Un épisode

An Episode

Daniel Halevy

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE MUTUAL EDUCATION SOCIETY OF THE EIGHTEENTH ARRONDISSEMENT

My dear friends,

Allow me to dedicate to you this tale in which you will recognize the traces of experiences we shared and the memory of a labor that we assuredly do not renounce.

Yours,

Daniel Halevy

November 1907.

“I’m leaving, so it’s really true…” thought Julien Guinou. He was entering a platform at the Gare du Nord, walking alongside a train with all its doors open, where passengers were settling in. To his left walked his father, an old workman with a swaying gait, carrying a rather heavy suitcase. A young woman, Adeline, his companion, his friend, almost his fiancee, accompanied him, leaning on his right arm.

“Get in there,” she said suddenly, pointing to an empty compartment.

Julien looked, climbed in without a word. His father handed him the suitcase. He set it on a seat and stood in the doorway. He was a young man with a thin body, a sickly complexion, of a suburban pallor. He bore scrofula scars on his neck, and his face had no beauty except for its willful expression, the hard brightness of his pale eyes.

His father and his friend watched him from below: Julien looked away. He did not love his father and despised him. He loved Adeline and esteemed her well enough, but felt constrained by the difference in their thoughts. He was happy, purely happy, at the moment of breaking the bonds of his toilsome life and going, as the rich do, to the countryside to enjoy a long leisure. Adeline felt the grief of losing her friend and felt it all the more keenly because he felt nothing. “I am going to be alone,” Julien Guinou constantly thought, “alone, without family, without companions, without work…”

Old Guinou, knowing his son well, peacefully stuffed his pipe while waiting for the train to depart. The hour was near: an employee came and closed the door, and Adeline, seeing Julien separated from her, was moved.

“Will you write to me?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” he murmured with annoyance.

Adeline felt a chill in her heart and, speaking in a restrained voice so that the neighbors would not hear:

“Julien,” she pleaded, “don’t leave me like this, without a word, a look, a promise; for a fortnight I’ve barely seen you; you were ill, I know, I don’t reproach you for anything; but you’re leaving today, you’re leaving Paris, you’re going to get well; say goodbye to me, look at me, Julien, look at me.”

The carriages began to move, with an imperceptible, gliding, gentle motion. Adeline suddenly stepped back and Julien, leaning over the door, stayed turned toward her as if he had wanted to repair a little of the harm he had done. But this impulse of pity was brief. He watched the shrinking station and breathed deeply, expanded by his flight and his deliverance.

Adeline and old Guinou left the station together.

“My dear Adeline,” he said, walking beside her with heavy strides, “what I’m going to tell you, I’ve often told you: if you marry my boy, you won’t have an easy life, and it’s better that you be warned; a sick head, a sick body, there’s nothing but misfortune in him.”

Adeline was hurt by these words.

“Monsieur Guinou,” she said dryly, “Julien is like no one else and you don’t understand him. I’m leaving. Goodbye.”

She turned to the left and set off toward her distant quarter, Menilmontant. She had that quick pace of working women accustomed to long daily treks, in the morning toward the city, in the evening toward the outskirts. She walked quickly, but her young face remained anxious.

Julien Guinou had always been her companion. They had lived on the same street, studied in neighboring schools. Julien was a dreamy, solitary child; Adeline had adapted to these singular tastes. They had grown up together and alone, disdaining easy company, inventing games of which they were proud. At sixteen, Julien had developed a passion for ideas and for books that he obtained with great difficulty. Adeline had a quick intelligence; she could understand and follow her friend. First he was an anarchist: she listened to his rages, his hopes, and more than once let herself be led to the private or public meetings of the sect. Then Guinou came to know another group and wanted to occupy himself exclusively with poetry, with daring literature. Whether he was anarchist or decadent, Adeline admired him, always approved, and her ever-ready attention, her feminine docility, sufficed to bring a little peace and joy to Julien’s taut soul. She had devoted to him her first tender feelings: life did not separate them. The jewelry shop where she was a salesgirl was close to the linen store where he worked. Every day the two of them walked and lunched together, then, when evening came, met again at a little popular university: there they encountered a few people, as isolated as themselves in the coarse faubourg, and the only ones they consented to esteem.

Why had Julien suddenly wearied of a life he had long found sweet? No doubt those nights of study had exhausted him. He had read Verlaine, Laforgue, the Comtesse de Noailles. He had learned hundreds of lines of verse by heart, delighted at first, then seized by a despair that the young woman understood poorly. She saw a singular humor being born in him. She questioned him; he did not answer. Sometimes he avoided her. Reluctantly he resigned himself to going home to his parents. He no longer wished to work and seemed in revolt against his whole life. Adeline led him more than once, like a recalcitrant child, to the door of his shop. She had, like so many daughters of the people, a practical and wise instinct that Julien lacked. “One must live,” she would say, desolate. He would answer: “I am consumptive, I am going to die.” This was one of the ideas of his hypochondria.

A doctor who examined him found him very slightly ill and advised some rest, above all to calm this state of neurasthenia. A young bourgeois named Clement Dorsel, who often saw Julien at his popular university, took the trouble to pull strings and managed to procure him a bed at the sanatorium of Angicourt: he was leaving at that very moment and going there.

