“Isn’t it about time that you ceased making me suffer in this way?”
In order to quiet himself and drive off these dreams and other visions even more vivid and painful he lit his candle again, called to Bompard, asleep in the adjoining room—his comrade, his echo, always ready at command—and then the two would talk about the girl. It was for that very purpose he had brought him along, having torn him away with no little trouble from the business of establishing his artificial hatcher. Bompard consoled himself by talking of his venture to Father Olivieri, who was thoroughly acquainted with the raising of ostriches, having lived at Cape Town a long while. The tales told by the priest interested the imaginative Bompard very much more than Numa’s affair with little Bachellery—the Father’s voyages, his martyrdom, the different ways in which the robust body of the man had been tortured in different countries—that buccaneer’s body burnt and sawed and stretched on the wheel, a sort of sample card of refinements in human cruelty—and all that along with the cool fan of silky and tickly ostrich plumes dreamt of by the promoter. But Bompard was so well trained to his business of shadow that even at that time of night Numa found him ready to warm up and be indignant in sympathy with him and to express, with his magnificent head under the silken ends of a night scarf, the emotions of anger, irony or sorrow, according as the talk fell upon the false eyelashes of the artificial little girl, on her sixteen years, which certainly were equal to twenty-four, or on the immorality of a mother who could take part in such scandalous orgies. Finally, when Roumestan, having declaimed and gesticulated well and laid bare the weakness of his amorous heart, put out his candle, saying “Let’s try to sleep, come on,” then Bompard would use the advantage of the darkness to say to him before going to bed:
“Well, in your place, I know well enough what I would do.”
“What?”
“I would renew the contract with Cadaillac.”
“Never!”
And then he would plunge violently under the bed-clothes in order to protect himself from the rowdy-dow overhead.
One afternoon at the time for music, that hour during life at the baths which is given over to coquetry and gossip, whilst all the bathers, crowded in front of the establishment as if on the poop of a ship, came and went, slowly circled about, or took their seats on the camp-chairs arranged in three rows, the Minister had darted into an empty alley in order to avoid Mlle. Bachellery, whom he saw coming clad in a stunning toilet of blue and red, escorted by her staff. There, all alone, seated in the corner of a bench and with his pre-occupation strong upon him, infected by the melancholy of the hour and that distant music, he was mechanically stirring about with his umbrella the spots of fire with which the alley was strewn by the setting sun, when a slow shade passing across his sunlight made him raise his eyes. It was Bouchereau, the celebrated doctor, very pale and puffy, dragging his feet after him. They knew each other in the way that all Parisians at a certain height of society know each other. It chanced that Bouchereau, who had not been out for several days, felt in a sociable frame of mind; he took a seat; they fell to talking: “Is it true that you are ill, Doctor?”
“Very ill,” said the other with his manner of a wild boar, “a hereditary disease—a hypertrophy of the heart. My mother died of it and my sisters also. Only, I shall last less long than they, because of my horrible business; I have about a year to live—or two years at the most.”
There was nothing except useless phrases with which to answer this great scientist, this infallible diagnoser who was talking of his death with such quiet assurance. Roumestan understood it, as in silence he pondered that there indeed were sorrows a good deal more serious than his own. Bouchereau went on without looking at him, having that vague eye and that relentless sequence of ideas which the habit of the professorial chair and his lectures give to a professor: