"I have just given him an injection of morphine, to subdue him," he said. "He will doze now, till the end. But such a paroxysm! That of last night was a mere outline.—Above all things pay no attention to what he may have said to you. It was absolute mental confusion,—madness." He repeated: "madness."
He looked his companion squarely in the face—too squarely—as he emitted that phrase which contradicted so utterly his earlier formulas: "He lives over past events.—The depths of his memory come to the surface." He himself realized, no doubt, the terrible bearing of the antithesis between this second assertion and the former one, for he could not help blushing. What words had Jaubourg uttered, then, in his delirium, that were even more explicit? Had he pronounced, before those witnesses, the horrifying sentence: "I was Madame de Claviers' lover, and Landri is my son?" At all events, that was the ghastly fact that Chaffin had grasped amid the sick man's divagations, as Landri himself had done; and, at this additional evidence, he felt an icy chill run through his whole body.
When a man is suddenly brought face to face with a fact of supremely tragic importance to him, which he cannot honestly doubt, and of which he had no previous suspicion, an interval of semi-stupefaction succeeds, of brief duration, during which he could not himself say what his sensations are. It is not grief, for the man does not comprehend what he has just learned. He does not realize it. Nor is it hesitation. Later he will be able to argue, he will attempt, rather, to argue, against the evidence. For the moment the fact has entered into him, with its irresistible force, as a steel point enters the flesh that it passes through, and there ensues, in the most secret depths of his being, that total upheaval of nature to which the hymn in the liturgy refers: Stupebit et natura. However, life goes on about this man who has been stricken to death and knows it not. It even goes on within him, and he seconds it, and he obeys its behests with an automatism resembling that of an evil suggestion. In this state Landri descended the stairs from Jaubourg's apartment, re-entered the cab he had left at the door, and gave the cabman Maître Métivier's address, almost without being conscious of it. The clock, wound before the terrible shock, performed its functions mechanically.
The notary was not at his office. Of what consequence now to the young man were those financial difficulties which had seemed so formidable to him? What were they in presence of this other horrible thing? He left his letter, and went on, on foot, toward the club on Rue Scribe where he had determined to lunch. A telegraph office that he passed reminded him of his promise to send M. de Claviers a despatch. He went in; and there, as he rested his elbow on the desk of blackened wood, before the printed form, and dipped his pen into the ink, this species of somnambulism suddenly ceased. His consciousness returned, acute and heart-rending. That ghastly hour that he had just lived through was a reality. Jaubourg was really dying. He had really said to him those words which still filled his ears and which had rooted in his mind the most cruel, the most ineradicable of ideas. A sudden evocation showed him M. de Claviers entering that same room, and the dying man, in the throes of the same delirium, uttering the same words.
"That shall not be!" he said, and he crumpled the paper, on which he had not even begun to write the address, with a convulsive gesture of dismay. Feverishly he wrote on another sheet: "Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp. Château de Grandchamp, Oise.—Don't be alarmed. A decided improvement;" and signed it. Then he handed the untruthful despatch through the wicket.
He was within two steps of the club. The sight of one of the members going in at the door, who, fortunately, did not see him, made him stop short and walk away, almost run, in the opposite direction. That member of the club knew Charles Jaubourg, as all the others did. He would ask him for news of him. The friendship between the sick man and M. de Claviers was legendary.—Friendship!—Suddenly Landri said to himself: "They all know. Such scandals as this the world always knows; it hawks them about and laughs at them. The whole club knows. All Paris knows. There were only two people who didn't know."
He walked on and on,—how long he could not have told,—flying from those witnesses of the family disgrace, flying from himself. He mechanically entered a restaurant for luncheon, but had hardly begun to eat when he rose. Another image sprang up in his mind,—that of Valentine Olier. She too knew. That was the meaning of the exclamation that rushed from her lips: "Monsieur Jaubourg dying? I hope he won't see you"; of her entreaty not to see the sick man. She knew! With a bound as brutally instinctive as the contraction of his fingers on the white telegraphic form just before, Landri left the restaurant. He hailed another cab, to fly to her.
In his unreasoning excitement he had walked heedlessly, from street to street, as far as the network that encompasses the Department of the Interior. He was quite near Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where the town mansion of the Claviers-Grandchamps is situated. There his mother had died. There he had lived ever since with—By what name should he call henceforth the man whom he loved and should always love as a son loves his father, and who was nothing at all to him, nothing more than a great-souled honorable man, outraged by the most terrible of affronts, by those of the flesh of which his flesh was the offspring? The thought of seeing that house again was abhorrent to the wretched youth. He had given the cabman Madame Olier's address. As he was preparing to turn into Rue des Saussaies, Landri knocked on the glass as if he would break it. He ordered the man to go by way of Rue de Suresnes, Boulevard Malesherbes, and Rue Royale. The mere aspect of the quarter in which he had passed his childhood was, physically, intolerable to him. He closed his eyes that he might recognize nothing. But in that crisis of his life what impression could he receive that would not make him cry out in pain?
And now he was going to Valentine. To tell her what? To ask her what?—The cab had crossed Place de la Concorde, passed through Rue de Bourgogne and Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, and was rumbling over the pavement of Rue Monsieur; and he was still asking himself that question, without finding any reply thereto. To have conceived that ghastly suspicion, that certainty, alas! concerning Madame de Claviers and his own birth, was such a disgrace to begin with! To put that idea in words, even to Valentine, especially to Valentine, would be a crime! The affection of a son for his mother bears so sacred a character, all the loving energies of our being combine so powerfully to make her a creature apart from all others, purer, more irreproachable, more venerable! Was Landri to overstep the bounds of that respect which he alone could never cease to feel for Madame de Claviers, whatever she might have done? Should he repeat, voluntarily, knowingly, those terrible words torn from a dying man by the approach of the death-agony,—words by which he himself, as soon as he had heard them, was, as it were, stunned, ay, struck dead?
And yet it was absolutely necessary that he should find out whether Valentine knew and what she knew. The nervous shock had been too violent. All power of inhibition was momentarily suspended in him. His thought was certain to become an act the instant that it bore any relation to the overwhelming revelation that he had had to undergo. So that it was impossible for him not to cross the courtyard, not to ring at Madame Olier's door, not to ask if she would receive him. It had not even occurred to him that it was barely half-past twelve, that their appointment was for two o'clock, and that the simple fact of his arriving unexpectedly indicated some extraordinary occurrence. Did he so much as remember the reason that he and the young woman had made the appointment, and the passionate and painful interview of yesterday concerning their marriage? There is a peculiar characteristic of such uncontrollably excited mental states into which we are cast by a too abrupt and too violent shock: our mental equilibrium is temporarily upset. Our most cherished sentiments are arrested as it were, and our power of prevision as well. We seem to be looking on at the throwing out of gear of certain all-powerful sensations which lead us where they choose.