Adeline recalled as she walked the painful past and tried, but tried in vain, to hope for a better future. Her friend’s strange farewell had made an impression on her. “Poor Julien!” she thought, without the slightest reproach. For she admired him, pitied him, and pity prevented her from blaming. “Poor Julien! What new idea torments him? When he comes back to me, what will he do? Julien is too intelligent to be poor. He should be rich, like those he knows at the Foyer, like Monsieur Dorsel, for instance, who has time to read all the books…”

Adeline followed without haste the populous street of Menilmontant. She was going home and going home reluctantly, for she knew that none of her family would sympathize with her sorrow, neither her weary father nor her ever-scolding mother: and her need was extreme not to be either alone or roughly treated. Her sadness was more poignant in these surroundings of familiar houses that all her memories enlivened. As she walked she held her head slightly bowed, as if to hold back in her breast the sobs ready to rise. Suddenly she thought of the Foyer, the little popular university where she had all her friends:

“Today is Sunday,” she told herself. “No doubt they’ve come to the committee, Rudoul and old Marot, or Monsieur Dorsel or Mademoiselle Gaillon… I’ll stop by.”

The young woman, even in sadness, remained so receptive to happy impressions that this brief hope of a frank welcome, of outstretched hands, of friendly voices answering hers, sufficed to diminish her grief. She lightly climbed the steep slope that finishes the ascent, then, turning left, entered a narrow street bordered on one side by gardens and on the other by low houses, one of which bore a red inscription: The Foyer, Popular University and Cooperative of the Twentieth Arrondissement.

Adeline entered this house. She quickly crossed the untidy shop, paying no attention to the housewives making their purchases, without addressing a greeting to the clerk, and made her way to the small room where a few people, seated in the doubtful light emanating from a courtyard, appeared to be deliberating or working together.

“Good morning, Mademoiselle Adeline!” came a chorus of voices offering welcome.

“Guinou has just left,” she said without answering, and sat down. Her eyes were red and she was crumpling a handkerchief damp with her tears.

“Left this morning?” inquired one of the men.

“I took him to the station, I’ve just come back.”

A table strewn with papers; a bookcase where a few hundred books were arranged; about thirty chairs, more than one of them broken, cluttered this space. Three prints, hung on the walls, alternating with the dusty busts of Auguste Comte and Dante, did not diminish the sadness of the place but on the contrary, by the attempt at vain adornment, made its desolation all the more keenly felt.

They were gathered to the number of seven, last faithful members, last supporters of this society that was perishing despite their efforts: Rudoul, a bookkeeper, with a broad body slightly stooped, a furrowed brow, a man of invincible hope who for twenty years had been founding and sustaining groups of workers’ action. His hair was graying, he felt the fatigue of age and the melancholy of mediocre success: but a fighting instinct still sustained him. — Marot, a thin old man, with a fine, long, bearded face, a bourgeois of threadbare dress. He had been a monitor in a school and a mathematics tutor; then, retired, he lived on a tiny income sufficient for his tastes. He loved science and always knew how to unearth a few books to read. He loved music, and a relative sometimes sent him a ticket: nothing more was needed to ensure his happiness. — Groslay, the locksmith, of rustic appearance, an open soul, inclined to pleasant company, to generous hopes, impervious to Parisian baseness. — Megy, the electrician, a youth with a broad forehead and blue eyes, the youngest of the group and the most serious. — Dorsel, different in manner and bearing, a bourgeois, alone of his kind. He was somewhat a civil servant, somewhat a man of letters, as is customary in Paris. He held a position at the Arsenal Library and published critical essays in a few reviews. Curiosity had drawn him among these workers, friendship had kept him there: month by month he gave them a lecture and attended the sessions of their committee. — Mademoiselle Gaillon, the feminist, the strange creature, with a somewhat misshapen body, somewhat oblique features, as if a gust of wind, coming from the right, had slightly pushed the eyes, the nose, the mouth toward the left; but so gentle a gaze, vast and moist, appeared through this disorder, and so tender a smile passed across it, that Mademoiselle Gaillon had a great deal of charm after all and, in flashes, beauty. She lived alone, slept on a pallet, nourished herself on cheese and bread, earned each morning, in four or five hours of drudgery, the few pennies she spent, then gave the best of her days to friends in trouble or sick whom she went to visit.

In other times they had gathered more numerous in this little room: fifteen, twenty, zealous, happy and rich in intentions. On lecture evenings they opened the shop door and listeners crowded in. Sometimes it was necessary to set up in a school yard: all the serious men of the quarter came. But this first ardor had waned. Some had grown weary; others had been diverted by age, by family or health concerns: many a comrade had thus disappeared. Like a reduced troop marching in battle, decimated but not beaten, reduced to ten, reduced to eight, reduced to seven, the militants of the Foyer continued their labor. Chance had brought them together in the vague multitude of a Parisian faubourg, and they stayed together, they still strove, sustained by habit, by the fear of being alone, as also by a feeling of instinctive tenacity, affection, and honor.

They were sad that morning because of the one they were losing, this Guinou whose departure the young woman had just announced.

Dorsel rose and sat down beside her.

“You mustn’t worry,” he told her. “We arranged for Guinou to be admitted to a sanatorium. But his condition isn’t serious, not at all; he isn’t tubercular; it’s rest he needs; it’s a period of rest that we’ve procured for him.”

Adeline shook her head as if to decline this comforting thought.

“I’d rather he were ill, and very ill,” she said, “and that someone would tell me the name of his illness. I’d rather he were tubercular. Then I would nurse him, perhaps I would cure him…”

Groslay murmured:

“It’s his brain that’s affected.”

The young woman seemed absorbed by her emotion. And all at once, with a long sob that broke her voice:

“He left me without a farewell,” she cried, “without a look. What’s the matter with him? Does he hate me?”

