Other nights followed, and all his old torture came on him again. It seized him suddenly as he lay sleepless in bed, without ability on his part to foresee or prevent it. All at once, while he was lying there perfectly calm, a fearful shudder would convulse him; whereas, on the other hand, when he was irritable and weary, he perhaps escaped altogether. It was more than the mere shock of earlier times that he experienced now; his nervous excitement increased, and his whole being was shaken by each fresh attack. He could not sleep without a night-light, for the darkness increased his anxiety, in spite of his constant fear that his wife might discover his secret suffering. This very fear, indeed, increased his distress and aggravated the effects of his attacks; for in the old days, when he lay alone, he had been able to vent his dread, but now the presence of another at his side was a source of additional disquietude. When he started in terror from his pillow, his eyes heavy with sleep, he instinctively glanced at her, fearing he might find her eyes wide open and fixed upon his own. But she never moved, and by the glimmer of the night-light he could watch her quiet slumber, her placid face, thick lips, and little, blue-veined eyelids. And as she never awoke, he at last grew less disturbed on her account, until one night what he had so long feared really happened, and he saw her staring at him. But she said not a word when she saw him all pale and trembling. She, like himself, must have been thrilled by the horror of death, for she seemed to understand what was passing in his mind, and threw herself against him like a frightened woman seeking protection. Then, still desiring to deceive each other, they pretended that they had heard the sound of footsteps, and got out of bed to look under the furniture and behind the curtains.
Thenceforward they were both haunted with nervous fear. Never a word of confession escaped the lips of either. They felt that it was a shameful secret of which they must not speak; but as they lay in bed, with their eyes staring widely into space, they knew quite well what each was thinking of. Louise had become as nervous as Lazare; they must have infected each other with this dread, even as two lovers are sometimes carried off by the same fever. If he awoke, while she continued to sleep, he grew alarmed at her very slumber. Was she still breathing? He could not hear the sound of any respiration. Perhaps she had suddenly died! He would then peer into her face for a moment and touch her hands; but, even when he had satisfied himself that she was alive and well, he could not get to sleep again. The thought that she would certainly die some day plunged him into a mournful reverie. Which of them would go first, he or she? Then his mind dwelt at length on the alternative suppositions; and scenes of death, with the last torturing throes, the hideous shrouding and laying-out, the final heart-breaking separation, presented themselves to his mind. That thought of never seeing each other again, when they had lived together thus as man and wife, drove him to distraction, filled him with revolt; he could not endure the thought of such horror. His very fear made him wish that he himself might be the first to go. Then his heart ached with bitter grief for Louise, as he pictured her as a widow, still carrying on the old routine of life, doing this and that, when he should no longer be there. Sometimes, to free himself from those haunting thoughts, he would gently pass his arms about her without awaking her; but this he could not long endure, for he became still more terrified as he felt the pulsations of her life within his embrace. If he rested his head upon her breast and listened to her heart, he could not hear it beating without alarm, without feeling that all action might suddenly cease. And even love was powerless to drive away that great dread which still hovered around their curtains after every transport.
About this time Lazare began to grow weary of business. He fell back into his old state, and spent whole days in idleness, excusing himself on the ground of the contempt and dislike he felt for money-grubbing. The real truth was that constant brooding over the thought of death was daily depriving him of the desire, the strength to live. He came back to his old question, 'What was the good of it all?' Since it would all end in complete extinction sooner or later, perhaps to-morrow, or even to-day, or a single hour hence, what was the use of troubling and exciting one's self and bothering about one thing more than another? It was all quite purposeless. His existence itself had become a slow, lingering death, continuing day after day, and he strained his ears to listen to the sounds of its progress, even as he had done before in earlier times, and thought that he could detect the mechanism of his life quickly running down. His heart, he fancied, no longer beat so strongly as before, the action of every other organ was becoming feebler, and all would doubtless soon come to a dead-stop. He noted with a shudder that gradual diminution of vitality which growing age was bringing in its train. His very frame was perishing; its component parts were constantly disappearing. His hair was falling off, he had lost several teeth, and he could feel his muscles and sinews shrinking away, as though they were already returning to dust. The approach of his fortieth year filled him with gloomy melancholy; old age would soon be upon him now and make a speedy end of him. He had already begun to believe that his system was quite deranged, and that some vital part would very soon give way. Thus his days were spent in a morbid expectation of some catastrophe. He took anxious note of those who died around him, and every time he heard of the death of an acquaintance he received a fresh shock. Could it be possible that such an one was really dead? Why, he was three years younger than himself and had seemed likely to last a hundred years! And then that other man he knew so well, had he, too, really gone? A man who was so careful of himself, and who even weighed the very food he ate! For a couple of days after occurrences like these he could think of nothing else, but remained stupefied by what had happened; feeling his pulse, carefully observing all his own symptoms, and then falling foul of the poor fellows who had gone. He felt a craving to reassure himself, and accused the departed of having died from their own fault. One had been guilty of inexcusable imprudence, while another had succumbed to so rare a disease that the doctors did not even know its name.
