During this time, Ligny, lying moodily against the wall, was grumbling:

"As you will, but, if you catch a cold, so much the worse for you!"

She glided back into bed. At first he remained somewhat resentful; but she wrapped him about with the delicious freshness of her body.

When they came to themselves they were surprised to see by one of their watches that it was seven o'clock.

Ligny lit the lamp, a paraffin lamp, supported on a column, with a cut-glass container inside which the wick was curled up like a tape-worm. Felicie was very quick in dressing herself. They had to descend one floor by a wooden staircase, dark and narrow. He went ahead, carrying the lamp, and halted in the passage.

"You go out, darling, before I put the lamp out."

She opened the door, and immediately recoiled with a loud shriek. She had seen Chevalier standing on the outer steps, with arms extended, tall, black, erect as a crucifix. His hand grasped a revolver. The glint of the weapon was not perceptible; nevertheless she saw it quite distinctly.

"What's the matter?" demanded Ligny, who was turning down the wick of the lamp.

"Listen, but don't come near me!" cried Chevalier in a loud voice. "I forbid you to belong to one another. This is my dying wish. Good-bye, Felicie."

And he slipped the barrel of the revolver into his mouth.

Crouching against the passage wall, she closed her eyes. When she reopened them, Chevalier was lying on his side, across the doorway. His eyes were wide open, and he seemed to be gazing at them with a smile. A thread of blood was trickling from his mouth over the flagstones of the porch. A convulsive tremor shook his arm. Then he ceased to move. As he lay there, huddled up; he seemed smaller than usual.

On hearing the report of the revolver, Ligny had hurriedly come forward. In the darkness of the night he raised the body, and immediately lowering it gently to the ground he attempted to strike matches, which the wind promptly extinguished. At last, by the flare of one of the matches, he saw that the bullet had carried away part of the skull, that the meninges were laid bare over an area as large as the palm of the hand; this area was grey, oozing blood, and very irregular in shape, its outlines reminding Ligny of the map of Africa. He was conscious of a sudden feeling of respect in the presence of this dead man. Placing his hands under the armpits, he dragged Chevalier with the minutest precautions into the room at the side. Leaving him there, he hurried through the house in quest of Felicie, calling to her.

He found her in the bedroom, with her head buried under the bed-clothes of the unmade bed, crying: "Mamma! Mamma!" and repeating prayers.

"Don't stay here, Felicie."

She went downstairs with him. But, on reaching the hall, she said:

"You know very well that we can't go out that way."

He showed her out by the kitchen door.



CHAPTER VII

Left alone in the silent house, Robert de Ligny relit the lamp. Serious and even somewhat solemn voices were beginning to speak within him. Moulded from childhood by the rules of moral responsibility, he now experienced a sensation of painful regret, akin to remorse. Reflecting that he had caused the death of this man, albeit without intending it or knowing it, he did not feel wholly innocent. Shreds of his philosophic and religious training came back to him, disturbing his conscience. The phrases of moralists and preachers, learned at school, which had sunk to the very depths of his memory, suddenly rose in his mind. Its inward voices repeated them to him. They said, quoting some old religious orator: "When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world, we render ourselves liable to commit the most reprehensible actions. We perceive, from the most frightful examples, that voluptuousness leads to crime."

These maxims, upon which he had never reflected, suddenly assumed for him a precise and austere meaning. He thought the matter over seriously. But since his mind was not deeply religious, and since he was incapable of cherishing exaggerated scruples, he was conscious of only a passable degree of edification, which was steadily diminishing. Before long he decided that such scruples were out of place and that they could not possibly apply to the situation. "When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world.... We perceive, from the most frightful examples...." These phrases, which only a little while ago had reverberated through his soul like a peal of thunder, he now heard in the snuffling and throaty voices of the professors and priests who had taught them to him, and he found them somewhat ridiculous. By a natural association of ideas he recalled a passage from an ancient Roman history—which he had read, when in the second form, during a certain course of study, and which had impressed itself on his mind—a few lines concerning a lady who was convicted of adultery and accused of having set fire to Rome. "So true it is," ran the historian's comment, "that a person who violates the laws of chastity is capable of any crime." He smiled inwardly at this recollection, reflecting that the moralists, after all, had queer ideas about life.

The wick, which was charring, gave an insufficient light. He could not manage to snuff it, and it was giving out a horrible stench of paraffin. Thinking of the author of the passage relating to the Roman lady, he said to himself: "Sure enough, it was a queer idea that he got hold of there!"

He felt reassured as to his innocence. His slight feeling of remorse had entirely evaporated, and he was unable to conceive how he could for a moment have believed himself responsible for Chevalier's death. Yet the affair troubled him.

Suddenly he thought: "Supposing he were still alive!"

A while ago, for the space of a second, by the light of a match blown out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor's skull. But what if he had seen incorrectly? What if he had taken a mere graze of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull? Does a man retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and horror? A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even particularly serious. It had certainly seemed to him that the man was dead. But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?

He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and muttered:

"This lamp is enough to poison one."

Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr. Socrates, as to the origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally:

"This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils."

Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his brains but merely shot off an ear. These instances applied to Chevalier with striking exactitude.

"Supposing he were not dead."

He wished and hoped against all evidence that the unfortunate man might still be breathing, that he might be saved. He thought of fetching bandages, of giving first aid. Intending to re-examine the man lying in the front room, he raised the lamp, which was still emitting an insufficient light, too suddenly, and so extinguished it. Whereupon, surprised by the sudden darkness, he lost patience and exclaimed:

"Confound the blasted thing!"

While lighting it again, he flattered himself with the idea that Chevalier, once taken to hospital, would regain consciousness, and would live, and seeing him already on his feet, perched on his long legs, bawling, clearing his throat, sneering, his desire for his recovery became less eager; he was even beginning to cease to desire it, to regard it as annoying and inconsiderate. He asked himself anxiously, with a feeling of real uneasiness:

"What in the world would he do if he came back, that dismal actor fellow? Would he return to the Odeon? Would he stroll through its corridors displaying his great scar? Would he once more have to see him prowling round Felicie?"

He held the lighted lamp close to the body and recognized the livid bleeding wound, the irregular outline of which reminded him of the Africa of his schoolboy maps.

Plainly death had been instantaneous, and he failed to understand how he could for a moment have doubted it.

He left the house and proceeded to stride up and down in the garden. The image of the wound was flashing before his eyes like the impression caused by too bright a light. It moved away from him, increasing in size against the black sky; it took the shape of a pale continent whence he saw swarms of distracted little blacks pouring forth, armed with bows and arrows.

He decided that the first thing to do was to fetch Madame Simonneau, who lived close at hand, in the Boulevard Bineau, in the residential part of the cafe. He closed the gate carefully, and went in search of the housekeeper. Once on the boulevard, he recovered his equanimity. He felt most uncomfortable about the accident; he accepted the accomplished fact, but he cavilled at fate in respect of the circumstances. Since there had to be a death, he gave his consent that there should be one, but he would have preferred another. Toward this one he was conscious of a feeling of disgust and repugnance. He said to himself vaguely:

"I concede a suicide. But what is the good of a ridiculous and declamatory suicide? Couldn't the fellow have killed himself at home? Couldn't he, if his determination was irrevocable, have carried it out discreetly, with proper pride? That is what a gentleman would have done in his position. Then one might have pitied him, and respected his memory."

He recalled word for word his conversation with Felicie in the bedroom an hour before the tragedy. He asked her if she had not for a time been Chevalier's mistress. He had asked her this, not because he wanted to know, for he had very little doubt of it, but in order to show that he knew it. And she had replied indignantly: "Chevalier? He? Good gracious no! You wouldn't have had me look at him!"

