He arose and paced across the studio in agitation. Gesticulating and angry, he upset the chairs and paste-boards, ripped some of his sketches with a kick. I thought he was going mad. His bloodshot eyes rolled wildly; he was pale, and the words were coming out of his drawn-up mouth in a violent jumble.
“For men to be born of woman … men! … How irrational! For men to be conceived in an impure womb! … For men to gorge themselves with woman’s vices, with her imbecile, ferocious appetites, to have sucked the sap of life from her nefarious breasts! Mother! … Ah! yes, mother! … Divinized mother, eh? Mother who creates us, sick and wasted race that we are, who stifles the man in the child and hurls us nailless and toothless, stupid and tamed, upon the bedstead of a mistress and the nuptial bed! …”
Lirat stopped for a moment; he was choking. Then, bringing his hands together and knotting his crisp fingers in the air, as if gripping an imaginary neck, he shouted madly, terribly:
“This is what should be done with them, all of them, all of them! … Do you understand? … eh … tell me? … All of them! …”
And he began pacing back and forth again, swearing, stamping his feet. But the last shout of anger had evidently relieved him.
“Come now, my dear Lirat, calm yourself,” I said to him. “What’s the use of getting excited, and over what, I ask you? Come now, you are not a woman.”
“That’s true, too, but you provoked me with this Juliette. … How does this Juliette concern you anyway?”
“Was it not natural on my part to want to know the name of the person to whom you had introduced me? … And then, frankly, pending the invention of some other machine than woman for breeding children …”
“Pending that … I am a brute,” interrupted Lirat, who again seated himself before his easel, a little ashamed of himself, and in a quiet voice asked:
“Dear little Mintié, would you mind sitting for me a little. That won’t bore you, will it? For only ten minutes.”
Joseph Lirat was forty-two years old. I made his acquaintance casually one evening; I no longer remember where it was, and though he had the reputation of being a misanthrope, unsociable and spiteful, I instantly took a fancy to him. Is it not painful to think that our deepest friendships, which ought to be the result of a long process of selection, that the gravest events in our life which should be brought about by a logical chain of causes, are for the most part, the instant result of chance? … You are at home in your study, tranquilly absorbed in a book. Outside the sky is grey, the air is cold: it is raining, the wind is blowing, the street is gloomy and dirty, therefore you have every good reason in the world not to stir from your chair. … Yet you go out, driven by weariness, by idleness, by something you yourself don’t know—by nothing, … and then at the end of a hundred steps, you meet the man, the woman, the carriage, the stone, the orange peel, the mud puddle which upsets your whole existence from top to bottom.
In the midst of the most sorrowful of my experiences I used to think of these things, and often I would say to myself—with what bitter regrets!—“If on the evening when I met Lirat, in the forgotten place where I certainly had nothing to do, I had but stayed at home and worked or dreamed or slept, I would have been today the happiest man on earth and there would have happened to me none of the things which did happen to me.” And that moment of trivial hesitancy, the moment when I was asking myself: “Shall I go out or shall I not?,” that moment embraced the most important act in my life; my whole destiny was determined in the brief space of time which in my memory left no more trace than a gust of wind, which blows down a house or uproots an oak tree, leaves upon the skies! I recall the most insignificant details of my life. For example, I remember the blue velvet suit, laced in front, which I wore on Sunday, when I was very little. I can swear, yes I can swear, that I could count the grease spots on the habit of curé Blanchetière or even the number of tobacco grains he used to drop while snuffing up his pinch of snuff.
It seems a senseless and yet disquieting thing: very often when I cry, or look at the sea or even watch the sunset upon an enchanted field—I can still see by that odious freak of irony which is at the bottom of our ideals, our dreams and our sufferings—I can still see upon the nose of an old guard we had, father Lejars, a big tumor, grumous and funny with its four hair filaments which proved an excellent attraction for flies. … Whereas the moment which decided my life, which cost me my peace, my honor, and reduced me to the position of a scabby dog; this moment which I passionately wish to reconstruct, to bring back again to memory with the aid of physical reminders and mental associations—this moment I cannot recall. Thus it is that in the course of my life
