An Old Man
All the newspapers had carried the advertisement:
The new watering place of Rondelis offers all desired advantages for a long stay and even for permanent residence. Its ferruginous waters, recognized as the best in the world for counteracting all impurities of the blood, seem also to possess particular qualities calculated to prolong human life. This singular circumstance is perhaps due in part to the exceptional situation of the town, which lies surrounded by mountains and in the very center of a pine forest. For several centuries it has been celebrated for numerous cases of extraordinary longevity.
And the public came in droves.
One morning the doctor in charge of the springs was asked to call on a new arrival, Monsieur Daron, who had come to Rondelis only a few days before and had rented a charming villa on the edge of the forest. He was a little old man of eighty-six, still sprightly, wiry, healthy, active, who went to infinite pains to conceal his age.
He asked the doctor to be seated, and immediately questioned him: “Doctor, if I am well, it is thanks to hygienic living. I am not very old, but have reached a certain age, and I keep free of all illness, all indisposition, even the slightest discomfort, by means of hygiene. I am told that the climate of this place is very favorable for the health. I am very willing to believe it, but before establishing myself here I want proof. I am therefore going to ask you to call on me once a week, to give me, very exactly, the following information:
“I wish first of all to have a complete, utterly complete, list of all the inhabitants of the town and surroundings who are more than eighty years old. I also need a few physical and psychological details concerning each. I wish to know their professions, their kinds of life, their habits. Each time one of these people dies, you will inform me, indicating the precise cause of death, as well as the circumstances.”
Then he graciously added: “I hope, Doctor, that we may become good friends,” and he stretched out his wrinkled little hand. The doctor took it, promising his devoted cooperation.
M. Daron had always had a strange fear of death. He had deprived himself of almost all the pleasures because they are dangerous, and whenever anyone expressed surprise that he did not drink wine—wine, that bringer of fancy and gaiety—he replied in a voice containing a note of fear: “I value my life.” And he pronounced My, as if that life, His life, possessed some generally unknown value. He put into that My such a difference between his life and the life of others, that no answer was possible.
Indeed, he had a very particular way of accentuating the possessive pronouns designating all the parts of his person or even things belonging to him. When he said “My eyes, my legs, my arms, my hands,” it was clear that no mistake must be made: those organs did not belong to everyone. But this distinction was particularly noticeable when he spoke of his physician: “My doctor.” One would have said that this doctor was his, only his, destined for him alone, to take care of his illnesses and nobody else’s, and that he was superior to all the doctors in the universe, all, without exception.
He had never considered other men except as kinds of puppets, created as furniture for the natural world. He divided them into two classes: those whom he greeted because some chance had put him in contact with them, and those whom he did not greet. Both categories of individuals were to him equally insignificant.
But beginning with the day when the doctor of Rondelis brought him the list of the seventeen inhabitants of the town who were over eighty, he felt awaken in his heart a new interest, an unfamiliar solicitude for these old people whom he was going to see fall by the wayside one after the other.
He had no desire to make their acquaintance, but he had a very clear idea of their persons, and with the doctor, who dined with him every Thursday, he spoke only of them. “Well, doctor, how is Joseph Poinçot today? We left him a little ill last week.” And when the doctor had given him the patient’s bill of health M. Daron proposed modifications in diet, experiments, methods of treatment which he might later apply to himself if they succeeded with the others. The seventeen old people were an experimental field from which much was to be learned.
One evening the