He did not blame her for having lied. All women lie. He rather enjoyed the graceful and easy manner with which she had cast the fellow out of her past. But he was vexed with her for having given herself to a low-down actor. Chevalier spoilt Felicie for him. Why did she take lovers of that type? Was she wanting in taste? Did she not exercise a certain selection? Did she behave like a woman of the town? Did she lack a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may not do? Didn't she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Felicie for the accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus.

Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the waiters in the cafe, the grocer's assistants, the girls at the laundry, the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the corpse. He instructed her to cover it with a sheet, and to hold herself at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please God, what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a social circle which is obsequious to the constituted authorities and respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him to unpleasantness.

"You ought not to have done it," she told him. "When anyone has killed himself, you must never touch him before the police come."

Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement having passed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circumstances of that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and the occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary's he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.

At nine o'clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden with his secretary and a policeman. The municipal physician, Monsieur Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a candle.

He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had just dined.

"The bullet, a large calibre bullet," he said, "penetrated by way of the palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous."

He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:

"Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction."

However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thin man with a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was howling outside the garden gate.

"The direction of the wound," said the doctor, "as well as the fingers of the right hand, which are still contracted, are more than ample proof of suicide."

He lit a cigar.

"We are sufficiently informed," remarked the commissary.

"I regret, gentlemen, to have disturbed you," said Robert de Ligny, "and I thank you for the courteous manner in which you have carried out your official duties."

The secretary and the police agent, Madame Simonneau showing the way, carried the body up to the first floor.

Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel was biting his nails and looking into space.

"A tragedy of jealousy," he remarked, "nothing is more common. We have here in Neuilly a steady average of self-inflicted deaths. Out of a hundred suicides thirty are caused by gambling. The others are due to disappointment in love, poverty, or incurable disease."

"Chevalier?" inquired Dr. Hibry, who was a lover of the theatre, "Chevalier? Wait a minute! I have seen him; I saw him at a benefit performance, at the Varietes. Of course! He recited a monologue."

The dog howled outside the garden gate.

"You cannot imagine," resumed the commissary, "the disasters caused in this municipality by the pari mutuel. I am not exaggerating when I assert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every hairdresser's shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors, threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?"

"I have it!" exclaimed the physician. "He recited The Duel in the Prairie. People are rather tired of monologues, but that is very funny. You remember! 'Will you fight with the sword?' 'No, sir.' 'The pistol?' 'No, sir.' 'The sabre, the knife?' 'No, sir.' 'Ah, then, I see what you want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation.' Chevalier used to recite The Duel in the Prairie in a very humorous manner. He amused me greatly that night. It is true that I am not an ungrateful audience; I worship the theatre."

The commissary was not listening. He was following up his own train of thought.

"It will never be known, how many fortunes and lives are devoured each year by the pari mutuel. Gambling never releases its victims; when it has despoiled them of everything, it still remains their only hope. What else, indeed, will permit them to hope?"

He ceased, straining his ear to catch the distant cry of a newsvendor, and rushed out into the avenue in pursuit of the fugitive yelping shadow, hailed him, and snatched from him a sporting paper, which he spread out under the light of a gas-lamp, scanning its pages for certain names of horses: Fleur-des-pois, La Chatelaine, Lucrece. With haggard eyes, trembling hands, dumbfounded, crushed, he dropped the sheet: his horse had not won.

And Dr. Hibry, observing him from a distance, reflected that some day, in his capacity of physician to the dead, he might well be called upon to certify the suicide of his commissary of police, and he made up his mind in advance to conclude, as far as possible, that his death was due to accidental causes.

Suddenly he seized his umbrella.

"I must be off," he said. "I have been given a seat for the Opera-Comique to-night. It would be a pity to waste it."

Before leaving the house, Ligny asked Madame Simonneau:

"Where have you put him?"

"In the bed," replied Madame Simonneau. "It was more decent."

He made no objection, and raising his eyes to the front of the house, he saw at the windows of the bedroom, through the muslin curtains, the light of the two candles which the housekeeper had placed on the bedside table.

"Perhaps," he said, "one might get a nun to watch by him."

"It's not necessary," replied Madame Simonneau, who had invited some neighbours of her own sex, and had ordered her wine and meat. "It's not necessary, I will watch by him myself."

Ligny did not press the point.

The dog was still howling outside the gate.

Returning on foot to the barrier, he noticed, over Paris, a reddish glow which filled the whole sky. Above the chimney-pots the factory chimneys rose grotesque and black, against this fiery mist, seeming to look down with a ridiculous familiarity upon the mysterious conflagration of a world. The few passers-by whom he met on the boulevard strolled along quietly, without raising their heads. Although he knew that when cities are wrapped in night the moist atmosphere often reflects the lights, becoming tinged with this uniform glow, which shines without a flicker, he fancied that he was looking at the reflection of a vast fire. He accepted, without reflection, the idea that Paris was sinking into the abyss of a prodigious conflagration; he found it natural that the private catastrophe in which he had become involved should be merged into a public disaster and that this same night should be for a whole population, as for him! a night of sinister happenings.

Being extremely hungry, he took a cab at the barrier, and had himself driven to a restaurant in the Rue Royale. In the bright, warm room he was conscious of a sense of well-being. After ordering his meal, he opened an evening newspaper and saw, in the Parliamentary report, that his Minister had delivered a speech. On reading it, he smothered a slight laugh; he remembered certain stories told at the Quai d'Orsay. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was enamoured of Madame de Neuilles, an elderly lady with a lurid past, whom public rumour had raised to the status of adventuress and spy. He was wont, it was whispered, to try on her the speeches which he was to deliver in the Chamber. Ligny, who had formerly been to a certain small extent the lover of Madame de Neuilles, pictured to himself the statesman in his shirt reciting to his lady-love the following statement of principles: "Far be it from me to disregard the legitimate susceptibilities of the national sentiment. Resolutely pacific, but jealous of France's honour, the Government will, etc." This vision put him in a merry mood. He turned the page, and read: To-morrow at the Odeon, first performance (in this theatre) of La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812 with Messieurs Durville, Maury, Romilly, Destree, Vicar, Leon Clim, Valroche, Aman, Chevalier....



CHAPTER VIII

At one o'clock on the following day La Grille was in rehearsal, for the first time, in the green-room of the theatre. A dismal light spread like a pall over the grey stones of the roof, the galleries, and the columns. In the depressing majesty of this pallid architecture, beneath the statue of Racine, the leading actors were reading before Pradel, the manager of the house, their parts, which they did not yet know. Romilly, the stage manager, and Constantine Marc, the author of the piece, were all three seated on a red velvet sofa, while, from a bench set back between two columns, was exhaled the vigilant hatred and whispered jealousy of the actresses left out of the cast.

The lover, Paul Delage, was with difficulty deciphering a speech:

"'I recognize the chateau with its brick walls, its slated roof; the park, where I have so often entwined her initials and mine on the bark of the trees; the pond whose slumbering waters....'"

Fagette rebuked him:

"'Beware, Aimeri, lest the chateau know you not again, lest the park forget your name, lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"

But she had a cold, and was reading from a manuscript copy full of mistakes.

"Don't stand there, Fagette: it's the summer-house," said Romilly.

"How do you expect me to know that?"

"There's a chair put there."

"'Lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"

"Mademoiselle Nanteuil, it's your cue——Where has Nanteuil got to? Nanteuil!"

Nanteuil came forward muffled up in her furs, her little bag and her part in her hand, white as a sheet, her eyes sunken, her legs nerveless. When fully awake she had seen the dead man enter her bedroom.

She inquired:

"Where do I make my entrance from?"

"From the right."

"All right."

And she read:

"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning, I do not know why it was. Can you perhaps tell me?'"

Delage read his reply:

"'It may be, Cecile, that it was due to a special dispensation of Providence or of fate. The God who loves you suffers you to smile, in the hour of weeping and the gnashing of teeth.'"

