“The other evening we were together in considerable number in the big room on the ground floor where the guests unite to play little games, sing and even occasionally to dance. Mamma Bachellery had just accompanied Bébé in a cavatina from an opera—you know ‘we’ want to enter the opera; in fact, we have come to Arvillard to ‘cure up our voice for that’ according to the elegant expression of the mother. All of a sudden the door opened and the princess made her appearance, with that grand air which is her own—near her end but elegant, wrapped in the lace mantle which hides the terrible and significant narrowness of her shoulders. The little girl and the father followed.
“‘Go on, I beg of you—’ coughed the poor woman.
“And would you believe it? that idiot of a little singer must choose out of all her repertory the most harrowing, the most sentimental ballad ‘Vorrei morir,’ something like our ‘Dying Leaves’ in Italian, a ballad of a sick woman who fixes the date of her death in autumn, in order to give herself the illusion that all nature will die along with her, enveloped in the first autumnal fog as in a winding sheet!
“‘Vorrei morir nella stagion dell’ anno.’
(Oh! let me pass away when dies the year.)
“It is a graceful air, but with a sadness in it which is increased by the caressing sound of the Italian words; and there in the middle of that big drawing-room, into which penetrated all sorts of perfumes through the open window, the little breezes, too, and the freshness of a fine summer night, this longing to live on until autumn, this truce and surcease asked of the malady took on something too poignant to bear. Without saying a word, the princess stood up and quickly left the room. In the shadows of the garden I heard a sob, one long sob, then the voice of a man scolding, and then those tearful complaints which a child makes when it sees its mother sorrowing.
“That is the mournfulness of such watering-places: these miseries concerning health which meet one everywhere, these persistent coughs scarcely deadened by the hotel partitions, these precautions taken with handkerchiefs pressed upon the mouth in order to keep off the air, these chats and confidences, the miserable meaning of which one divines from the hand moving toward the chest or toward the back near the shoulder-blade, from the sleepy manner, the dragging gait and the fixed idea of misfortune.
“Mamma, poor mamma, who knows the stages in sickness of the lungs, says that at Eaux-Bonnes or at Mont Dore it is a very different thing from what it is here. To Arvillard people send only convalescents like myself or else desperate cases for which nothing can do any more good. Luckily at our hotel Alpes Dauphinoises we have only three sick persons of that sort, the princess and two young Lyon people, brother and sister, orphans and very rich, they say, who appear to be on their last legs; especially the sister, with that pallid complexion of the Lyon women, as if seen under water; she’s wound up in morning gowns and knit shawls, without one jewel or ribbon—not a single glimpse of coquetry about her!
“She looks poverty-stricken, that rich girl; she is certainly lost and she knows it; she is in despair and abandons herself to despair. On the other hand, in the bent figure of the young man, tightly squeezed into a fashionable jacket, there is a certain terrible determination to live, an incredible force of resistance to the malady.
“‘My sister has no spring in her—but I have plenty!’ said he the other day at the table d’hôte, in a voice quite eaten away, which is as difficult to hear as the ut note of Vauters the diva when she sings. And the fact is, he does have springs in the most surprising way; he is the make-fun of the hotel, the organizer of games, card-parties and excursions; he goes out riding and driving in sleds, that kind of little sled laden with fagots on which the mountaineers of this country toboggan you down the steepest slopes; he waltzes and fences, shaken with the terrible spasms of coughing which never stop him for a moment.