“We physicians, you see, are supposed not to feel anything because we have such an air with us. They think that in the sick person we are taking care of the sickness only, never the being, the human creature suffering pain. What an error! I have seen my master Dupuytren, who was supposed to be a pretty tough chicken, weeping hot tears before a poor little sufferer from diphtheria who told him very quietly that it was an awful bore to die ... and then those heart-breaking appeals from anguished mothers, those passionate hands which clasp your arm: ‘My child, save my child!’ ... and then the fathers who stiffen themselves up and say to you in a very masculine voice, but with great big tears running down their cheeks: ‘You will pull him through, won’t you, Doctor?’ It is all very well to harden oneself, but such despairs break your heart, and that is a nice thing, isn’t it, when one’s own heart is already attacked? Forty years of practice and every day becoming more nervous and sensitive—it is my patients who have killed me! I am dying from the sufferings of other people!”
“But I thought you did not accept patients any more, Doctor,” said the Minister, who was deeply moved.
“Oh, no; never any more, for nobody’s sake! I might see a man fall dead to the ground there in front of me and I wouldn’t even bend down. You understand? It is enough to turn one’s blood at last, this sickness of mine, which I have increased by all the sicknesses of others! Why, I want to live; there is nothing else but life!”
With all his pallor he excited himself and his nostrils, pinched with a look of morbidness, drank in the light air filled with lukewarm aromas, vibrating musical instruments and cries of birds. He continued with a heart-broken sigh:
“I do not practise any more, but I always remain the doctor. I preserve that fatal gift of diagnosis, that horrible second sight for the latent symptom, for suffering which the sufferer hopes to conceal, and which at a mere glance at the passer-by I perceive in the person who walks and talks and acts in the full force of his being, showing me the man about to die to-morrow, the motionless corpse. And all that just as clearly as I see it advancing towards me, the fit which is going to do for me, that last fainting-fit from which nothing can ever bring me back.”
“It is frightful!” murmured Numa, who felt himself turning pale. A poltroon in the face of sickness and death, like all Provençal people, those people so crazy to live, he turned his face away from the redoubtable scientist and did not dare look him in the face for fear he might read on his own rubicund features the warning signs of his, Numa’s, approaching end.
“Oh! this terrible skill at diagnosis, which they all envy me, how sad it makes me, how it ruins the little remnant of life which remains to me! Why, look here: I know a luckless woman here whose son died of laryngeal consumption ten or twelve years ago. I had seen him twice and I alone among all the physicians gave warning of the seriousness of the malady. Well, to-day I come across that same mother with her young daughter; and I may say that the presence of those unfortunate ones destroys the good of my sojourn at the baths and does me more harm than my treatment will ever do me good. They pursue me, they wish to consult me, and as for me I absolutely refuse to do it. No good of auscultating that child in order to read her condemnation! It was enough the other day to have seen her voracity while seizing a bowl of raspberries, and during the inhalation to have seen her hand lying on her knees, a thin hand, the nails of which are puffed up and rise above the fingers as if they were ready to detach themselves. That girl has the consumption her brother had; she will die before the year is out. But let other people tell them that; I have given enough of those dagger-stabs which have turned again to stab me. I want no more.”
Roumestan had got up, very much frightened.
“Do you know the name of those ladies, Doctor?”
“No; they sent me their card and I would not even see them. I only know that they are at our hotel.”