"Nanteuil, my darling, you cross the stage," said Romilly. "Delage, stand aside a bit to let her pass."

Nanteuil crossed over.

"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them. They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"

Romilly interrupted:

"Delage, efface yourself a trifle; be careful not to hide her from the audience. Once more, Nanteuil."

Nanteuil repeated:

"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them. They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"

Constantin Marc no longer recognized his handiwork, he could no longer even hear the sound of his beloved phrases, which he had so often repeated to himself in the Vivarais woods. Dumbfounded and dazed, he held his peace.

Nanteuil tripped daintily across the stage, and resumed reading her part:

"'You will perhaps think me very foolish, Aimeri; in the convent where I was brought up, I often used to envy the fate of the victims.'"

Delage took up his cue, but he had overlooked a page of the manuscript:

"'The weather is magnificent. Already the guests are strolling about the garden.'"

It became necessary to start all over again.

"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri....'"

And so they proceeded, without troubling to understand, but careful to regulate their movements, as if studying the figures of a dance.

"In the interests of the play, we shall have to make some cuts," said Pradel to the dismayed author.

And Delage continued:

"'Do not blame me, Cecile: I felt for you a friendship dating from childhood, one of those fraternal friendships which impart to the love which springs from them a disquieting appearance of incest.'"

"Incest," shouted Pradel. "You cannot let the word 'incest' remain, Monsieur Constantin Marc. The public has susceptibilities of which you have no idea. Moreover, the order of the two speeches which follow must be transposed. The optics of the stage require it."

The rehearsal was interrupted. Romilly caught sight of Durville who, in a recess, was telling racy stories.

"Durville, you can go. The second act will not be rehearsed to-day."

Before leaving, the old actor went up to Nanteuil, to press her hand. Judging that this was the moment to assure her of his sympathy, he summoned up the tears to his eyes, as anyone condoling with her would have done in his place. But he did it admirably. The pupils of his eyes swam in their orbits, like the moon amid clouds. The corners of his lips were turned down in two deep furrows which prolonged them to the bottom of his chin. He appeared to be genuinely afflicted.

"My poor darling," he sighed, "I pity you, I do indeed! To see one for whom one has experienced a—feeling—with whom one has—lived in intimacy—to see him carried off at a blow—a tragic blow—is hard, is terrible!"

And he extended his compassionate hands. Nanteuil, completely unnerved, and crushing her tiny handkerchief and her part in her hands, turned her back upon him, and hissed between her teeth:

"Old idiot!"

Fagette passed her arm round her waist, and led her gently aside to the foot of Racine's statue, where she whispered into her ear:

"Listen to me, my dear. This affair must be completely hushed up. Everybody is talking about it. If you let people talk, they will brand you for life as Chevalier's widow."

Then, being something of a talker, she added:

"I know you, I am your best friend. I know your value. But beware, Felicie: women are held at their own valuation."

Every one of Fagette's shafts told. Nanteuil, with fiery cheeks, held back her tears. Too young to possess or even to desire the prudence which comes to celebrated actresses when of an age to graduate as women of the world of fashion, she was full of self-esteem, and since she had known what it was to love another she was eager to efface everything unfashionable from her past; she felt that Chevalier, in killing himself for her sake, had behaved towards her publicly with a familiarity which made her ridiculous. Still unaware that all things fall into oblivion, and are lost in the swift current of our days, that all our actions flow like the waters of a river, between banks that have no memory, she pondered, irritated and dejected, at the feet of Jean Racine, who understood her grief.

"Just look at her," said Madame Marie-Claire to young Delage. "She wants to cry. I understand her. A man killed himself for me. I was greatly upset by it. He was a count."

"Well, begin again!" shouted Pradel. "Come now, Mademoiselle Nanteuil, your cue!"

Whereupon Nanteuil:

"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"

Suddenly, Madame Doulce appeared. Ponderous and mournful, she let fall the following words:

"I have very sad news. The parish priest will not allow him to enter his church."

As Chevalier had no relations left other than a sister, a working-woman at Pantin, Madame Doulce had undertaken to make arrangements for the funeral at the expense of the members of the company.

They gathered round her. She continued:

"The Church rejects him as though he were accurst! That's dreadful!"

"Why?" asked Romilly.

Madame Doulce replied in a very low tone and as if reluctantly:

"Because he committed suicide."

"We must see to this," said Pradel.

Romilly displayed an eager desire to be of service.

"The cure knows me," he said. "He is a very decent fellow. I'll just run over to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and I'd be greatly surprised if——"

Madame Doulce shook her head sadly:

"All is useless."

"All the same, we must have a religious service," said Romilly, with all the authority of a stage-manager.

"Quite so," said Madame Doulce.

Madame Marie-Claire, deeply exercised in her mind, was of opinion that the priests could be compelled to say a Mass.

"Let us keep cool," said Pradel, caressing his venerable beard. "Under Louis VIII the people broke in the doors of Saint-Roch, which had been closed to the coffin of Mademoiselle Raucourt. We live in other times, and under different circumstances. We must have recourse to gentler methods."

Constantin Marc, seeing to his great regret that his play was abandoned, had likewise approached Madame Doulce; he inquired of her:

"Why should you want Chevalier to be blessed by the Church? Personally, I am a Catholic. With me, it is not a faith, it is a system, and I look upon it as a duty to participate in all the external practices of worship. I am on the side of all authorities. I am for the judge, the soldier, the priest. I cannot therefore be suspected of favouring civil burials. But I hardly understand why you persist in offering the cure of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont a dead body which he repudiates. Now why do you want this unfortunate Chevalier to go to church?"

"Why?" replied Madame Doulce. "For the salvation of his soul and because it is more seemly."

"What would be seemly," replied Constantin Marc, "would be to obey the laws of the Church, which excommunicates suicides."

"Monsieur Constantin Marc, have you read Les Soirees de Neuilly?" inquired Pradel, who was an ardent collector of old books and a great reader. "What, you have not read Les Soirees de Neuilly, by Monsieur de Fongeray? You have missed something. It is a curious book, which can still be met with sometimes on the quays. It is adorned by a lithograph of Henry Monnier's, which is, I don't know why, a caricature of Stendhal. Fongeray is the pseudonym of two Liberals of the Restoration, Dittmer and Cave. The work consists of comedies and dramas which cannot be acted; but which contain some most interesting scenes representing manners and customs. You will read in it how, in the reign of Charles X, a vicar of one of the Paris churches, the Abbe Mouchaud, would refuse burial to a pious lady, and would, at all costs, grant it to an atheist. Madame d'Hautefeuille was religious, but she held some national property. At her death, she received the ministrations of a Jansenist priest. For this reason, after her death, the Abbe Mouchaud refused to receive her into the church in which she had passed her life. At the same time, in the same parish, Monsieur Dubourg, a big banker, was good enough to die. In his will he stipulated that he should be borne straight to the cemetery. 'He is a Catholic,' reflected the Abbe Mouchaud, 'he belongs to us.' Quickly making a parcel of his stole and surplice, he rushed off to the dead man's house, administered extreme unction, and brought him into his church."

"Well," replied Constantin Marc, "that vicar was an excellent politician. Atheists are not formidable enemies of the Church. They do not count as adversaries. They cannot raise a Church against her, and they do not dream of doing so. Atheists have existed at all times among the heads and princes of the Church, and many of them have rendered signal services to the Papacy. On the other hand, whoever does not submit strictly to ecclesiastical discipline and breaks away from tradition upon a single point, whoever sets up a faith against the faith, an opinion, a practices against the accepted opinion and the common practice, is a factor of disorder, a menace of peril, and must be extirpated. This the vicar, Mouchaud, understood. He should have been made a Cardinal."

