The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 2. Guy de Maupassant

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      After every meal he thus during more than an hour, sipped three or four small glasses of brandy, which stupefied him by degrees, and then his head dropped onto his chest, he shut his eyes and went to sleep: then, having drunk it, he raised himself on the seat covered with red velvet, pulled his trousers up, and his waistcoat down, so as to cover the linen which appeared between the two, drew down his shirt sleeves and took up the newspapers again, which he had already read in the morning, and read them all through again, from beginning to end, and between four and five o'clock he went for a walk on the boulevards, to get a little fresh air, as he used to say, and then came back to the seat which had been reserved for him, and asked for his absinthe. He used to talk to the regular customers, whose acquaintance he had made. They discussed the news of the day, and political events, and that carried him on till dinner-time, and he spent the evening like he had the afternoon, until it was time to close. That was a terrible moment for him, when he was obliged to go out into the dark, into the empty room full of dreadful recollections, of horrible thoughts and of mental agony. He no longer saw any of his old friends, none of his relations, nobody who might remind him of his past life. But as his apartments were a hell to him, he took a room in a large hotel, a good room on the ground floor, so as to see the passers-by. He was no longer alone in that great building, he felt people swarming round him, he heard voices in the adjoining rooms, and when his former sufferings tormented him too much at the sight of his bed which was turned back, and of his solitary fire-place, he went out into the wide passages and walked up and down them like a sentinel, before all the closed doors, and looked sadly at the shoes standing in couples outside each, women's little boots by the side of men's thick ones, and he thought that no doubt all these people were happy, and were sleeping sweetly side by side or in each other's arms, in their warm bed.

      Five years passed thus; five miserable years with no other events except from time to time a passing love affair which lasted a couple of hours at the cost of forty francs. But one day when he was taking his usual walk between the Madeleine and the Rue Drouot, he suddenly saw a lady, whose bearing struck him. A tall gentleman and a child were with her, and all three were walking in front of him. He asked himself where he had seen them before, when suddenly he recognized a movement of her hand: it was his wife, his wife with Limousin and his child, his little George.

      His heart beat as if it would suffocate him, but he did not stop, for he wished to see them and he followed them. They looked like a family of the better middle class. Henriette was leaning on Paul's arm and speaking to him in a low voice and looking at him sideways occasionally. Parent saw her side face, and recognized its graceful outlines, the movements of her lips, her smile and her caressing looks, but the child chiefly took up his attention. How tall and strong he was! Parent could not see his face, but only his long, fair curls. That tall boy with bare legs, who was walking by his mother's side like a little man, was George.

      He saw them suddenly, all three, as they stopped in front of a shop. Limousin had grown very gray, had aged, and was thinner; his wife, on the contrary, was as young looking as ever, and had grown stouter; George he would not have recognized, he was so different to what he had been formerly.

      They went on again, and Parent followed them, then walked on quickly, passed them and then turned round, so as to meet them face to face. As he passed the child he felt a mad longing to take him into his arms and run off with him, and he knocked against him as if it were accidentally. The boy turned round and looked at the clumsy man angrily, and Parent went off hastily, struck and hurt by the look. He went off like a thief, seized by a horrible fear lest he should have been seen and recognized by his wife and her lover, and he went to his café without stopping, and fell breathless into his chair, and that evening he drank three absinthes.

      For four months he felt the pain of that meeting in his heart. Every night he saw the three again, happy and tranquil, father, mother and child walking on the boulevard before going in to dinner, and that new vision effaced the old one. It was another matter, another hallucination now, and also a fresh pain. Little George, his little George, the child he had so much loved and so often kissed formerly, disappeared in the far distance, and he saw a new one, like a brother of the first, a little boy with bare legs, who did not know him! He suffered terribly at that thought. The child's love was dead; there was no bond between them; the child would not have held out his arms when he saw him. He had even looked at him angrily.

      Then, by degrees he grew calmer, his mental torture diminished, the image that had appeared to his eyes and which haunted his nights became more indistinct and less frequent. He began once more to live nearly like everybody else, like all those idle people who drink beer off marble topped tables and wear out the seats of their trousers on the threadbare velvet of the couches.

      He grew old amidst the smoke from the pipes, lost his hair under the gas lights, looked upon his weekly bath, on his fortnightly visit to the barber's to have his hair cut, and on the purchase of a new coat or hat, as an event. When he got to his café in a new hat covering he used to look at himself in the glass for a long time before sitting down, and took it off and put it on again several times following, and at last asked his friend, the lady at the bar, who was watching him with interest, whether she thought it suited him.

      Two or three times a year he went to the theater, and in the summer he sometimes spent his evenings at one of the open air concerts in the Champs-Elysées. He brought back from them some airs which ran in his head for several weeks, and which he even hummed, beating time with his foot, while he was drinking his beer, and so the years followed each other, slow, monotonous and short, because they were quite uneventful.

      He did not feel them glide past him. He went on towards death without fear or agitation, sitting at a table in a café, and only the great glass against which he rested his head, which was every day becoming balder, reflected the ravages of time which flies and devours men, poor men.

      He only very rarely now thought of the terrible drama which had wrecked his life, for twenty years had passed since that terrible evening, but the life he had led since then had worn him out, and the landlord of his café would often say to him: "You ought to pull yourself together a little, Monsieur Parent; you should get some fresh air and go into the country; I assure you that you have changed very much within the last few months." And when his customer had gone out, he used to say to the barmaid: "That poor Monsieur Parent is booked for another world; it is no good never to go out of Paris. Advise him to go out of town for a day occasionally; he has confidence in you. It is nice weather, and will do him good." And she, full of pity and good will for such a regular customer, said to Parent every day: "Come, Monsieur, make up your mind to get a little fresh air; it is so charming in the country when the weather is fine. Oh! If I could, I would spend my life there."

      And she told him her dreams, the simple and poetical dreams of all the poor girls who are shut up from one year's end to the other in a shop and who see the noisy life of the streets go while they think of the calm and pleasant life in the country, of life under the trees, under the bright sun shining on the meadows, of deep woods and clear rivers, of cows lying in the grass, and of all the different flowers, blue, red, yellow, purple, lilac, pink and white, which are so pretty, so fresh, so sweet, all the wild flowers which one picks as one walks, and makes into large nosegays.

      She liked to speak to him frequently of her continual, unrealized and unrealizable longing, and he, an old man without hope, was fond of listening to her, and used to go and sit near the counter to talk to Mademoiselle Zoé and to discuss the country with her. Then, by degrees he was seized by a vague desire to go just once and see whether it was really so pleasant there, as she said, outside the walls of the great city, and so one morning he said to her: "Do you know where one can get a good lunch in the neighborhood of Paris?" "Go to the Terrace at Saint-Germain; it is delightful there!"

      He had been there formerly, just when he had got engaged, and so he made up his mind to go there again, and he chose a Sunday without any special reason, but merely because people generally do go out on Sundays, even when they have nothing to do СКАЧАТЬ