She turned away with a quick movement and, letting her face fall into her hands, wept. The men, suddenly rising, surrounded her with solicitude and embarrassment. Mademoiselle Gaillon gently touched her shoulder.

“Adeline,” she said, “come with me, let’s go out…”

The two women left together, and Rudoul, Dorsel, Megy, Marot, Groslay found themselves standing around the empty chair.

“Our poor Foyer!” said Groslay.

“It’s coming to a bad end,” murmured old Marot, and none of his companions contradicted this prediction of doom he had pronounced. Guinou’s departure, Adeline’s tears, had brought into them the feeling of defeat.

They took no pleasure in lingering in that little room where they had so faithfully labored in vain. The morning being well advanced, they went out. Megy, Groslay, Rudoul went together; Dorsel and Marot preceded them a little: a sort of instinct thus grouped them, the workers walking with the workers and the young bourgeois with the declassed bourgeois.

“Monsieur Marot,” Dorsel inquired, “had you seen Guinou lately?”

“A little. Sometimes he came up to my room.”

“What did he talk to you about?”

“His reading, his health, his rages, above all his reading, I believe.”

And the old man added:

“That poor Guinou, you know, is rather the victim of our books.”

Of my books, Dorsel immediately translated, not without some unease: for he had opened his library to Guinou.

Meanwhile Guinou got off his train and, leaving his packages at the station, disdaining the omnibus where a few patients were crowded together, he climbed alone through the woods to the sanatorium of Angicourt. This January day was somber but without harshness, and of a soothing sadness. Guinou walked gently, arrived, handed over his papers, and was received into the great house.

He was shown his bed, his wardrobe, then, outside, under the shelter of the galleries turned toward a pale sun, the chaise longue where he would have to stretch out all day long and rest. Several patients stirred under their blankets, sat up or turned their heads to study the newcomer. One coughed, and this brief little spasm having crossed the air, thirty suffering chests coughed one after another, communicating a bizarre animation to the enormous, silent space.

Guinou was not sensitive to the melancholy of the edifice and the welcome: he was accustomed to melancholy life. He was no more sensitive to the severe beauty of the view, to those wooded slopes curving before him like a misty gulf: he had too little familiarity with nature to know how to look at it. He barely listened to the instructions given him: he thought of himself alone, of the ugliness, the constraints suddenly lifted, of the great luxury of solitude, reading, and silence that a marvelous chance brought into his life.

Guinou had to undergo a medical examination that cost him time whose flight he cursed. Free, he hastily took up some books and settled on the chaise longue that had been shown to him.

A man with an emaciated face and a defeated look, his neighbor, looked at him and offered a banal welcome. Guinou had a start of anger, almost of hatred. He wanted to be alone and could not conceive that an intruder should speak to him. He looked at the man without unclenching his lips, turned his eyes away, spread the blanket over his legs, waited a minute for the full return of his happiness, then, as one performs a solemn act, he opened his sack, drew out Les Fleurs du mal and handled without haste this book he did not know.

He leafed through a few pages, hesitant to choose, fearing to miss the delicious moment, the first entry into this unknown universe that such a day opened to him. He raised his eyes, lingered, prolonged his pleasure and his excitement.

“To live like this,” he thought gently; “in an armchair, with books and one’s time to oneself, all one’s time truly one’s own… to live like this, like Monsieur Dorsel.”

He considered the titles at the top of the pages: Spleen and Ideal; Parisian Scenes; Wine; Revolt; Death; he hesitated, kept leafing; finally, reaching the last page, he read:

O Death, old captain, the time has come! Let us weigh anchor! This land wearies us, O Death! Let us set sail! If sky and sea are black as ink, Our hearts, which you well know, are filled with rays of light!

Guinou remained motionless for a few moments, transfixed: he had understood a new language.

His neighbor, who had not ceased observing him, thought him distracted and judged the moment good to strike up a conversation at last:

“You know, if we can be of any service to you in the house…” he said.

Julien Guinou turned his head sharply and, fixing the intruder, delivered a look so disdainful and so hard that the poor wretch was left stunned.

A pale sun, heavy as a tear, attenuated by mist and sadly visible, was sinking toward the horizon of the woods. Guinou dreamed, reflected, meditated until the end of the day; and his lips murmured Baudelaire’s alexandrine:

Our hearts, which you well know, are filled with rays of light.

He managed to safeguard his solitude. The poets he loved, the innumerable memory of images and rhythms that his young and firm memory retained, kept his mind in a strange state of constant and gentle obsession. He continued to read Baudelaire; he felt its magic. He was moved with a sure instinct, exalted by the pride of savoring without effort a lyricism so rare, so disdainful of what is simple and popular.

Five days passed: Guinou received a note from Adeline with embarrassment and displeasure. He did not like this reminder of a past that seemed abolished. He broke the envelope, skimmed two pages of tenderness, wishes, and news, and crumpled them in the bottom of his pocket.

The next day he received a letter from his father reproaching him for his silence. Julien barely read it, holding the paper at the tips of his fingers like a dirty thing; then he tore it into tiny pieces so the wind would scatter them and nothing would remain. He did not reply; he forgot.

A week passed: Julien received by the same post a second letter from his father, a second letter from Adeline, a letter from Megy. He was writing notes in the margins of a book when this packet was delivered to him: his quick thoughts were immediately distracted. It seemed to him that ill-intentioned friends were denying him his right to rest, to solitude, and cruelly bringing back upon him the shadows he had driven away. He took the sealed envelopes, tore them without even opening them, threw them away with an irritated gesture: he suddenly recovered his calm and his sweetness of life.