Madame Doulce, who had been clever enough not to tell everything in a breath, went on to say:

"I did not allow myself to be discomfited by the opposition of Monsieur le Cure. I begged, I entreated. And his answer was: 'We owe respectful obedience to the Ordinary. Go to the Archbishop's Palace. I will do as Monseigneur bids me.' There is nothing left for me but to follow this advice. I'm hurrying off to the Archbishop's Palace."

"Let us get to work," said Pradel.

Romilly called to Nanteuil:

"Nanteuil! Come, Nanteuil, begin your whole scene over again."

And Nanteuil said once more:

"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"



CHAPTER IX

The prominence given by the Press to the suicide of the Boulevard de Villiers rendered the negotiations between the Stage and the Church all the more difficult. The reporters had given the fullest details of the event, and it was pointed out by the Abbe Mirabelle, the Archbishop's second vicar, that to open the doors of the parish church to Chevalier, as matters then stood, was to proclaim that excommunicated persons were entitled to the prayers of the Church.

But for that matter, Monsieur Mirabelle himself, who in this affair displayed great wisdom and circumspection, paved the way to a solution.

"You must fully understand," he observed to Madame Doulce, "that the opinion of the newspapers cannot affect our decision. We are absolutely indifferent to it, and we do not disturb ourselves in the slightest degree, no matter what fifty public sheets may say about the unfortunate young fellow. Whether the journalists have told the truth or distorted it is their affair, not mine. I do not know and I do not wish to know what they have written. But the fact of the suicide is notorious. You cannot dispute it. It would now be advisable to investigate closely, and by the light of science, the circumstances in which the deed was committed. Do not be surprised by my thus invoking the aid of science. Science has no better friend than religion. Now medical science may in the present case be of great assistance to us. You will understand in a moment. Mother Church ejects the suicide from her bosom only when his act is an act of despair. The madmen who attempt their own lives are not those who have lost all hope, and the Church does not deny them her prayers; she prays for all who are unfortunate. Now, if it could be proved that this poor boy had acted under the influence of a high fever or of a mental disorder, if a medical man were in a position to certify that the poor fellow was not in possession of his faculties when he slew himself with his own hand, there would be no obstacle to the celebration of a religious service."

Having hearkened to the words of Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle, Madame Doulce hastened back to the theatre. The rehearsal of La Grille was over. She found Pradel in his office with a couple of young actresses, one of whom was soliciting an engagement, the other, leave of absence. He refused, in conformity with his principle never to grant a request until he had first refused it. In this way he bestowed a value upon his most trifling concessions. His glistening eyes and his patriarchal beard, his manner, at once amorous and paternal, gave him a resemblance to Lot, as we see him between his two daughters in the prints of the Old Masters. Standing on the table was an amphora of gilt pasteboard which fostered this illusion.

"It can't be done," he was telling each of them. "It really can't be done, my child——Well, after all, look in to-morrow."

Having dismissed them, he inquired, as he signed some letters:

"Well, Madame Doulce, what news do you bring?"

Constantin Marc, appearing with Nanteuil, hastily exclaimed:

"What about my scenery, Monsieur Pradel?"

Thereupon he described for the twentieth time the landscape, upon which the curtain ought to rise.

"In the foreground, an old park. The trunks of the great trees, on the north side, are green with moss. The dampness of the soil must be felt."

And the manager replied:

"You may rest assured that everything that can be done will be done, and that it will be most appropriate. Well, Madame Doulce, what news?"

"There is a glimmer of hope," she replied.

"At the back, in a slight mist," said the author, "the grey stones and the slate roofs of the Abbaye-aux-Dames."

"Quite so. Pray be seated, Madame Doulce; you have my attention."

"I was most courteously received at the Archbishop's Palace," said Madame Doulce.

"Monsieur Pradel, it is imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists of coming night. A pale-gold sky——"

"Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle," resumed Madame Doulce, "is a priest of the highest distinction——"

"Monsieur Marc, are you particularly keen on your pale-gold sky?" inquired the stage manager. "Go on, Madame Doulce, go on, I am listening to you."

"And exquisitely polite. He made a delicate allusion to the indiscretions of the newspapers——"

At this moment Monsieur Marchegeay, the stage manager, burst into the room. His green eyes were glittering, and his red moustache was dancing like a flame. The words rolled off his tongue:

"They are at it again! Lydie, the little super, is screaming like a stoat on the stairs. She says Delage tried to violate her. It's at least the tenth time in a month that she has come out with that story. This is an infernal nuisance!"

"Such conduct cannot be tolerated in a house like this," said Pradel. "You'll have to fine Delage. Pray continue, Madame Doulce."

"Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle explained to me in the clearest manner that suicide is an act of despair."

But Constantin Marc was inquiring of Pradel with interest, whether Lydie, the little super, was pretty.

"You have seen her in La Nuit du 23 octobre; she plays the woman of the people who, in the Plaine de Grenelle, is buying wafers of Madame Ravaud."

"A very pretty girl, to my thinking," said Constantin Marc.

"Undoubtedly," responded Pradel. "But she would be still prettier if her ankles weren't like stakes."

And Constantin Marc musingly replied.

"And Delage has outraged her. That fellow possesses the sense of love. Love is a simple and primitive act. It's a struggle, it's hatred. Violence is necessary to it. Love by mutual consent is merely a tedious obligation."

And he cried, greatly excited.

"Delage is prodigious!"

"Don't get yourself into a fix," said Pradel.

"This same little Lydie entices my actors into her dressing-room, and then all of a sudden she screams out that she is being outraged in order to get hush-money out of them. It's her lover who has taught her the trick, and takes the coin. You were saying, Madame Doulce——"

"After a long and interesting conversation," resumed Madame Doulce, "Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle suggested a favourable solution. He gave me to understand that, in order to remove all difficulties, it would be sufficient for a physician to certify that Chevalier was not in full possession of his faculties, and that he was not responsible for his acts."

"But," observed Pradel, "Chevalier wasn't insane. He was in full possession of his faculties."

"It's not for us to say," replied Madame Doulce. "What do we know about it?"

"No," said Nanteuil, "he was not in full possession of his faculties."

Pradel shrugged his shoulders.

"After all, it's possible. Insanity and reason, it's a matter of appreciation. To whom could we apply for a certificate?"

Madame Doulce and Pradel called to mind three physicians in succession; but they were unable to find the address of the first; the second was bad-tempered, and it was decided that the third was dead.

Nanteuil suggested that they should approach Dr. Trublet.

"That's an idea!" exclaimed Pradel. "Let us ask a certificate of Dr. Socrates. What's to-day? Friday. It's his day for consultations. We shall find him at home."

Dr. Trublet lived in an old house at the top of the Rue de Seine. Pradel took Nanteuil with him, with the idea that Socrates would refuse nothing to a pretty woman. Constantin Marc, who could not live, when in Paris, save in the company of theatrical folk, accompanied them. The Chevalier affair was beginning to amuse him. He found it theatrical, that is, appropriate to theatrical performers. Although the hour for consultations was over, the doctor's sitting-room was still full of people in search of healing. Trublet dismissed them, and received his theatrical friends in his private room. He was standing in front of a table encumbered with books and papers. An adjustable arm-chair, infirm and cynical, displayed itself by the window. The director of the Odeon set forth the object of his call, and ended by saying:

"Chevalier's funeral service cannot be celebrated in the church unless you certify that the unfortunate young man was not altogether sane."

Dr. Trublet declared that Chevalier might very well do without a religious service.

"Adrienne Lecouvreur, who was of more account than Chevalier, did without one. Mademoiselle Monime had no Mass said for her after her death, and, as you are aware, she was denied 'the honour of rotting in a nasty cemetery in the company of all the beggars of the quarter.' She was none the worse off for that."

"You are not ignorant of the fact, Dr. Socrates," replied Pradel, "that actors and actresses are the most religious of people. My company would be deeply grieved if they could not be present at the celebration of a Mass for their colleague. They have already secured the co-operation of several lyric artists, and the music will be very fine."

