[X]
HE took a room at the first hotel he encountered on the Quai Voltaire. In the mornings, he looked out through the rain at the river he had not yet dared to cross; at midday he ventured into the restaurant at the Gare d'Orléans where he could listen to the soothing roar of trains carrying happy travellers to the south-west. When his lunch was eaten and his bottle of white wine empty, he drank two liqueurs, not daring to remain at his table without reason, and his nimble mind skipped off into the Absolute. His peculiarities sometimes brought smiles to the faces of those about him, but for the most part he was unnoticed in his corner between the vestibule and a pillar. He read the newspapers, advertisements and all: murders, suicides, crimes of jealousy and madness—all these things helped to satisfy his appetite for the tragic facts of life. After dinner Jean bought a platform ticket and sought out the carriages that bore the name Irun. The next morning its windows would hold the reflection of monotonous heather-covered plains. He had calculated that this carriage would pass within fifty miles, as the crow flies, of his father's house, and he laid his hand upon it. When the train began to move out of the station he watched it with the eyes of a man who sees half of himself vanishing into space. Later at his table again, he abandoned himself despairingly to the influence of the restaurant orchestra. The ghost of Noémi took possession of him, and his thoughts thronged about her body which he had only seen while she slept. Through those long September nights when the moonlight fell upon the bed, Jean had probably come to know this body more intimately than if he had been her chosen lover and they had clasped each other in mutual ecstasy. She was always like a corpse in his arms, and his visual possession was therefore complete. Perhaps we know the woman who does not love us better than any other.
At that very moment, Noémi lay in the great cold bedroom, happy, and untroubled by a repulsive presence,—asleep in the bed he had deserted. Jean, still at his table, was acutely conscious of the joy and relief that his absence had brought her; anger flamed up within him, and he pressed his hands to his head. He would go back and compel her to submit to his desires, and insist upon enjoying himself at whatever the cost to her. He would make use of her. Then her face rose up in his mind; the same submissive expression, the same inanimate whiteness, the same passive surrender—a tree offering its fruit. He remembered her speechless horror; her wishes for death.... Paying for his drinks, he hurried along the quay to his hotel, and undressed in the dark in order not to see himself in the mirror.
Every three days he found an envelope on his breakfast tray which he sometimes did not open until evening. What did these hypocritical wishes for his return matter to him? The only pleasure these letters brought him was the fact that Noémi's hand had touched them, that her little finger-nail had scratched a faint line beneath each word. Towards the end of March he thought he could detect a trace of sincerity in the lines she wrote him: "If you don't believe I want to see you again, it is because you do not know your wife." And again: "I miss you." Jean crumpled her letter in his hand, and re-read one from his father that had come by the same post: "You will find Noémi changed for the better; she has put on weight and is in superb health. She is spoiling me to such an extent that I can hardly remember to thank her for her attentions. The Cazenaves never come here, but I know they think you two have quarrelled. Let them say what they please. I am very fit, unlike young Pieuchon who can only go out in a carriage and who is thought by everyone to be dying in spite of a doctor from B—— who pretends he is curing him with iodine and water. The old outlast the young."
With the first spring days Jean took courage and crossed one of the bridges. Just after the sun had set, he stood looking into the river, and his hands caressed the warm stone parapet as though it were a human being. Someone whispered at his shoulder; she called him "darling" and asked him to come with her. He turned and saw a young face close to his, pale under its paint. A swollen nailless hand sought his, but he turned and fled along the quay to the gate of the Louvre where he flopped, breathing hard. Could he have answered the summons of such a creature? For the first time he indulged himself with thoughts of a woman other than Noémi. He could not expect to thrill her, but she would at least be indifferent and not disgusted with him. Even as slight an enjoyment as that was inconceivable, he reflected bitterly, and anger again flamed within him. Why not give in to-night, and lose himself in the indulgent and willing embraces of one of these women? Were they in the world for everyone but a Péloueyre, these dispensers of love? At eight o'clock he watched the sky trembling in the pond in the Tuileries gardens; a laughing crowd of children gathered to watch his strange gesturings, and he hurried away. In the rue Royale he courageously crossed the threshold of a famous cabaret. He sat close to the door facing the bar to which a chattering throng attached itself as to a mahogany drinking-trough. He was delighted to find that his appearance caused no surprise to the women, or to the fat black-haired head waiters—the rats that infest expensive restaurants. In this glittering resort there were too many queer-looking savages from across the Atlantic, too many farmers and provincial notaries for anyone to laugh at Jean Péloueyre. Some Vouvray brought colour to his cheeks, and he smiled at the cattle round the mahogany trough. A big blonde woman left her stool and asked him for a light, drank from his glass, promised to make him happy for five louis, and then went back to her perch expectantly. An old man at the next table urged him to wait till the closing hour "because those who are left make you better prices then," but Jean paid his bill, and the woman joined him on the pavement outside. She called a taxi and drove her client to a house behind the Madeleine. The door opened directly on to the street as though to draw in all its odours. The tinkle of hairpins on marble awoke Jean from his lethargy; her arms were enormous at the point where they joined her shoulders, and bows of pink ribbon adorned a broad expanse of trembling flesh. She called him her wolf, and with infinite care began to remove her artificial silk stockings. Before this quick consent, this surrender without any trace of disgust, Jean experienced more acute agony of mind than when Noémi's body cried "No!" to him in the stillness.