Stretched out on his chaise longue, he read. When he walked, book in hand, he read still. He said not a word to anyone; he lived alone, proud of his solitude. No one liked him: and he was well aware of this ill will that he had provoked. He rejoiced in it, interpreting it as an involuntary homage, an admission of difference and inferiority.

“All these people are common folk,” he thought, “and I am not. They feel it!”

Thus Julien managed to see nothing of the things around him and was affected neither by the mediocrity of meals taken in common, nor by the melancholy of the white edifice with its two arched wings that seemed to turn obstinately toward the sun its sickly, recumbent guests.

The comrades of the Foyer had lost heart and, as if ashamed of being beaten, avoided meeting one another. Victims of their singular tastes, these men without families lived as solitaries in their vast faubourg full of children, laughter and cries, quarrels and calls, sensuality, anger, and love.

Adeline was vexed at having shown her tears, her weakness, and sad at the abandonment in which Julien left her: she came no more. One morning she met Megy, who immediately asked about Julien: he had written twice without receiving a word in reply. Adeline had to confess her ignorance.

They walked together and talked. Megy, like Adeline, no longer went to the Foyer. He preferred to study alone, suddenly seized by mistrust or instinctive resentment against this unhappy group where he had wasted much effort and lost a friend.

“Why so many lectures?” he said in an irritated voice. “We don’t need to know, we workers, everything that has passed through the heads of poets, or to know all the histories of the past… we need to know our trade, to be strong against the bosses, and then to be energetic in preparing the future.”

Adeline gently agreed: she was accustomed to the vehemence of her friends.

Dorsel had promised to come and give a talk one evening in February: he excused himself, alleging pressing work. This was not a lie. But his language would have been more truthful had he confessed that he remained unsettled since Guinou’s departure, and very much in doubt about the quality of the services he could render.

The following week, they hoped for the arrival of a new lecturer who had promised his support. Groslay, Rudoul, and Marot, last faithful members of the dying group, waited for him. Once again they were disappointed; the lecturer did not deign to appear.

Old Marot began to talk. He told the memories of his fine days. He named the famous revolutionaries — Barbes, Proudhon, Blanqui. He spoke with that spirit of old men who console themselves for the tedium of being old by astonishing younger men with their antiquity. Groslay, suddenly addressing him, said:

“Monsieur Marot, give the lecture, tell us all your memories!”

“Very well,” replied Marot.

He collected himself a moment, then spoke. He had known the republican leaders before the war. He recalled their ways and manners, their jokes, their somewhat mad courage, their love of chance and risk. He had been a friend of Raoul Rigault; he had seen Flourens, one evening at a public meeting, arrest in the name of the people the police commissioner sent to monitor his speech.

Groslay, delighted with these French stories, laughed.

Marot knew well the history of the siege of Paris. “How much fun I had during that time,” he said, “and all Parisians with me! Bread was scarce, but paper never. How many newspapers to read! Every day a vote, a riot, or a battle…”

Absorbed by the memories that came to him so numerous and so vivid, he forgot his small audience and even the pleasure of amusing. He found himself again in his old life, pushed along by dark hours. Suddenly he fell silent. Groslay inquired:

“And the Commune?”

Marot had been a Communard, but without illusions or joy. He told of the death of Flourens, his skull split by a saber blow; that of Raoul Rigault, shot in the street by the soldiers of Versailles. He himself had escaped with difficulty: he did not like to speak of those days when he had walked in blood and run over corpses.

“And after the Commune,” asked Groslay, who was no longer laughing, “where did you go?”

“To London.”

Groslay wanted stories about London. Marot had lived there very poorly, happy enough to be able to live at all, for the French had had a bitter and difficult life in the enormous crowded city, the damp and dark city. Many had died: one, a good and cheerful comrade, of hunger on a pallet; and Marot had known three who had killed themselves. After seven years he had returned to Paris where he had found new groups, led by new leaders, who thought, acted, and deluded themselves in a new manner as well.

Marot fell silent, almost surprised to find so much bitterness at the bottom of himself.

“Father Marot,” said Groslay, “your talk isn’t cheerful.”

“You asked for my memories,” replied Marot, already risen to leave: “I’ve told them to you. The life of revolutionaries isn’t pleasant, as you must know.”

Rudoul approved with a nod. Groslay, sad and disconcerted like a child, was pacing the room.

“It’s ignorance,” he kept saying, “it’s ignorance that causes all the harm. But look: we opened our university, no one comes.”

“Ignorance,” said Marot; “do you think so? The bourgeois know Greek, spelling, and Latin: they make blunders just like us.”

“No,” insisted Groslay, striking the table with his fist, “I say it right, it’s ignorance we must fight… Ah, if only people knew, if only they knew…”

Marot and Groslay went out together. Rudoul did not follow them, having intended to work that evening and verify the cooperative’s accounts. He sat at the counter, opened the ledgers: his mind was disposed in a somewhat grave and weary manner. He was tired from the day’s work. Marot’s words, which he had listened to in silence, preoccupied him. He was too young to have gone through the Commune, the massacres; but he knew the misery of strikes, the hard propagandizing. He thought of his own memories, already so numerous and so heavy; of the tragic multitude of vanished comrades, worn down by poverty, humiliated by prison, some dead, others broken, disappointed by the length of useless effort. “Ignorance is the cause of evil,” Groslay had said; “ah, if only people knew.” Rudoul repeated to himself: if only people knew…

These simple words revived in him a trouble that came from far away. One day in his childhood, his mother, in answer to some naive question, had responded: “When you’re grown up, you’ll know.” Suddenly silent, withdrawn into a corner, he had reflected on the future announced by those surprising words. He would know: why this glass on this table had this shape, he would know; why this wine one could see in it had such a good taste, he would know; and why children, before being grown, were small, and why trees grew like that, above even the houses, and why the stars twinkled so numerous in the sky, some so brilliant, others so pale, one day he would know all that!