"Now that's a reason," said Trublet "I do not gainsay it. Charles Monselet, who was a witty fellow, was reflecting, only a few hours before his death, on his musical Mass, 'I know a great many singers at the Opera,' he said, 'I shall have a Pie Jesu aux truffes.' But, as on this occasion the Archbishop does not authorize a spiritual concert, it would be more convenient to postpone it to some other occasion."

"As far as I am concerned," replied the director, "I have no religious belief. But I consider that the Church and the Stage are two great social powers, and that it is beneficial that they should be friends and allies. For my own part, I never lose an opportunity of sealing the alliance. This coming Lent, I shall have Durville read one of Bourdaloue's sermons. I receive a State subsidy. I must observe the Concordat. Moreover, whatever people may say, Catholicism is the most acceptable form of religious indifference."

"Well then," objected Constantin Marc, "since you wish to show deference to the Church, why do you foist upon her, by force or by subterfuge, a coffin which she doesn't want?"

The doctor spoke in a similar strain, and ended by saying.

"My dear Pradel, don't you have anything more to do with the matter."

"Whereupon Nanteuil, her eyes blazing, her voice sibilant, cried:

"He must go to church, doctor; sign what is asked of you, write that he was not in possession of his faculties, I entreat you."

There was not religion alone at the back of this desire. Blended with it was an intimate feeling, an obscure background of old beliefs, of which she herself was unaware. She hoped that if he were carried into the church, and sprinkled with holy water, Chevalier would be appeased, would become one of the peaceful dead, and would no longer torment her. She feared, on the other hand, that if he were deprived of benediction and prayers he would perpetually hover about her, accursed and maleficent. And, more simply still, in her dread of seeing him again, she was anxious that the priests should take good care to bury him, and that everybody should attend the funeral, so that he should be all the more thoroughly buried; as thoroughly buried, in short, as it was possible to be. Her lips trembled and she wrung her hands.

Trublet, who had long graduated in human nature, watched her with interest. He understood and took a special interest in the female of the human machine. This particular specimen filled him with joy. His snub-nosed face beamed with delight as he watched her.

"Don't be uneasy, child. There is always a way of coming to an understanding with the Church. What you are asking me is not within my powers; I am a lay doctor. But we have to-day, thank God, religious physicians who send their patients to the ecclesiastical waters, and whose special function is to attest miraculous cures. I know one who lives in this part of the town; I'll give you his address. Go and see him; the Bishop will refuse him nothing. He will arrange the matter for you."

"Not at all," said Pradel. "You always attended poor Chevalier. It is for you to give a certificate."

Romilly agreed:

"Of course, doctor. You are the physician to the theatre. We must wash our dirty linen at home."

At the same time, Nanteuil turned upon Socrates a gaze of entreaty.

"But," objected Trublet, "what do you want me to say?"

"It's very simple," Pradel replied. "Say that he was to a certain extent irresponsible."

"You are simply asking me to speak like a police surgeon. It's expecting too much of me."

"You believe then, doctor, that Chevalier was fully and entirely morally responsible?"

"Quite the contrary. I am of opinion that he was not in the least responsible for his actions."

"Well, then?"

"But I also consider that, in this respect, he differed in nowise from you, myself, and all other men. My judicial colleagues distinguish between individual responsibilities. They have procedures by which they recognize full responsibilities, and those which lack one or more fractional parts. It is a remarkable fact, moreover, that in order to get a poor wretch condemned they always find him fully responsible. May we not therefore consider that their own responsibility is full—like the moon?"

And Dr. Socrates proceeded to unfold before the astonished stage folk a comprehensive theory of universal determinism. He went back to the origins of life, and, like the Silenus of Virgil, who, smeared with the juice of mulberries, sang to the shepherds of Sicily and the naiad Aglaia of the origin of the world, he broke out into a flood of words:

"To call upon a poor wretch to answer for his actions! Why, even when the solar system was still no more than a pale nebula, forming, in the ether, a fragile halo, whose circumference was a thousand times greater than the orbit of Neptune, we had all of us, for ages past, been fully conditioned, determined and irrevocably destined, and your responsibility, my dear child, my responsibility, Chevalier's, and that of all men, had been, not mitigated, but abolished beforehand. All our movements, the result of previous movements of matter, are subject to the laws which govern the cosmic forces, and the human mechanism is merely a particular instance of the universal mechanism."

Pointing to a locked cupboard, he proceeded.

"I have there, contained in bottles, that which would transform, destroy, or excite to frenzy the will of fifty thousand men."

"Wouldn't be playing the game," objected Pradel.

"I agree, it wouldn't be playing the game. But these substances are not essentially laboratory products. The laboratory combines, it does not create anything. These substances are scattered throughout nature. In their free state, they surround and enter into us, they determine our will, they circumscribe our freedom of device, which is merely the illusion engendered within us by the ignorance of our determinations."

"What on earth do you mean?" asked Pradel, taken aback.

"I mean that our will is an illusion caused by our ignorance of the causes which compel us to exert our will. That which wills within us is not ourselves, but myriads of cells of prodigious activity, of which we know nothing, which are unaware of us, which are ignorant of one another, but which nevertheless constitute us. By means of their restlessness they produce innumerable currents which we call our passions, our thoughts, our joys, our sufferings, our desires, our fears, and our will. We believe that we are our own masters, while a mere drop of alcohol stimulates, and then benumbs the very elements by which we feel and will."

Constantin Marc interrupted the physician:

"Excuse me! Since you are speaking of the action of alcohol, I should like your advice on the subject. I am in the habit of drinking a small glass of Armagnac brandy after each meal. That's not too much, is it?"

"It's a great deal too much. Alcohol is a poison. If you have a bottle of brandy at home, fling it out of the window."

Pradel was pondering. He considered that in suppressing will and responsibility in all human things Dr. Socrates was doing him a personal injury.

"You may say what you like. Will and responsibility are not illusions. They are tangible and powerful realities. I know how the terms of my contract bind me, and I impose my will on others."

And he added with some bitterness:

"I believe in the will, in moral responsibility, in the distinction between good and evil. Doubtless these are, according to you, stupid ideas."

"They are indeed stupid ideas," replied the physician, "but they are very suitable to us, since we are mere animals. We are for ever forgetting this. They are stupid, venerable, wholesome ideas. Men have felt that, without these ideas, they would all go mad. They had only the choice between stupidity and madness. Very reasonably they chose stupidity. Such is the foundation of moral ideas."

"What a paradox!" exclaimed Romilly.

The physician calmly proceeded:

"The distinction between good and evil in human societies has never emerged from the grossest empiricism. It was constituted in a wholly practical spirit and as a simple convenience. We do not trouble ourselves about it where cut-glass or a tree is concerned. We practise moral indifference with regard to animals. We practise it in the case of savage races. This enables us to exterminate them without remorse. That's what is known as the colonial policy. Nor do we find that believers exact a high degree of morality from their god. In the present state of society, they would not willingly admit that he was lecherous or compromised himself with women; but they do think it fitting that he should be vindictive and cruel. Morality is a mutual agreement to keep what we possess: land, houses, furniture, women, and our lives. It does not imply, in the case of those who bow to it, any particular intelligence or character. It is instinctive and ferocious. Written law follows it closely, and is in more or less harmonious agreement with it. Hence we see that great-hearted men, or men of brilliant genius, have almost all been accused of impiety, and, like Socrates, the son of Phenaretes, and Benoit Malon, have been smitten by the tribunals of their country. And it may be stated that a man who has not, at the very least, been sentenced to imprisonment does little credit to the land of his fathers."

"There are exceptions," remarked Pradel.

"Few," replied Dr. Trublet.

But Nanteuil, pursuing her idea, remarked.

"My little Socrates, you can very well certify that he was insane. It is the truth. He was not sane, I know it only too well."

