But as his lodgings became a hell to him, he took a room in a big hotel, a large room on the ground floor, so that he could see the passersby. He was no longer alone in this vast public dwelling-place; he felt people swarming round him; he heard voices behind the partitions; and when his old grief harassed him too cruelly, between his bed with the sheet drawn back and his lonely fireside, he would go out into the broad passages and walk up and down like a sentry, past all the closed doors, looking sadly at the pairs of boots in couples before each of them, the dainty boots of the women squatting beside the strong ones of the men; and he would reflect that all these people were happy, no doubt, and sleeping lovingly, side by side or in each other’s arms, in the warmth of their beds.
Five years went by in this fashion, five mournful years with no events but an occasional two hours of bought love.
One day, as he was going for his customary walk between the Madeleine and the Rue Drouot, he suddenly noticed a woman whose bearing struck him. A tall man and a child were with her. All three were walking in front of him. “Where have I seen those people?” he wondered, and all of a sudden he recognised a gesture of the hand: it was his wife, his wife with Limousin and with his child, his little Georges.
His heart beat so that he was almost stifled, but he did not stop; he wanted to see them, and he followed them. Anyone would have said that they were a family party, a decent family of decent middle-class people. Henriette was leaning on Paul’s arm, talking softly to him and occasionally looking at him from beside him. At these times Parent saw her profile, and recognised the graceful line of her face, the movements of her mouth, her smile, and the caress of her eyes. The child in particular drew his attention. How big he was and strong! Parent could not see his face, but only the long fair hair which fell upon his neck in curling locks. It was Georges, this tall barelegged boy walking like a little man beside his mother.
As they stopped in front of a shop, he suddenly saw all three. Limousin had gone grey, older, and thinner; his wife, on the contrary, was younger than ever, and had put on flesh; Georges had become unrecognisable, so different from the old days!
They set off again. Parent followed them once more, then hurried past them in order to turn back and see their faces at close quarters. When he passed the child, he felt a longing, a mad longing to seize him in his arms and carry him off. He touched him, as though by chance. The child turned his head and looked angrily at this clumsy fellow. At that Parent fled, struck, pursued, wounded by his glance. He fled like a thief, overcome by the horrible fear that he had been seen and recognised by his wife and her lover. He raced to his beerhouse and fell panting into his chair.
That evening he drank three absinths.
For four months he bore the scar of that meeting on his heart. Every night he saw them all again, happy and carefree father, mother, and child, walking along the boulevard before going home to dinner. This new vision effaced the old one. It was a new thing, a new hallucination, and a new grief, too. Little Georges, his little Georges, whom he had loved so well and kissed so much in the old days, was vanishing into a distant and ended past, and he saw a new Georges, like a brother of the old one, a little boy with bare calves, who did not know him! He suffered terribly from this thought. The child’s love was dead; there was no longer any bond between them; the child had not stretched out his arms at sight of him. He had given him an angry look.
Then little by little his soul grew calm again; his mental torments grew less keen; the image which appeared before his eyes and haunted his nights became vague, rarer. He began to live more like the rest of the world, like all the men of leisure who drink their bocks at marble-topped tables and wear out the seats of their trousers on the threadbare velvet seats.
He grew old amid the pipe-smoke, and bald in the gaslight, made quite an event of his weekly bath, his fortnightly haircut, the purchase of new clothes or a new hat. When he arrived at the beerhouse wearing a new hat, he would contemplate himself in the mirror for a long time before sitting down, would take it off and put it on several times in succession, would set it at different angles, and would finally ask his friend, the lady at the counter, who was looking at it with interest: “Do you think it suits me?”
Two or three times a year he would go to the theatre; and, in the summer, he would sometimes spend the evening at an open-air concert in the Champs-Élysées. He carried the tunes in his head; they sang in the depths of his memory for weeks; he would even hum them, beating time with his foot, as he sat at his bock.
The years followed one another, slow and monotonous, and short because they were empty.
He did not feel them slipping over his head. He advanced towards death without stirring, without exciting himself, sitting at a beerhouse table; only the great mirror against which he leaned a head that every day was a little balder, witnessed to the ravages of time, who runs swift-footed, devouring man, poor man.
By this time he seldom thought of the terrible drama in which his life had been wrecked, for twenty years had gone by since that ghastly evening.
But the life he had fashioned
