Short Fiction

body to choke it. She hated it with the hatred one has for a stubborn enemy that threatens one’s life.

“After these vain struggles, these impotent efforts to get rid of her child, she dashed out madly into the fields, running in a frenzy of misery and fear. One morning she was found, with her feet in a stream, and a look of madness in her eyes. People thought she had had an attack of delirium, but did not notice what was really the matter with her. She was pursued by an obsession, to remove this accursed child from her body.

“One evening her mother said to her laughingly: ‘How stout you are getting, Hélène. If you were married I would think you were going to have a baby.’

“These words must have been like a deadly blow to her. She left immediately, and returned to her own home. What happened then? Probably she looked again at her swollen belly, struck it, bruised it, and knocked it against the corners of the furniture, as she used to do every night. Then she went downstairs in her bare feet to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and took out the big carving-knife. She went upstairs again, lit four candles, and sat down in front of her mirror on a wicker chair. Then, exasperated with hatred of this unknown and redoubtable embryo, desiring to tear it out and kill it at last, to take it in her hands, strangle it and cast it away from her, she felt for the place where it was stirring, and, with a single stroke of the knife, she ripped open her abdomen from top to bottom.

“She performed her task very well, indeed, and very quickly, for she caught hold of this enemy which had hitherto eluded her grasp. She took it by one leg, tore it out and tried to throw it into the fireplace. But it was held by bonds which she had not been able to cut, and perhaps before she had realized what still remained to be done, in order to separate herself and her child, she fell dead on its body, drowned in a pool of blood.

“Do you think she was very wicked, Madame?”

The doctor was silent and waited, but the Baroness made no reply.

The Lock

The four glasses which were standing in front of the diners were still nearly half full, which is a sign, as a general rule, that the guests are quite so. They were beginning to speak without waiting for an answer; no one took any notice of anything except what was going on inside him; voices grew louder, gestures more animated, eyes brighter.

It was a bachelors’ dinner of confirmed old celibates. They had instituted this regular banquet twenty years before, christening it “The Celibate,” and at the time there were fourteen of them, all fully determined never to marry. Now there were only four of them left; three were dead and the other seven were married.

These four stuck firmly to it, and, as far as lay in their power, they scrupulously observed the rules which had been laid down at the beginning of their curious association. They had sworn, hand-in-hand, to turn aside every woman they could from the right path, and their friends’ wives for choice, and more especially those of their most intimate friends. For this reason, as soon as any of them left the society, in order to set up in domestic life for himself, he took care to quarrel definitely with all his former companions.

Besides this, they were pledged at every dinner to relate most minutely their last adventures, which had given rise to this familiar phrase among them: “To lie like an old bachelor.”

They professed, moreover, the most profound contempt for woman, whom they talked of as an animal made solely for their pleasure. Every moment they quoted Schopenhauer, who was their god, and his well-known essay “On Women”; they wished that harems and towers might be reintroduced, and had the ancient maxim: “Mulier, perpetuus infans,” woven into their table-linen, and below it, the line of Alfred de Vigny: “La femme, enfant malade et douze fois impure.” So that by dint of despising women they lived only for them, while all their efforts and all their desires were directed toward them. Those of them who had married called them old fops, made fun of them, and⁠—feared them.

When they began to feel the exhilarating effects of the champagne, the tales of their old bachelor experiences began.

On the day in question, these old fellows, for they were old by this time, and the older they grew the more extraordinary strokes of luck in the way of love affairs they had to relate, were quite talkative. For the last month, according to their own accounts, each of them had seduced at least one woman a day. And what women! the youngest, the noblest, the richest, and the most beautiful!

After they had finished their stories, one of them, he who had spoken first and had therefore been obliged to listen to all the others, rose and said:

“Now that we have finished drawing the longbow, I should like to tell you, not my last, but my first adventure⁠—I mean the first adventure of my life, my first fall⁠—for it is a moral fall after all, in the arms of Venus. Oh! I am not going to tell you my first⁠—what shall I call it?⁠—my first appearance; certainly not. The leap over the first ditch (I am speaking figuratively) has nothing interesting about it. It is generally rather a muddy one, and one picks oneself up rather abashed, with one charming illusion the less, with a vague feeling of disappointment and sadness. That realization of love the first time one experiences it is rather repugnant; we had dreamed of it as being so different, so delicate, so refined. It leaves a physical and moral sense of disgust behind it, just as when one