.—The disease is gradually doing its work of destruction in our poor Rose. It is as if the immaterial manifestations of life that formerly emanated from her body were dying one by one. Her face is entirely changed. Her expression is not the same, her gestures are not the same; and she seems to me as if she were putting off every day more and more of that something, humanly speaking indefinable, which makes the personality of a living being. Disease, before making an end of its victim, introduces into his body something strange, unfamiliar, something that is not he, makes of him a new being, so to speak, in whom we must seek to find the former being—he, whose joyous, affectionate features have already ceased to exist.
.—Doctor Simon is to tell me very soon whether our dear old Rose will live or die. I am waiting to hear his ring, which to me, is equivalent to that of a jury at the assizes, announcing their return to the court room with their verdict. “It is all over, there is no hope, it is simply a question of time. The disease has progressed very rapidly. One lung is entirely gone and the other substantially.” And we must return to the invalid, restore her serenity with a smile, give her reason to hope for convalescence in every line of our faces. Then we feel an unconquerable longing to rush from the room and from the poor creature. We leave the house, we wander at random through the streets; at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in a café. We mechanically take up a copy of L’Illustration and our eyes fall at once upon the solution of its last riddle: Against death, there is no appeal!
.—The disease of the lungs is complicated with peritonitis. She has terrible pains in the bowels, she cannot move without assistance, she cannot lie on her back or her left side. In God’s name, is not death enough? must she also endure suffering, aye, torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant’s rooms, where the sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we proposed to take her; it seems that twenty-five years ago, when she first came to us, she went there to see the nurse in charge of Edmond, who died there, and so that particular hospital represents to her the place where people die. I am waiting for Simon who is to bring her a permit to go to Lariboisière. She passed almost a good night. She is all ready, in high spirits, in fact. We have covered everything up from her as well as we could. She longs to be gone. She is in a great hurry. She feels that she is going to get well there. At two o’clock Simon arrives: “Here it is, all right.” She refuses to have a litter: “I should think I was dead!” she says. She is dressed. As soon as she leaves her bed, all the signs of life to be seen upon her face disappear. It is as if the earth had risen under her skin. She comes down into our apartments. Sitting in the dining-room, with a trembling hand, the knuckles of which knock against one another, she draws her stockings on over a pair of legs like broomsticks, consumptive legs. Then, for a long moment, she looks about at the familiar objects with dying eyes that seem desirous to take away with them the memory of the places they are leaving—and the door of the apartment closes upon her with a noise as of farewell. She reaches the foot of the stairs, where she rests for an instant on a chair. The concierge, in a bantering tone, assures her that she will be well in six weeks. She bows and says “yes,” an inaudible “yes.” The cab drives up to the door. She rests her hand on the concierge’s wife. I hold her against the pillow she has behind her back. With wide open, vacant eyes she vaguely watches the houses pass, but she does not speak. At the door of the hospital she tries to alight without assistance. “Can you walk so far?” the concierge asks. She makes an affirmative gesture and walks on. Really I cannot imagine where she procured the strength to walk as she does. Here we are at last in the great hall, a high, cold, bare, clean place with a litter standing, all ready for use, in the centre. I seat her in a straw armchair by a door with a glazed wicket. A young man opens the wicket, asks my name and age and writes busily for quarter of an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious figure at the head. At last, everything is ready, and I embrace her. A boy takes one arm, the housekeeper the other.—After that, I saw nothing more.
—We have been to Lariboisière. We found Rose quiet, hopeful, talking of her approaching discharge—in three weeks at most—and so free from all thought of death that she told us of a furious love scene that took place yesterday between a woman in the bed next hers and a brother of the Christian schools, who was there again today. Poor Rose is death, but death engrossed with life. Near her bed was a young woman, whose husband, a mechanic, had come to see her.