From then on he worked; he learned to read on his own, was first in school; then, constantly driven by this childhood instinct that age increased, despite the crises of life, he had continued his studies. The day had come: what did he know at last? Rudoul avoided thinking about it.

He recalled the task he had set himself: he took a pen and verified at length, without a wavering of attention, the columns of figures. Then he went out. He returned, walking with weary steps, to the room where his solitary nights passed, and he was immediately seized again by that meditation which long habit seemed to perpetuate at the bottom of his thought.

“If only people knew,” he brooded, “if only people knew; but nobody knows, nobody wants to take the trouble to know; if only people knew, clearly and thoroughly, all the causes and all the consequences, then we could sort out this disorder, which is the evil, and this evil would cease. If only people would wait, with a little patience, before acting, and work like any workman who goes slowly when the work is difficult, then we could see clearly, we could find order, and men would know their place, their place in life: for that above all they do not know.”

It was past midnight. Rudoul reflected, his head bowed under an invisible weight. Nothing in the deserted faubourg distracted the course of his thoughts, and he meditated obstinately on the neglected virtue of knowledge.

March was drawing to a close and each day increased Guinou’s happiness. His imagination was free of restraints, of irritating encumbrances. He forgot the past; he never thought of the future, unconcerned as the child he still was and as those poor people among whom he had lived.

Now it happened that an employee, interrupting his reading without respect, handed him a sheet.

“You leave in two days,” he said.

Guinou did not reply, but he bowed his head and, suddenly feeling the imminent unknown, shuddered.

It was four o’clock. For two more hours he remained stretched out, trying to enjoy the fleeting moments, the air, his book, the light. He often repeated the stanza of Baudelaire that chance had revealed to him on the first day of his retreat:

He put down, he took up his book again, and sometimes managed to salvage some scrap of his threatened happiness: then he was seized again by dread.

He fell asleep with difficulty, awoke in the night and was gripped by panic: he heard his heart beating, his watch beating, he felt the passage of time rushing upon him the memories of his sordid past and the forebodings of the dreadful future. Sitting up in bed, he waited a long time. At last calm came, and sleep.

Two days later he left.

Guinou stopped on leaving the Gare du Nord. The day was damp and without light. People walked in the mud looking at their feet. He asked himself: where shall I go? He felt himself the victim of fate.

He walked for a few minutes, then sat down on a bench on the outer boulevards. His suitcase was set on the ground and he held his bag on his knees like a tramp of the open roads. Where would he go? It did not even occur to him that he might return to his parents, to that vile street, that vile lodging where he had wasted his twenty years of life. Nevertheless, when, chilled through, he rose, he made his way toward that Menilmontant which was like his city within the immense city.

He took a tram, got off at the faubourg, and again did not know where he would go. It displeased him to ask a friend for hospitality. He was intimate only with Megy and did not wish to see him. He noticed a hotel at the entrance to the rue de Menilmontant. He hesitated a little, then went in.

The room they gave him was hideous with its dirty wallpaper. It exhaled an odor of filth, of women, and of stuffiness. Julien Guinou opened the window that looked onto a courtyard and breathed air scarcely less foul. He sat down, sad as a defeated man. Until now he had been more stunned than desperate: at last despair took him. He threw himself on the bed, constantly open for sordid loves, and was assailed by all the memories of this life to which his destiny cast him back: shouts, roughness, thick stupidity, disorder and negligence, doubtful lights, infamous odors. A few rhythms of Baudelaire came to him suddenly, crossing, wounding his mind with their mocking and lyrical cadences:

Gleaming furniture, Polished by the years, Would adorn our chamber; The rarest flowers Mingling their scents With the vague fragrances of amber, The rich ceilings, The deep mirrors, The oriental splendor, All would speak there To the soul in secret Its sweet native tongue.

“My life, my whole life,” Guinou asked himself; “is it really like this, forever sordid, forever lost?” He repeated those words, my life, clenching his hands as if to hold onto some precious possession of which he was being robbed. The light rhythm assailed him again:

All would speak there To the soul in secret Its sweet native tongue. There, all is but order and beauty, Luxury, calm, and delight.

Powerless and furious like an animal caught in a trap, Julien let the night fall.

The next morning, tardily awakened, he recognized with weary eyes the ugly room and recalled one by one the sorrows of his state. A sound of footsteps rose from the street. “They’re going to work,” thought Julien disdainfully, “and I won’t go anymore…” He reflected a moment, then murmured: “I cannot.” It seemed to him that he would have dishonored himself by conceding such a vulgar step. “I must not,” he pronounced with pride. Then he mused: “What to do then? Kill myself, perhaps?” He considered this new idea; he considered it without agitation, without haste, like a thing ingenious and beautiful; he repeated, to better savor the sound of the words: “Kill myself, perhaps?” He found in them a familiar accent; nothing about them surprised him: “Yes,” he told himself, “I shall do that, and thus everything will be settled, and otherwise nothing can be settled.” Only then was he moved, and his heart beat, but gently, as with love, as if he had discovered a sublime vision. He smiled. “I shall do that, it will be good: I must kill myself, since my life cannot be beautiful…” (this sentence satisfied him and he smiled again) “I must do it, I shall kill myself…”

He idled in his bed, happy to have found the answer. At last he went down toward the city whose murmur he heard.

