom, and ran to find my doctor, to whom I related what had just happened.
He hurried over.
Armand was purple. He was delirious, and stammered incoherent words, in which only the name Marguerite could be distinctly heard.
“Well?” I said to the doctor when he had examined the patient.
“He has brain fever, no more, no less, and that’s a good thing, because I believe, God forgive me, that otherwise he would have gone mad. Luckily the physical illness will kill the psychological illness, and in one month he will be delivered from one, and perhaps from the other.”
CHAPTER VII
Illnesses like the one Armand had contracted are convenient in that if they don’t kill you on the spot, they are quickly conquered.
Fifteen days after the events I have just described, Armand was much better, and we had formed a firm friendship. I had hardly left his room the entire time he was sick.
Spring had scattered its flowers in profusion, its leaves, its birds and its songs, and my friend’s window opened cheerfully onto his garden, whose restorative scents drifted up to him.
The doctor had given him permission to leave his bed, and we often chatted, sitting by the open window, at the hour when the sun is at its hottest, from noon until two o’clock.
I took care not to speak to him of Marguerite, still fearing that the name might awaken a dormant unhappy memory in the seemingly calm patient; but Armand, on the contrary, seemed to take pleasure in speaking of her, not the way he had done in the past, with tears in his eyes, but with a gentle smile that reassured me about his mental state.
I had noticed that since his last visit to the cemetery, where the spectacle had taken place that had brought on this violent crisis, his psychological pain seemed to have been dwarfed by the illness, and for him the death of Marguerite no longer belonged to the past. A sort of consolation had come from the certainty he had obtained, and to chase away the dark image that frequently came to him, he sank into happy memories of his relationship with Marguerite, and seemed to want to think of none but those.
His body was too worn out from his attack and from his recovery from the fever to permit him to surrender to violent emotion, and the joys of the
springtime and of the world around him led his thoughts, despite himself, to cheerful visions.
He still stubbornly refused to tell his family of the danger he was in, and until he had recovered, his father was unaware of his illness.
One night we had stayed by the window longer than usual; the weather had been magnificent, and the sun had set in a twilight of shimmering azure and gold. Although we were in Paris, the foliage that surrounded us seemed to isolate us from the world, even if from time to time the sound of a carriage faintly interrupted our conversation.
“It was at about this time of the year, on the evening of a day like this one, that I met Marguerite,” Armand told me, caught up in his thoughts and not in what I was telling him.
I said nothing.
He turned toward me and said, “I must tell you this story; you will get a book out of it that no one will believe, but that perhaps will be interesting to write.”
“You can tell me about it later, my friend,” I said. “You’re not well enough yet.”
“The evening is warm, I’ve eaten my chicken breast,” he said to me, smiling. “I don’t have a fever, we’ve got nothing to do. I’m going to tell you everything.”
“Since you feel so strongly, I’ll listen.”
“It’s a very simple story,” he added, “and I will tell it to you in the order that things happened. If you do something with it later, feel free to tell it differently.”
Here is what he told me, and I have changed hardly a word of this touching narrative.
Yes, continued Armand, letting his head fall back on his armchair. Yes, it was on an evening like this one! I had spent my day in the country with one of my friends, Gaston R . . . . That night we came back to Paris, and not knowing what to do, we went to the Variétés theater.
During an intermission we went out, and in the corridor we saw a tall woman pass, and my friend bowed to her.
“Who is that you are you bowing to?” I asked him.
“Marguerite Gautier,” he said.
“It seems to me she has changed; I wouldn’t have recognized her,” I said with an emotion that you will understand a little later.
The Lady of the Camellias Page 6