Henceforth I was never free from it. I noticed everything my friend ate or drank, not daring to advise him, and itching sometimes to do so.
I got clear away by myself and read in secret some medical treatise which tended rather to lead me astray than instruct me. I made a thousand resolutions and plans and rejected them in turn. They would all have been ridiculous, or even comic, if death had not been at hand, sacred and solemn.
That night I awoke startled several times, and I listened to the breathing of my companion, convinced, with the slightest pause, the slightest change in the rhythm, that he was dying—that he was dead.
We had not given up our walks, but I had abruptly shortened them, without saying why. I discovered a thousand round-about ways in order to avoid a rocky or slippery road; I pushed aside the branches that grew across the paths with a care that could not fail to arouse suspicion. Sometimes, in the course of a little excursion, feeling that we had gone far from the village, I suddenly experienced an overpowering terror which made me silent and stupid.
I had given up chess, excusing myself on the ground of fatigue, which soon indeed was no longer feigned. A time came when all these emotions seriously affected my health. I kept my bed for several days without being at all rested. I would rather have been left to myself absolutely; but the thought of Dauche going out alone and not able to take care of himself was unendurable. I could not imagine that the fatality was to take place without my being present, because I was always expectant, waiting....
So he always stayed with me, and used to pass the time by reading out to me. I often wished to stop him and, being unable to say that I felt anxious on his account, I complained of my head. The thing is unbelievable. It was I who looked like the man who was doomed, and it was he who seemed to be in full possession of his strength. I was right in what I said: I was undergoing on his behalf the pangs of death.
One night, during his first sleep, he uttered a kind of moan so strangely animal in quality, that at once I was on my feet, and I gazed at him for a long time in the glow of the night-light.
The emotion I felt that night was mingled with something like an intense desire for freedom. I was horrified to discover that my sick soul not only waited for the inevitable thing, but was dominated by a longing for the end.
I got up about the beginning of December, and our first walk was in the pinewoods that clustered on the sandy hills south of the main road from Rheims to Soissons.