He went toward the rich quarters and walked all day long on the boulevards, the Champs-Elysees, the quays. He rejoiced to be in Paris, alone, unknown; he thought with a malicious joy that his friends, his parents, must be wondering at his absence and waiting for him. “Let them wonder!” he thought. “They’ll wonder a great deal more when I’ve done my deed.” His suicide seemed to him a glorious thing. He decided he would write a letter so that the newspapers would speak of him, of the young worker who killed himself because his life could not be beautiful.

He suddenly asked himself: “When shall I kill myself? In a week: I want to live eight more days. But money to live on?” Julien opened his purse, found four francs, and shivered with fear. “I need twenty francs, where to get them? Adeline?” he thought. “She loves me, she’ll do what I want, and if I command her to keep silent, she will keep silent…”

Day was falling. Julien Guinou went back up toward Menilmontant and waited for Adeline on the path of her return.

Adeline was walking a little fast, preoccupied because of Guinou and his astonishing silence. The date of his return must be very near: what had become of him? She heard:

“Adeline!”

It was Guinou calling her. Turning her head slightly, she saw him, pale and strange-looking, and seized his hands, laughing with pleasure.

“Julien, how are you? Where have you come from? We’ve all been wondering.”

“I have something to ask you, Adeline,” he pronounced with a brief and domineering accent. “Listen.”

“What is it?”

“I need money.”

Adeline listened, stupefied.

“What’s come over you?” she said. “I have a little money, I’ll lend it to you, but that’s not the point. Tell me about yourself, we have so much to say to each other, speak, tell me.”

Adeline fixed upon him determined eyes, and Guinou was humiliated to find her so firm before him.

“Will you do me a service, yes or no?” he declared.

“When you’re polite!” she said.

Her indignation was sincere; Guinou’s imperiousness was not. He lowered his eyes; Adeline sensed this moment of weakness.

“Julien,” she said, “speak to me; tell me how long you’ve been back in Paris, why you’re not working, where you’re staying. I know nothing about you, for two long months nothing. I wrote to you, you didn’t answer; Megy saw your father, who couldn’t say anything. Julien, be like before, speak.”

Julien Guinou made an irritated gesture, then, to his great shame, fell silent.

“Where are you staying?” Adeline repeated.

And Julien still keeping silent:

“Why do you need money? You’re not working? Why aren’t you working?”

Julien had foreseen this question and, assuming a mysterious voice, he replied:

“I need a week… over there I began a work, a poem… I need a week to finish it. After that I won’t ask for anything more.”

“But why hide from me where you’re staying?”

“I wanted to be alone for those eight days… alone as I was over there.”

Adeline remained undecided; the story of the poem seemed odd to her: but Julien was always odd. Besides, he had touched her and made her less suspicious. But she did not want to accept the secret of his address. She was uneasy about it, offended, and said so:

“Julien, I’ll give you what you want, and gladly. But you’ll tell me your address. I won’t accept your hiding from me and stopping me in the street because you need money.”

Julien Guinou, understanding he could not evade the request, indicated the hotel where he was staying. Adeline kissed him.

“Wait for me this evening,” she said, “I’ll bring you a small sum.”

Julien Guinou, displeased with himself, did not detain his friend. She disappeared, light and gay.

That same evening she saw him again and did not leave until very late at night. She had questioned him about this mysterious work he said he had begun: he had not answered. She had questioned him about the reasons for his silence and isolation: he had answered poorly. Adeline could not manage to understand and vaguely apprehended some misfortune. She was frightened to be the only one who knew Guinou’s retreat, to bear alone with him the responsibility of an unknown so heavy. The next morning she found herself still more anxious and decided she should not, she could not keep such a secret. She dressed quickly, dropped off a brief note at old Guinou’s: she delivered to him the address of his son.

She felt relieved, but for a short time. “I was very clumsy in warning his father,” she told herself reproachfully. “He doesn’t understand Julien, Julien doesn’t love him, they’ve always quarreled… It’s Megy I should have warned, or, better still, Monsieur Dorsel; he knows Julien, he knows how to talk to him; Monsieur Dorsel would have understood; I should have written to him; I can still do so; he is kind, he won’t refuse… I’ll go; and perhaps he’ll repair my mistake of this morning…”

Once before she had thus solicited Dorsel, at the end of autumn, when Guinou had seemed so ill and so desperate. She did not have lunch and hurried to the Arsenal Library where she found the young man installed behind his desk, peaceful and sorting books.

She told him everything; she confessed her great desire that he intervene.

Dorsel listened in silence. Adeline fixed upon him pleading eyes.

“Do you find me indiscreet?” she asked.

“No,” replied Dorsel, who guessed the serious and perhaps even tragic depth of it all.

Guinou worried and touched him singularly.

“I’ll go,” he said.

Adeline hesitated a moment, then dared to ask:

Dorsel took pity on her.

“I’ll have lunch and be off,” he said.

Adeline’s visit had overwhelmed Julien. She was the only figure in his past that he had never detested. He had been imprudent enough to seek her out: having seen her again, and taken back into his arms the frail habit of living, he found himself without strength. If she herself had returned that morning, Julien would no doubt have confided the secret he had held back the night before with great difficulty. He would have confessed everything in tears, promised everything, like a cowardly child who is afraid.

He heard footsteps on the stairs, and these steps stopped before his door. They were not Adeline’s, so light: Julien Guinou recognized in them a familiar heaviness, a familiar rhythm.

“Is this the room?” said a heavy voice; and he recognized his father’s voice, who at the same time tried to open the door: but it was locked.