The stupefied woman saw him throw a note upon the table, and before she could protest he was gone, speeding down the street like a robber. People were streaming along the boulevards, and Jean was filled with the happiness that comes after some great danger has been averted. Then the lure of gaunt leafless chestnut trees enticed him to the Champs Elysées, and he sat upon an empty bench, breathless and coughing a little. The arc-lights outshone the waning moon, but he knew that its quiet gleam fell upon the sombre uplands between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic. His agony had passed from him and his purity remained; he revelled in his wretched chastity. Sometime he and Noémi would love each other all through an endless summer's day, and he imagined what this exalted union of the flesh would be like. Ah, that bright shining light in which their immortal, their incorruptible bodies would come together! Jean spoke aloud: "There are no masters; we are all born slaves to be emancipated by Thee, Lord." A policeman approached the bench, looked at him for a moment, and passed on with a shrug of his shoulders.
Jean installed himself every afternoon at one of the little tables in front of the Café de la Paix, on the edge of a melancholy river of faces. Degrading diseases, alcohol and drugs had produced an unimaginably loathsome similarity in the features of the multitude that passed him, and these had once been children's faces. Jean counted the prostitutes eagerly hunting for employment, and tried to amuse himself by guessing what vice one particular man with an eyeglass and a sagging lower lip sought to satisfy. Anxiously he searched the crowd for a face bearing the mark of a Master. The sight of just one of these elect beings would have caused him to jump from his chair in eager pursuit. But he saw only shifting eyes, trembling hands and faces polluted by unnatural lust. If such a Master had existed, would he have been immortal? Jean, waving his arms and gesticulating at his table on the boulevard as wildly as in one of the back streets of his own town, took to himself Pascal's phrase about the end of the most brilliant career in the world: "One always loses the game!" One always loses the game; even your brain, Nietzsche!
The people about him began to nudge one another; a woman spoke to him and he leapt from his seat, threw some coins upon the table, and hurried away. But he could hear the woman's words: "You don't often see anything as soft as that!" He scampered like a rat along the inner edge of the flowing tumult, close to the shop windows, and all the time he was working out a plan for a decisive essay which he would call: The Will to Power and Holiness. Every now and then a mirror presented him with a reflection that he did not recognize; bad food was making him thinner than ever, and the dust of Paris irritated his throat. He should have given up cigarettes altogether, but he now smoked more than ever and was continually coughing and spitting. Attacks of dizziness often obliged him to cling to lamp posts, and he usually preferred starving himself to suffering a burning pain in his stomach. Would he be picked out of the gutter one day like a dead cat? Then Noémi would be free of him.... Such were his thoughts as he sat in a cinema where the uninterrupted music rather than the screen had drawn him. He often went into Turkish bath establishments, feverish and exhausted: the light behind calico curtains, the dripping of taps, and then the fading of consciousness. Jean's reason for seeking the protection of places like this was that the only church he knew in Paris was the Madeleine; there was no other on his way from the hotel to the Café de la Paix. But one day he took a less roundabout route and discovered Saint-Roch: its shadowy interior became his daily refuge. Even the smell of it was like his own church, and the Presence was there close to one of the great city's crowded thoroughfares, as definitely as in the obscure town from which he came. Not once did he cross the threshold of a library.
He might have existed in this way till the end of his life, had not a letter from the priest arrived one morning to call him home. The letter was a pressing one in spite of the fact that it contained the most satisfactory news of M. Jêrome and Noémi. Greatly distressed, Jean took his place in the carriage bearing the name Irun, a part of the train he had so often watched gliding slowly and then more rapidly out of the station, feeling that a part of himself went with it towards the South-West.