But it was in vain that he tried to banish the importunate spectre; he never ceased to hear within himself the grating of the wheels which he fancied had so nearly run down; he felt that he was helplessly descending the slope of years, and the thought of the deep, black pit that lay at the bottom of it threw him into an icy perspiration and made his hair stand on end with horror.
When Lazare ceased going to his office, quarrels broke out at home. He manifested excessive irritability, which flared up at the slightest opposition. His increasing mental disorder, which he tried so carefully to conceal, revealed itself in angry snappishness, fits of moody sulking, and wild, mad actions. At one time he was so possessed by the fear of fire that he removed from a third-floor flat to one on the ground floor, in order that he might more easily escape whenever the house should burn. A perpetual anticipation of coming evil completely poisoned the present, and prevented him from deriving any enjoyment from it. Every time a door was opened rather noisily he started up in fear; and his heart throbbed violently whenever a letter was put into his hand. He suspected everybody. His money was hidden in small sums in all sorts of places, and he kept his simplest plans and intentions secret. He felt embittered, too, against the world, thinking that he was misunderstood and underrated, and that all his successive failures were the result of a general conspiracy against him. But ever-growing boredom dominated everything else—the ennui of a man whose mind was unhinged and to whom the incessant idea of death made all action distasteful, so that he dragged himself idly through life on the plea of its nothingness and worthlessness. What was the use of troubling? The powers of science were miserably limited; it could neither prevent nor foresee. He was possessed by the sceptical ennui of his generation, not the romantic ennui of Werther or René, who regretfully wept over the old beliefs, but the ennui of the new doubters, the young scientists who worry themselves and declare that the world is unendurable because they have not immediately found the secret of life in their retorts.
In Lazare the unavowed terror of ceasing to be was, by a logical contradiction, blended with a ceaseless braggart insistence upon the nothingness of things. It was his very terror, the want of equilibrium in his morbid temperament, that drove him into pessimistic ideas and a mad hatred of life. As it could not last for ever, he looked upon it as a mere fraud and delusion. Was not the first half of one's days spent in dreaming of happiness and the latter half in regrets and fears? He fell back again upon the theories of 'the old one,' as he called Schopenhauer, whose most violent passages he used to recite from memory. He expatiated on the desirability of destroying the wish to live, and so bringing to an end the barbarous and imbecile exhibition of existence, with the spectacle of which the master force of the world, prompted by some incomprehensible egotistical reason, amused itself. He wanted to do away with life in order to do away with fear. He always harped upon the great deliverance; one must wish nothing for fear of evil, avoid all action since it meant pain, and thus sink entirely into death. He occupied himself in trying to discover some practical method of general suicide, some sudden and complete disappearance to which all living creatures would consent. This was perpetually recurring to his mind, even in the midst of ordinary conversation, when he freely and roughly gave vent to it. The slightest worry was sufficient to make him cry that he was sorry he was not yet annihilated; a mere headache set him raging furiously at his body. If he talked with a friend, his conversation immediately turned upon the woes of life, and the luck of those who were already fattening the dandelions in the cemeteries. He had a perfect mania for mournful subjects, and he was much interested in an article by a fanciful astronomer who announced the arrival of a comet with a tail which would sweep the earth away like a grain of sand. Would not this indeed prove the expected cosmical catastrophe, the colossal cartridge destined to blow the world to bits like a rotten old boat? And this desire of his for death, this constant theorizing about universal annihilation, was but the expression of his desperate struggle with his terror, a mere vain hubbub of words, by which he tried to veil the awful fear which the expectation of his end caused him.
The knowledge that his wife was enceinte gave him a fresh shock. It caused him an indefinable sensation, compounded of joy and an increase of disquietude. Notwithstanding the contrary views of 'the old one,' the thought of becoming a father thrilled him with pride—indeed, a vain wonder, as though he were the first person whom such a thing had befallen. But his joy quickly became poisoned; he tormented himself with forebodings of a disastrous issue; already making up his mind that his wife would die, and that the child would never be born. And, indeed, it happened that Louise's health became very bad, for she was far from strong; and then the confusion of the household and the upsetting of their usual habits, together with their frequent bickerings, soon made them both thoroughly miserable. The expectation of a child, which ought to have brought the husband and wife more closely together, only served, indeed, to increase the misunderstanding between them. Thus, when Louise's doctor suggested a visit to the mountains, Lazare was delighted to take her to her sister-in-law's and secure a fortnight's freedom for himself on the plea of going to see his father at Bonneville. At the bottom of his heart he really felt ashamed of this flight; but, after arguing the matter with his conscience, he persuaded himself that a short separation would have a tranquillising effect upon both of them, and that it would be quite sufficient if he joined his wife before the expected event.
On the evening when Pauline at last learned the whole history of the past eighteen months she remained for a moment unable to speak—quite overcome, indeed, by the pitiable story. They were sitting in the dining-room; she had put Chanteau to bed, and Lazare had just finished making his confession in front of the cold tea-pot, beneath the lamp which was now burning dimly.
After an interval of silence Pauline at last exclaimed: