“Tonight?”
She reflected for a minute.
“Tonight, yes, my dear! But still do not wait for me too long. Go to bed. Sleep well. Above all, don’t cry. You drive me to despair! Really, I don’t know what to do with you!”
And so I lived here, stretched out on the sofa, never going out, counting the minutes which slowly, slowly, drop by drop, vanished into the eternity of waiting.
The frenzied excitement of my senses was succeeded by a period of great depression. I spent whole afternoons apathetically, without stirring, my body lifeless, my limbs hanging, my brains in a state of torpor, like the morrow of a day of drunkenness. My life resembled a heavy slumber disturbed by painful dreams, interrupted by sudden awakenings even more painful than the dreams; and in the annihilation of my willpower, in the blotting out of my intellect, I again felt, but more keenly than ever, the horror of my moral decay. In addition, Juliette’s life caused me perpetual anguish. As in the past, on the dune of Ploch, I could not dismiss from my mind the loathsome vision which grew, intensified and assumed even more cruel forms. … To lose a person whom you love, a person who has been the source of all your joys, the memory of whom is associated with happiness only, is a heartrending sorrow. But where there is sorrow there is also consolation, and suffering is eventually put to sleep, lulled in some way by its own tenderness. But here I was losing Juliette, losing her daily, every hour, every minute; and with this chain of successive deaths, with this process of impenitent dying, I could only associate memories of torture and disgrace.
No matter how eagerly I searched in the stirred-up depths of our two hearts for a flower bud, for a tiny blossom whose fragrance it would have been so sweet to inhale, I could not find it. And yet I could not conceive anything dissociated from Juliette. All my thoughts had Juliette for their starting point and for their final goal, and the more she escaped me the more fiercely obdurate I grew in my absurd desire to win her back. I had no hope at all that she would ever stop, carried away as she was by this life of evil pleasure; yet, in spite of myself, in spite of her, I was planning for a better future. I said to myself: “It is impossible that some day disgust will not seize her, that some day sorrow will not awaken remorse and pity in her heart. Then she will return to me. Then we will move into a plain workman’s house and I shall work like a galley-slave. I’ll enter journalism, I’ll publish novels, I’ll ask for a job as a plain copyist.” Alas! I forced myself to believe all this so as to accentuate the state of misery into which I had fallen. With the proceeds from the sale of two sketches by Lirat, of a few jewels I still had, of my books, I had realized a sum of four thousand francs, which I was saving like a treasure for that chimeric eventuality.
One day when Juliette was pensive and tenderer than usual, I ventured to lay my project before her. She clasped her hands.
“Yes! Yes! Ah! Won’t that be nice! A little bit of an apartment, a tiny one. I’ll do the housekeeping. I’ll have pretty bonnets, a pretty apron! But with you it’ll be impossible! What a pity! It’s impossible!”
“Why is it impossible?”
“Because you won’t work and we’ll starve. That’s your nature! Did you work at Ploch. Are you working now? Why, you have never worked!”
“How can I? Don’t you know that the thought of you never leaves me for a moment? It is the uncertainty of your life, it is the cruel anguish of everything I feel, of everything I suspect about you that gnaws at my heart, devours me, sucks my brains! When you are not here, I don’t know where you are! And still I am always with you wherever you are! Ah! if you only wished! To know that you are near me, loving and tranquil, far from everything that besmirches, from everything that torments. Why, I could then have the strength of a God in me! Money! Money! Why, I’ll make it for you by the shovelful, by the cartful! Ah! Juliette if you only wished. …”
She looked at me, excited by the great noise of gold which my words caused to ring in her ears.
“Well! Make it right away, dearie. Yes, make a lot of it, piles of it! And don’t think about those vile things which make you suffer! Men are so funny! They don’t want to understand anything!”
Tenderly, she sat down on my lap.
“Why, I adore you, my dear little thing! Why, I detest the others and I give them nothing of myself, do you hear, nothing. I am very unhappy!”
With tear-filled eyes, she tried to nestle near me, repeating: “Yes very, very unhappy!”
I was seized with fear and pity.
“Ah! He thinks it is a pleasure!” she cried sobbing, “he thinks so! But if I did not have my Jean to console me, my Jean to lull me to sleep, my Jean to give me courage, I could not stand it any longer. I could not stand it any longer. … I would rather die.”
Suddenly, changing the subject, and with a voice in which I seemed to hear a plaint of regret:
“First of all, you need money for that—for the little apartment, I mean … and you haven’t got it!”
“Why yes, yes, my dear,” I exclaimed triumphantly, “I have some money. We have enough to live on for two months, three months while I make my fortune!”
“You have money? Let me see it.”
I showed her four one thousand franc bills. Juliette greedily snatched them one after another, counted them, examined them. Her eyes shone, surprised and delighted.
“Four thousand francs, dear! you really have four thousand francs! Why, you are rich!