"No doubt he was mad, my dear child. But it is a question of determining whether he was madder than other men. The entire history of humanity, replete with tortures, ecstasies, and massacres, is the history of raving, demented creatures."

"Doctor," inquired Constantin Marc, "are you by chance one of those who do not admire War? It is nevertheless a magnificent thing, when you come to think of it. The animals merely eat one another. Men have conceived the idea of beautiful massacres. They have learnt to kill one another in glittering cuirasses, in helmets topped with plumes, or maned with scarlet. By the use of artillery, and the art of fortification, they have introduced chemistry and mathematics among the necessary means of destruction. War is a sublime invention. And, since the extermination of human beings appears to us the only object of life, the wisdom of man resides in this, that he has made this extermination a delight and a splendour. After all, doctor, you cannot deny that murder is a law of nature, and that it is consequently divine."

To which Dr. Socrates replied:

"We are only miserable animals, and yet we are our own providence and our own gods. The lower animals, whose immemorial reign preceded our own upon this planet, have transformed it by their genius and their courage. The insects have traced roads, excavated the soil, hollowed the trunks of trees and rocks, built dwellings, founded cities, metamorphosed the soil, the air, and the waters. The labour of the humblest of these, that of the madrepores, has created islands and continents. Every material change produces a moral change, since morals depend upon environment. The transformation to which man in his turn has subjected the earth is undoubtedly more profound and more harmonious than the transformation wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity, miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is possible that our race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania, dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness. This world is perhaps irremediably wicked. At all events, I shall have got plenty of amusement out of it. It affords those who are in it an interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat."

Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to the doctor.

He began to write:

"Having been called on several occasions to attend——"

He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier's Christian name.

"Aime," replied Nanteuil.

"Aime Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of——"

He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.

"It's a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases."

He turned over the leaves of the book.

"Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the eighteenth lecture, page 389: 'Many madmen are to be met with among actors.' This remark of Professor Ball's reminds me that the celebrated Cabanis one day asked Dr. Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a cause of madness."

"Really?" asked Romilly uneasily.

"Not a doubt of it," replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, a man is not a reasoning being merely because he is an idiot."

After glancing a little further through the pages of Professor Ball's lectures, he resumed his writing:

"Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity, which, according to the highest authorities, is merely an exaggeration of the habitual temperament of the individual, and hence it is not possible to credit him with full moral responsibility."

He signed the sheet and handed it to Pradel, saying:

"Here's something that is innocuous and too devoid of meaning to contain the slightest falsehood."

Pradel rose and said:

"Believe me, my dear doctors we should not have asked you to tell a lie."

"Why not? I am a medical man. I keep a lie-shop. I relieve, I console. How is it possible to relieve and console without lying?"

Then, with a sympathetic glance at Nanteuil; he added:

"Only women and physicians know how necessary untruthfulness is, and how beneficial to man."

And, as Pradel, Constantin Mate, and Romilly were taking their leave, he said:

"Pray go out by the dining-room. I've just received a small cask of old Armagnac. You'll tell me what you think of it!"

Nanteuil had remained behind in the doctor's consulting room.

"My little Socrates, I have spent an awful night. I saw him."

"During your sleep?"

"No, when wide awake."

"You are sure you were not sleeping?"

"Quite sure."

He was on the point of asking her if the apparition had spoken to her. But he left the question unspoken, fearing lest he might suggest to so sensitive a subject those hallucinations of the sense of hearing, which, by reason of their imperious nature, he dreaded far more than visual hallucinations. He was familiar with the docility of the sick in obeying orders given them by voices. Abandoning the idea of questioning Felicie, he resolved, at all hazards, to remove any scruples of conscience which might be troubling her. At the same time, having observed that, generally speaking, the sense of moral responsibility is weak in women, he made no great effort in that direction, and contented himself with remarking lightly:

"My dear child, you must not consider yourself responsible for the death of that poor fellow. A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which should not be exaggerated."

Thinking that he had said enough on this score, he applied himself immediately to dispersing the terrors which surrounded her. He sought to convince her by simple arguments that she was beholding images which had no reality, mere reflections of her own thoughts. In order to illustrate his demonstration, he told her a story of a reassuring nature.

"An English physician," he told her, "was attending a lady, like yourself, highly intelligent, who, like yourself, was in the habit of seeing cats under her furniture, and was visited by phantoms. He convinced her that these apparitions corresponded to nothing in reality. She believed him, and worried herself no longer. One fine day, after a long period of retirement, she reappeared in society, and on entering a drawing-room she saw the lady of the house who, pointing to an arm-chair, begged her to be seated. She also saw, seated in this chair, a crafty-looking old gentleman. She argued to herself that one of the two persons was necessarily a creature of the imagination, and, deciding that the gentleman had no real existence, she sat down on the arm-chair. On touching the bottom, she drew a long breath. From that day onward, she never again set eyes on any further phantoms, either of man or of beast. When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had smothered them all—fundamentally."

Felicie shook her head, saying:

"That does not apply to this case."

She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits without some object. But she feared to speak of these things; and, letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.

Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that they soon vanished without leaving any traces.

"I myself," he said, "once had a vision."

"You?"

"Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago. It was in Egypt."

He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights, in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.

"In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples in the desert. These trips across the sands are made on donkey-back. The last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey Rameses was stronger than the others. This donkey-boy, whose name was Selim, was also stronger, slenderer, and better looking than the other donkey-boys. He was fifteen years old. His shy, gentle eyes shone from behind a magnificent veil of long black lashes; his brown face was a pure clear-cut oval. He tramped barefoot through the desert with a step which made one think of those dances of warriors of which the Bible speaks. His every movement was graceful; his young animal-like gaiety was charming. As he prodded Rameses' back with the point of his stick, he would chatter to me in a limited vocabulary in which English, French and Arabic were intermingled; he enjoyed telling me of the travellers whom he had escorted and who, he believed, were all princes or princesses; but if I asked him about his relations or his companions he remained silent, and assumed an air of indifference and boredom. When cadging for a promise of substantial baksheesh, the nasal twang of his voice assumed caressing inflexions. He thought out subtle stratagems and expended whole treasuries of prayers in order to obtain a cigarette. Noticing that I liked to see the donkey-boys treat their beasts with kindness, he used, in my presence, to kiss Rameses on the nostrils, and when we halted he would waltz with him. He often displayed real ingenuity in getting what he wanted. But he was far too short-sighted ever to show the slightest gratitude for what he had obtained. Greedy of piastres, he coveted still more eagerly such small glittering articles as one cannot keep covered—gold scarf-pins, rings, sleeve-links, or nickel cigar-lighters; and when he saw a gold chain his face would light up with a gleam of pleasure.

"The following summer was the hardest time of my life. An epidemic of cholera had broken out in Lower Egypt. I was running about the town all day long in a scorching atmosphere. Cairo summers are overpowering to Europeans. We were going through the hottest weeks I had ever known. I heard one day that Selim, brought before the native court of Cairo, had been sentenced to death. He had murdered the daughter of some fellaheen, a little girl nine years old, in order to rob her of her ear-rings, and had thrown her into a cistern. The rings, stained with blood, had been found under a big stone in the Valley of the Kings. They were the crude jewels which the Nubian nomads hammer out of shillings or two-franc pieces, I was told that Selim would certainly be hanged, because the little girl's mother refused the tendered blood-money. Now, the Khedive does not enjoy the prerogative of mercy, and the murderer, according to Moslem law, can redeem his life only if the parents of the victim consent to receive from him a sum of money as compensation. I was too busy to give thought to the matter. I could readily imagine that Selim, cunning but thoughtless, caressing yet unfeeling, had played with the little girl, torn off her ear-rings, killed her, and hidden her body. The affair soon passed out of my mind. The epidemic was spreading from Old Cairo to the European quarters. I was visiting from thirty to forty sick persons daily, practising venous injections in every case. I was suffering from liver trouble, anaemia was playing havoc with me, and I was dropping with fatigue. In order to husband my strength, I took a little rest at noon. I was accustomed, after luncheon, to lie down in the inner courtyard of my house, and there for an hour I bathed myself in the African shade, as dense and cool as water. One day, as I was lying there on a divan in my courtyard, just as I was lighting a cigarette, I saw Selim approaching. With his beautiful bronze arm he lifted the door-curtain, and came towards me in his blue robe. He did not speak, but smiled with his shy and innocent smile, and the deep red of his lips disclosed his dazzling teeth. His eyes, beneath the blue shadow of his eyelashes, shone with covetousness while gazing at my watch which lay on the table.

