Short Fiction

are more cheerful than the houses of the miserable. His room was empty of memories, like his life. And the thought of returning to it alone, of getting into bed, of going through all the movements and duties of every evening, was horrible to him. And, as though to get further away from this sinister dwelling-place and from the moment when he must return to it, he rose, and, suddenly reaching the first path in the Bois, he turned into a little copse, to sit down on the grass.

He heard, around him, above him, everywhere, a confused, immense, continuous roar, made up of innumerable different noises, a dull roar, near and distant, a vast vague quivering of life: the breath of Paris, breathing like a colossal being.

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The sun, already high in the heavens, threw a flood of light upon the Bois de Boulogne. A few carriages were driving up and down, and groups of riders were trotting gaily past.

A young couple walked along a lonely path. Suddenly the woman, lifting her eyes, caught sight of something brown in the branches. She pointed to it, surprised and uneasy.

“Look.⁠ ⁠… What is that?”

Then with a cry she collapsed into the arms of her companion, who was forced to lower her on to the ground.

The keepers, promptly summoned, let down from the tree the body of an old man, hanged by his braces.

It was discovered that death had taken place the previous evening. Papers found on the man showed that he was a bookkeeper at Messrs. Labuze and Company, and that his name was Levas.

Death was attributed to suicide from a cause unknown. Possibly temporary insanity?

The Sisters Rondoli

I

“No,” said Pierre Jouvent, “I do not know Italy. I started to go there twice, but each time I was stopped at the frontier and could not manage to get any further. And yet my two attempts gave me charming ideas of the manners of that beautiful country. Some time or other I must visit its cities, as well as the museums and works of art with which it abounds. I shall make another attempt as soon as possible to cross that impregnable border.

“You don’t understand me, so I will explain myself. In 1874 I was seized with desire to see Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. I got this whim about the middle of June, then the powerful fever of spring stirs the desire for love and adventure. I am not, as you know, a great traveller; it appears to me a useless and tiresome business. Nights spent in a train, the disturbed slumbers of the railway carriage, with the attendant headache and stiffness in every limb, the sudden waking in that rolling box, the unwashed feeling, the flying dust and smuts that fill your eyes and hair, the taste of coal in your mouth, and the bad dinners in draughty refreshment rooms, are, in my opinion, a horrible way of beginning a pleasure trip.

“After this introduction by the express, we have the miseries of the hotel; of some great hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange room, and the dubious bed! I am most particular about my bed; it is the sanctuary of life. We entrust our nude and fatigued bodies to it that they may be refreshed and rested between soft sheets and feathers.

“There we spend the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected, venerated, and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly possessions.

“I cannot lift up the sheets of a hotel bed without a shiver of disgust. What took place there the night before? What dirty, odious people have slept in it! I begin, then, to think of all the horrible people with whom one rubs shoulders every day, hideous hunchbacks, people with flabby bodies, with dirty hands that make you wonder what their feet and the rest of their bodies are like. I think of those who exhale a smell of garlic and dirt that is loathsome. I think of the deformed and purulent, of the perspiration emanating from the sick, and of everything that is ugly in man. And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am going to sleep! The mere idea of it makes me feel ill as I get in.

“And then the hotel dinners⁠—those dreary table d’hôte dinners in the midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted up by a small, cheap candle under a shade.

“Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know anything more wretched than when it is getting dark on such an occasion? You go about as if in a dream, looking at faces which you have never seen before and will never see again; listening to people talking about matters which are either quite indifferent to you or in a language that perhaps you do not understand. You have a terrible feeling, almost as if you were lost, and you continue to walk on, so as to avoid returning to the hotel, where you would feel still more lost because you are at home, in a home which belongs to anyone who can pay for it. At last you fall into a chair at some well-lit café, whose gilding and lights overwhelm you a thousand times more than the shadows in the streets. Then you feel so abominably lonely sitting in front of the foaming bock which a hurrying waiter has brought, that a kind of madness seizes you, the longing to go somewhere or other, no matter where, as long as you need not remain in front of that marble table and in the dazzling brightness.

“And then, suddenly, you perceive that you are really alone in the world, always and everywhere; and that in places which we know the familiar jostlings