Then he threw a cape, greenish with age, about his feverish shoulders, and dragged himself painfully to a little square near by, taking care that no policeman should see him. He knelt down, and dug in the earth with his finger nails, and devoutly buried his old pipe underneath a tuft of flowers. Then he returned to his dwelling-place and died.
MAL DE VIVRE
A poet, Laurent Laurini by name, was sick unto death with the illness, called weariness of life. It is a terrible malady, and those who have fallen prey to it are unable to look upon men, animals, and things without frightful suffering. Great scruples poison his heart.
The poet went away from the town where he dwelled. He sought out the fields to gaze at the trees and the corn and the waters, to listen to the quails that sing like fountains and to the falling of the weavers' looms and the hum of the telegraph wires. These things and these sounds saddened him.
The gentlest thoughts were bitterness to him. And when he picked a little flower in order to escape his terrible malady, he wept because he had plucked it.
He entered a village on an evening sweet with the perfume of pears. It was a beautiful village like those he had often described in his books. There was a town square, a church, a cemetery, gardens, a smithy, and a dark inn. Blue smoke rose from it, and within was the sheen of glasses. There was also a stream which wound in and out under the wild nut-trees.
The poet with his sick heart sat down mournfully on a stone. He was thinking of the torment he was enduring, of his old mother crying because of his absence, of the women who had deceived him, and he had homesickness for the time of his first communion.
"My heart," he thought, "my sad heart cannot change."
Suddenly he saw a young peasant-girl near by gathering her geese under the stars. She said to him:
"Why do you weep?"