"I thought he had escaped. And this surprised me, not because captives are strictly watched in Oriental prisons, where men, women, horses and dogs are herded in imperfectly closed courtyards, and guarded by a soldier armed with a stick. But Moslems are never tempted to flee from their fate. Selim knelt down with an appealing grace, and approached his lips to my hand, to kiss it according to ancient custom. I was not asleep, and I had proof of it. I also had proof that the apparition had been before me only for a short time. When Selim had vanished I noticed that my cigarette, which was alight, was not yet tipped with ash."

"Was he dead when you saw him?" asked Nanteuil.

"Not a bit of it," replied the doctor, "I heard a few days later that Selim, in his jail, wove little baskets, or played for hours at a time with a chaplet of glass balls, and that he would smilingly beg a piastre of European visitors, who were surprised by the caressing softness of his eyes. Moslem justice is slow. He was hanged six months later. No one, not even he himself, was greatly concerned about it. I was in Europe at the time."

"And since then he has never reappeared?"

"Never."

Nanteuil looked at him, disappointed.

"I thought he had come when he was dead. But since he was in prison you certainly could not have seen him in your house. You only thought you saw him."

The physician, understanding what was in Felicie's mind, quickly replied:

"My dear little Nanteuil, believe what I tell you. The phantoms of the dead have no more reality than the phantoms of the living."

Without attending to what he was saying, she asked him if it was really because he suffered from his liver that he had a vision. He replied that he believed that the bad state of his digestive organs, general fatigue, and a tendency to congestion, had all predisposed him to behold an apparition.

"There was; I believe," he added, "a more immediate cause. Stretched out on my divan, my head was very low. I raised it to light a cigarette, and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with one's head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds. That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster and a fat pillow."

She began to laugh.

"As mamma does—majestically!"

Then, flitting off to another idea:

"Tell me; Socrates, how comes it that you saw this sordid individual rather than another? You had hired a donkey from him, and you were no longer thinking of him. And yet he came. Say what you like, it's queer."

"You ask me why it was he rather than another? It would be very hard for me to tell you. Our visions, bound up with our innermost thoughts, often present their images to us; sometimes there is no connection between them, and they show us an unexpected figure."

He once more exhorted her not to allow herself to be frightened by phantoms.

"The dead do not return. When one of them appears to you, rest assured that what you see is a thing imagined by your brain."

"Can you," she inquired; "guarantee that there is nothing after death?"

"My child, there is nothing after death that could frighten you."

She rose, picked up her little bag and her part, and held out her hand to the doctor, saying:

"As for you, you don't believe in anything, do you, old Socrates?"

He detained her for a moment in the waiting-room, warned her to take good care of herself, to lead a quiet, restful life, and to take sufficient rest.

"Do you suppose that is easy in our profession? To-morrow I have a rehearsal in the green-room, and one on the stage, and I have to try on a gown, while to-night I am acting. For more than a year now I've been leading that sort of life."



CHAPTER X

Under the great void reserved by the height of the roof for the upward flight of prayers the motley crowd of human beings was huddled together like a flock of sheep.

They were all there, at the foot of the catafalque surrounded by lights and covered with flowers, Durville, old Maury, Delage, Vicar, Destree, Leon Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay, the manager. They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, Louise Dalle, Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping. All of them brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning. Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans who gain their living by the theatre, and a crowd of curious onlookers filled the nave.

The choristers were uttering the mournful cries of the Kyrie eleison; the priest kissed the altar; turned towards the people and said:

"Dominus vobiscum."

Romilly; taking in the crowd at a glance, remarked

"Chevalier has a full house."

"Just look at that Louise Dalle," said Fagette. "To look as though she's in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!"

A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr. Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his moral homilies.

"Observe," he said, "that they are lighting, on the altar and about the coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of virgin wax to the Lord. The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions. This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan's."

The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting in a low voice:

"Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non contrisemimi, sicut et caeteri qui spem non habent."

"Who is taking the part of Florentin?" inquired Durville of Romilly.

"Regnard: he'll be no worse in it than Chevalier."

Pradel plucked Trublet by the sleeve, and said:

"Dr. Socrates, I beg you to tell me whether as a scientific man, as a physiologist, you see any serious objections to the immortality of the soul?"

He asked the question as a busy and practical man in need of personal information.

"You are doubtless aware, my dear friend," replied Trublet, "what Cyrano's bird said on this very subject. One day Cyrano de Bergerac heard two birds conversing in a tree. One of them said, 'The souls of birds are immortal,' 'There can be no doubt of it,' replied the other. 'But it is inconceivable that beings who possess neither bill nor feathers, who have no wings and walk on two legs, should believe that they, like the birds, have an immortal soul.'"

"All the same," said Pradel, "when I hear the organ, I am chock-full of religious ideas."

"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine."

The celebrated author of La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812 appeared in the church, and no sooner had he done so than he was everywhere at one and the same moment—in the nave, under the porch, and in the choir. Like the Diable boiteux he must, bestriding his crutch, have soared above the heads of the congregation, to pass as he did in the twinkling of an eye from Morlot, the deputy, who, being a freethinker, had remained in the parvis, to Marie-Claire kneeling at the foot of the catafalque.

At one and at the same moment he whispered into the ears of all a few nimble phrases:

"Pradel, can you imagine this fellow going and chucking his part, an excellent part, and running off to kill himself? A pumpkin-headed fool! Blows out his brains just two days before the first night. Compels us to replace him and sets us back a week. What an imbecile! A rotten bad egg. But we must do him justice; he could jump, and jump well, the animal. Well, my dear Romilly, we rehearse the new man to-day at two o'clock. See to it that Regnard has the script of his part, and that he knows how to climb on to the roof. Let us hope he won't kick the bucket on our hands like Chevalier. What if he, too, were to commit suicide! You needn't laugh. There's an evil spell on certain parts. Thus, in my Marino Falieri, the gondolier Sandro breaks his arm at the dress rehearsal. I am given another Sandro. He sprains his ankle on the first night. I am given a third, he contracts typhoid fever. My little Nanteuil, I'll entrust you with a magnificent role to create when you get to the Francais. But I have sworn by the great gods that I'll never again have a single play performed in this theatre."

And immediately, under the little door which shuts off the choir on the right hand side of the altar, showing his friends Racine's epitaph, which is let into the wall, like a Parisian thoroughly conversant with the antiquities of his city, he recalled the history of this stone, he told them how the poet had been buried in accordance with his desire at Port-Royal-des-Champs, at the foot of Monsieur Hamon's grave, and that, after the destruction of the abbey and the violation of the tombs, the body of Messire Jean Racine, the King's secretary, Groom of the Chamber, had been transferred, all unhonoured; to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. And he told how the tombstone, bearing the inscription composed for Boileau, beneath the knight's crest and the shield with its swan argent, and done into Latin by Monsieur Dodart, had served as a flagstone in the choir of the little church of Magny-Lessart; where it had been discovered in 1808.

"There it is," he added. "It was broken in six pieces and the name of Racine was effaced by the shoes of the peasants. The fragments were pieced together and the missing letters carved anew."

