“It is I then that will do it,” said Bigourdin. “I am not Anti-Semite in any way; but to present a Jew dealer, who is already very well off, with many thousands of francs is the act of an imbecile.”
He tossed off his glass of Armagnac, beckoned the waiter, threw down the coins for payment and rose.
“Allons!” said he.
Fortinbras, exhausted in mind and soul, followed him. An auto-taxi took them to the Rue Maugrabine. The desolate and haggard femme de journée was restoring the house of death to some sort of aimless order. Bigourdin put a ten-franc piece into her hand.
“That is for you. Come back in two hours’ time.”
The woman went. The two men were left alone in the wretched little room, whose poverty stared from its cracked and faded wall paper, from its bare floor, from the greasy plush couch with one maimed leg stuck in an old salmon tin.
Fortinbras threw himself with familiar recklessness on the latter article of furniture and covered his eyes with his hand.
“A quarter of a century is a long time, my dear Gaspard,” said he. “A quarter of a century’s daily and nightly intimate associations with another human being leaves a deep imprint in one’s soul. I have been very unhappy, it is true. But I have never been so unhappy and so hopeless as I am now. Let me be for a little. My head is stupefied.”
“Mon pauvre vieux,” said Bigourdin, very gently. He glanced around and seeing a blanket, which Clothilde had used during her vigil, neatly folded by the femme de Journée and laid upon a wooden chair, he threw it over the recumbent Fortinbras. “Mon pauvre vieux, you are exhausted. Stay there and go to sleep.”
The very weary man closed his eyes. Two hours later, the femme de journée appeared. Bigourdin, with his finger to his lips, pointed to the sleeper and told her to come in the morning. It was then six o’clock in the afternoon. Bigourdin wrapped in whatever coverings he could find, dozed in a ricketty armchair for many hours, until Fortinbras awoke with a start