Adeline has betrayed me, he thought, motionless in his bed. Those steps, that voice had recalled his entire thwarted childhood, and he was once again possessed by hatred. The father knocked on the door.

“Julien! Are you there?”

Julien, silent, was even holding his breath. Outside, the father, leaning over the staircase railing, was conversing with the hotel boy. “No one’s answering,” he said, “the room is empty.” “It’s occupied,” the boy affirmed. The father shook the door violently.

“Julien,” he cried in an imperious voice, “answer if you’re there!”

“How he shouts, the brute!” thought Julien. “I don’t want to see him anymore. He ruined my life; let him let me die.”

The old man grew tired. Julien heard him saying to the boy: “I’ll come back this evening,” and the sound of those too-familiar steps faded away.

Julien breathed. Suddenly curious, almost eager, he ran to the window, pulled back the shutters, and kept watch. He saw his father leaving the hotel, then moving away, swaying in the manner of old workmen. He disappeared going down the street. No pity touched Guinou; he watched with a conqueror’s pride.

“Monsieur Dorsel!” he murmured all at once.

A young man had crossed paths with his father, and Guinou recognized Dorsel. He had no doubt: Adeline had warned him and he was coming to see him. He left the window, seized with agitation. What do they all want from me? he thought. What right do they have over me? He hated Dorsel as much as his father, more cruelly perhaps, but differently. He despised his father; he envied Dorsel; his father appeared to him as a brute, and Dorsel as a refined being, the most refined of the men he had approached; Dorsel had taught him everything — manners, culture, taste, the books that the common people do not know: and Guinou wanted to make him suffer, but above all he wanted to see him.

He was standing undecided in the middle of the room, still in his shirt and barefoot, when Dorsel knocked on the door and called:

“Guinou, are you there?”

Guinou turned the key and threw himself back into his bed.

“Come in,” he said.

He had stretched out on his back, his head slightly tilted toward the room, and he saw Dorsel enter, hesitate for a second, then walk toward the head of the bed.

“Are you unwell, Guinou?” he said, surprised to find him in bed.

Guinou studied Dorsel, did not answer a word, and composed an impassive face.

“Listen,” continued Dorsel in a serious voice. “I’ve seen Adeline: she’s worrying about you, she would like…”

Guinou kept his gray eyes fixed on Dorsel and soon recognized, not without pleasure, that his preacher was somewhat disconcerted.

“Guinou,” said Dorsel, “I’ve come to serve you, if I can. Can I?”

Guinou was looking elsewhere and appeared to hear nothing.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Dorsel.

And Guinou still keeping silent, Dorsel pressed on for a long time.

“What are you hiding from us? — Do you still feel ill? — I can’t understand! — Will you answer? — What do you want? That I leave? I won’t leave, Guinou. I know that a little while ago you turned your father away. You’re worrying Adeline, you’re worrying me too, all your friends are worried. Guinou, answer me!”

Julien Guinou maintained his averted gaze and his impassive air: but this was only appearance. Dorsel’s humiliated voice recalled to him the meetings at the Foyer, the evenings of talks and music, precious memories, pride and loss of his life. He felt toward Dorsel gratitude mixed with cruelty.

“Guinou,” pleaded Dorsel, “am I a stranger to you? We were comrades. We’ll be so again. All your friends are my friends. Why, tell me why you won’t answer?”

Dorsel, having risen, approached the bed. Guinou turned over, presenting his back.

“Guinou!” said Dorsel in a sad and reproachful voice.

His hand touched Guinou’s shoulder, who brushed it away with a slight movement. He stood a few minutes, hesitating beside the bed; he noticed the books on the table and read the names of Baudelaire and Huysmans. He was oppressed with anguish.

“Since you won’t hear me, Guinou,” he said, “farewell!”

He looked once more at that nape and that motionless back under the sheets. He left, and did not know that Guinou was weeping against the wall beside the bed.

Guinou, soon up, left the hotel, carrying his light baggage of linen and books. He hurried, fearing the return of his father, Megy, Adeline, or someone else. He headed toward La Villette and again shut himself up in a hotel room. “All that remains is for me to die,” he mused with a bitterness that the day before he had not felt: there would have been nothing but darkness in his soul had it not been for the keen pleasure he felt in recalling Dorsel’s crestfallen look.

Yet he did not wish to slip away obscurely or die unavenged. He wanted to manifest his hatred, to act in killing himself; and sometimes violent memories rose toward him from the distant time of his anarchist adolescence. Poutre, the libertarian, had told him: “If ever you are hungry, remember this: arm yourself, kill a bourgeois, the guillotine will cure you of poverty.” Guinou thought, teeth clenched: “Yes, I ought to kill. Whom? Dorsel?” He did not imagine without pleasure his sudden gesture and the body of the well-dressed young man suddenly falling to the ground in blood. But he objected to himself: “No, I must not kill. I would be confused with those anarchists I no longer belong to, no longer wish to belong to. I must act in my own way, I must find… my life is not beautiful enough: that is why I am killing myself; I must make that understood…”

And he continued to hear the counsel and the voice of Poutre that obsessed him.

On the evening of that day he went out and, covered by the night, dared to return toward those old quarters where his past called him. He went down the rue des Amandiers, a dark corridor where he had lived the twenty years of his life. He passed, walking fast, before his own house, feeling nothing but a movement of anger. He climbed a neighboring street and, suddenly recognizing the poorly lit front of a bar, he stopped, he looked, he was moved: it was there that the anarchist group used to meet, it was there that he had become an anarchist and happy. Between sixteen and eighteen, he had passed through this dream. Every evening, letting his mother grumble, silent as though for a great and mysterious work, he slipped away to the group; he approached those indomitable men, those poor before whom the rich trembled; their hands clasped his childish hands; he spoke to them, they listened; he followed them to meetings, to celebrations, and, with Megy whom he had met there, peddled posters, pamphlets, and songs.