On this subject he expatiated with his customary vivacity and diffusiveness, drawing from his prodigious memory a multitude of curious facts and amusing anecdotes, breathing life into history and endowing archaeology with a living interest. His admiration and his wrath burst forth in swift and violent alternation in the solemnity of the church, and amid the pomp of the ceremony.

"I would give something to know, for instance, who were the stupid bunglers who set this stone in the wall. Hic jacet nobilis vir Johannes Racine. It is not true! They make honest Boileau's epitaph lie. The body of Racine is not in this spot. It was laid to rest in the third chapel on the left, as you enter. What idiots!" Then, suddenly calm, he pointed to Pascal's tombstone.

"That came here from the museum of the Petits-Augustins. No praise can be too great for Lenoir, who, in the days of the Revolution, collected and preserved."

Thereupon, he improvised a second lecture on lapidary archaeology, even more brilliant than the first, transformed the history of Pascal's life into a terrible yet amusing drama, and vanished. In all, he had remained in the church for the space of ten minutes.

Over those heads full of worldly cares and profane desires the Dies irae rumbled like a storm:

"Mors stupebit et natura, Quum resurget creatura Judicanti responsura."

"Tell me, Dutil, how could that little Nanteuil, who is pretty and intelligent, get herself mixed up with a dirty mummer like Chevalier?"

"Your ignorance of the feminine heart surprises me."

"Herschell was prettier when she was a brunette."

"Qui Mariam absolvisti Et latronem exaudisti Mihi quoque spem dedisti."

"I must be off to lunch."

"Do you know anyone who knows the Minister?"

"Durville is a has-been. He blows like a grampus."

"Put me in a little paragraph about Marie Falempin. I can tell you she was simply delicious in Les Trois Magots."

"Inter oves locum presta Et ab haedis me sequestra, Statuens in parte dextra."

"So then, it is for Nanteuil's sake that he blew out his brains? A little ninny who isn't worth spanking!"

The celebrant poured the wine and the water into the chance, saying:

"Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisu...."

"Is it really true, doctor, that he killed himself because Nanteuil wouldn't have any more to do with him?"

"He killed himself," replied Trublet, "because she loved another. The obsession of genetic images frequently determines mania and melancholia."

"You don't understand second-rate actors, Dr. Socrates," said Pradel. "He killed himself to cause a sensation, and for no other reason."

"It's not only second-rate actors," said Constantin Marc, "who suffer from an uncontrollable desire to attract attention to themselves at whatever cost. Last year, in the place where I live, Saint-Bartholome, while a threshing-machine was at work, a thirteen-year-old boy shoved his arm into the gear; it was crushed up to the shoulder. The surgeon who amputated it asked him, as he was dressing the stump, why he mutilated himself like that. The boy confessed that it was to draw attention to himself."

Meanwhile, Nanteuil, with dry eyes and pursed lips, had fixed her eyes upon the black cloth with which the catafalque was covered, and was impatiently waiting until enough holy water, candles and Latin prayers should be bestowed upon the dead man for him to depart in peace. She had seen him again the night before, and she thought he had returned because the priests had not yet bidden him to rest in peace. Then, reflecting that one day she, too, would die, and would, like him, be laid in a coffin, beneath a black pall, she shuddered with horror and closed her eyes. The idea of life was so strong within her that she pictured death as a hideous life. Afraid of death, she prayed for a long life. Kneeling, with bowed head, the voluptuous ashen cloud of her buoyant hair falling over her forehead, she, a profane penitent, was reading in her prayer-book words which reassured her, although she did not understand them.

"Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful dead from the pains of hell and from the depths of the bottomless pit. Deliver them from the lion's jaws. Let them not be plunged into hell, and let them not fall into the outer darkness, but suffer that St. Michael, the Prince of Angels, lead them to the holy light promised by Thee to Abraham and to his posterity."

At the Elevation of the Host the congregation, permeated by a vague impression that the mystery was becoming more sacred, ceased its private conversations, and assumed a certain appearance of reverent devotion. And as the organ fell silent all heads were bowed at the tinkling of a little bell which was shaken by a child. Then, after the last Gospel, when, the service being over, the priest, attended by his acolytes, approached the catafalque to the chanting of the Libera, a sense of relief was experienced by the crowd, and they began to jostle one another a little in order to file past the coffin. The women, whose piety, grief and contrition were contingent upon their immobility and their kneeling posture, were at once recalled to their customary frame of mind by the movement and the encounters of the procession. They exchanged amongst themselves and with the men remarks relating to their profession.

"Do you know," said Ellen Midi to Falempin, "that Nanteuil is going to join the Comedie-Francaise?"

"It's not possible!"

"The contract is signed."

"How did she manage it?"

"Not by her acting, you may be sure," replied Ellen, who proceeded to relate a highly scandalous story.

"Take care," said Falempin, "she is just behind you."

"Yes, I see her! She's got a cheek of her own to show herself here, don't you think?"

Marie-Claire whispered an extraordinary piece of news into Durville's ear:

"They say he committed suicide. Well, there's not a word of truth in it He didn't commit suicide at all. And the proof of it is that he is being buried with the rites of the Church."

"What then?" inquired Durville.

"Monsieur de Ligny surprised him with Nanteuil and killed him."

"Come, come!"

"I can assure you that I am accurately informed."

The conversations were becoming animated and familiar.

"So you are here, you wicked old sinner!"

"The box-office receipts are falling off already."

"Stella has succeeded in getting herself proposed by seventeen Deputies, nine of whom are members of the Budget Commission."

"Yet I told Herschell, 'That little Bocquet fellow isn't the man for you. What you need is a man of standing.'"

When the bier, borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis, a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces of celebrities; the little factory girls from the neighbouring workshops, standing in couples with arms round each other's waists, contemplated the actresses' dresses. And standing against the porch on their aching feet, a couple of tramps, accustomed to living under the open sky, whether mild or sullen, slowly shifted their dejected gaze, while a college lad gazed with rapture at the fiery tresses which coiled like flames on the nape of Fagette's neck.

She had stopped on the topmost step in front of the doors, and was chatting with Constantin Marc and a few journalists:

"...Monsieur de Ligny? He danced attendance upon me long before he knew Nanteuil. He used to gaze upon me by the hour, with eager eyes, without daring to speak a word to me. I received him willingly enough, for his behaviour was perfect. It is only fair to say that his manners are excellent. He was as reserved as a man could be. At last, one day, he declared that he was madly in love with me. I told him that as he was speaking to me seriously I would do the same; that I was truly sorry to see him in such a state; that every time such a thing happened I was greatly upset by it; that I was a woman of standing, I had settled my life, and could do nothing for him. He was desperate. He informed me that he was leaving for Constantinople, that he would never return. He couldn't make up his mind either to remain or to go away. He fell ill. Nanteuil, who thought I loved him and wanted to keep him, did all in her power to get him away from me. She flung herself at his head in the craziest fashion, I found her sometimes a trifle ridiculous, but, as you may imagine, I did not place any obstacle in her path. For his part, Monsieur de Ligny, with the object of inspiring me with regret, with vexation, or what not, perhaps in the hope of making me jealous, responded very visibly to Nanteuil's advances. And that is how they came to be together. I was delighted. Nanteuil and I are the best of friends."

Madame Doulce, hedged in on either side by the onlookers, came slowly down the steps, indulging herself in the illusion that the crowd was whispering, "That's Doulce!"

She seized Nanteuil as she was passing, pressed her to her bosom, and with a beautiful gesture of Christian charity enveloped her in her mantle, saying through her sobs:

"Try to pray, my child, and accept this medal. It has been blessed by the Pope. A Dominican Father gave it to me."

Madame Nanteuil, who was a little out of breath, but was growing young again since she had renewed her experience of love, was the last to come out. Durville pressed her hand.