Guinou approached very cautiously: through the curtains he recognized silhouettes, faces formerly fraternal; Poutre was holding forth, striking the table. Guinou felt tears rising to his eyes. He recalled, almost day by day, the first months of the Dreyfus affair, the harsh months, the fights of one against twenty, the charges at the platforms, the tearing down of tricolor flags — then, on a fine summer day, they had sacked the church of Saint-Joseph with Sebastien Faure, and in the evening they had watched the nationalists stone the police in front of the Gare de l’Est — great days when the world was cracking, giving hope to Justice!

A strong impulse pushed Guinou toward the lit doorway: he thought he was entering but stopped. “What’s the use?” he told himself. “A world separates us.” He stayed hidden. Poutre and the others rose: Guinou quickly drew back into the shadows. They advanced toward the door, they came out: Guinou fled before them.

He felt a little shame and regretted, without clearly admitting it to himself, those years when he had had an anger, a conviction, and a purpose.

He went home, went to bed, was long agitated among thoughts and dreams, found at last two or three hours of heavy sleep. A ray of morning sun, insinuating itself upon his face, woke him: he sat up in bed and immediately counted:

“This coming day… tonight… one more day, and then.”

He looked at the vile room.

“It’s ugly, I’ll leave it! Everything that’s ugly, I’ll leave! My act draws near!”

He repeated these words with a singular elation, as if he had felt revived in him his exaltations as a young libertarian. Les Fleurs du mal were at his bedside: he opened them but could not read, his feverish mind ill adapted to the sequence of words. He lay a long time, sometimes overtaken by sleep and lulled by a vague enthusiasm.

He went out after noon, then imagined he was being stared at, followed, and went back quickly. He feared that his friends might try to track him down. Adeline, indeed, as soon as she discovered his flight, had run to warn his father and Dorsel, who requested an investigation from the Prefecture of Police: but this could be a long search.

When night fell — his last night — Guinou recognized that nowhere more easily than at the hotel would they lay hands on him: he went out again, wandered through the dark streets, slept on a wooden bench at the Gare d’Orsay, woke chilled to the bone, walked, followed the quays, drank cafe au lait in the middle of the Pont-Neuf. An intense light was rising from the East over the pure sky: Guinou contemplated this last dawn while drinking the warm beverage, and felt that he was disposed in a calm and solemn manner. He drank slowly, savored the good gulps. Workers, both men and women, drank at his sides. He considered without pity these slaves of a universe in which only their cowardice kept them in bondage. These workers talked and laughed with simplicity. “Wretches!” thought Guinou.

He wanted to spend his last day at the Louvre; the hour being early, he found the doors closed and had to wait. This was a rather hard interval. Guinou needed to act to sustain his courage. He roamed the square without managing to distract his thoughts from imminent death. Often he looked at the time on the clock of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and though he was impatient to enter the museum, he felt long shudders because the minutes were fleeing. He leaned on the quay parapet, contemplating with an effort of indolence the moving water of the river: “Is it possible,” he mused, “that this water, tomorrow as today, will flow, and that I…” Neither his instinct nor his reason could comprehend that an infinite abyss could open for him alone. He took refuge in the church: an elongated ray, blued by a stained-glass window, seemed to rest on the deserted nave. Guinou was relieved by the immobility of things, the enveloping sounds, by an impression of life already suspended, soon transfigured.

As soon as the hour had struck, he left the church and entered the gallery of tombs and sphinxes. He circled around these monsters, then went up, attentively studied the refined jewels of the Egyptian ladies, crossed without haste the peaceful halls where the Hellenic figurines, gathered by hundreds in long display cases, smiling and mutilated, primp, chat, and try their light steps. He walked straight ahead and entered the painting galleries. He was weary, could not fix his attention.

He did not need to in order to be moved: his soul was all shaken, all overflowing, and the simple sight of those glorious walls sufficed to fill his eyes with tears. He examined a few scenes, deciphered a few names, realized that he knew nothing of these stories, these names. He passed on. Paintings different in aspect attracted him. He read Italian names, names of artists, and sometimes names of cities that Monsieur Dorsel had seen and described. He remembered, and was sad.

One o’clock had struck: Guinou felt a little hungry, went out, and lunched on three pastries, standing in a pastry shop. Then he retraced his steps to the museum. He headed for the Salon Carre and wanted to stay there a long time: but again his ignorance humiliated him. Too many people passed and repassed before him, whose apparently expert remarks and easy manners pained him. He set off again, saw the deserted reaches open in the shadows where the ancient gods reside, went toward them, and knew his last happiness. He stopped before the crucified Marsyas, sat at the feet of Venus; he wandered for a long time, turning aside sometimes to avoid the rare visitors. He heard their steps but saw only the marbles, and it seemed to him that this people of motionless heroes was beckoning to him and calling. The guards finally drove him out. The thought of seeing the street again dismayed him. He walked before them with a much-slowed step, lingering on purpose, yielding to them reluctantly, as if they had forced him to leave his tomb, soon to be definitive, to return a little to life.

That last hour had intoxicated him. He returned to his faubourg where he wanted to die. The journey was long and diminished his courage. He considered with agitation, yet with contempt, this wretched multitude clinging to life, among whom he walked.