A Family
I was on my way to revisit my friend Simon Radevin, whom I had not seen for fifteen years.
Once he had been my best friend, the true guest of my mind, that friend with whom a man spends long evenings, quiet or gay, to whom he tells the intimate secrets of his heart, for whom he finds, talking at ease, rare, delicate, ingenious and exquisite thoughts, born of a mutual sympathy that inspires and releases the mind.
For many years we had rarely been separated. We had lived, travelled, thought, and dreamed together, had the same love for the same things, admired the same books, appreciated the same works of art, quivered to the touch of the same sensations, and laughed so often at the same things that we understood one another completely, merely by the interchange of a glance.
Then, all of a sudden, he had married a provincial girl who had come to Paris to find a husband. How had this flaxen-haired, thin little creature, with silly hands, clear, empty eyes and a fresh, stupid voice, a girl like all the other hundred thousand marriageable dolls—how had she managed to pick up this youth of delicate perceptions and fine intelligence? It is one of those things one cannot understand. Doubtless he had hoped for happiness, the simple, sweet, lasting happiness to be found in the arms of a good, loving, faithful wife, and he had fancied that he saw all this in the transparent eyes of this pale-haired chit of a girl.
He had not reflected that an active man, quivering with eager life, tires of anything as soon as he has acquired the stupid reality of it, unless he becomes so besotted as to lose his proper understanding of things.
What sort of man was I going to find him? Still lively, witty, laughing, and enthusiastic, or sunk in the slumber born of life in the provinces? A man may well change in fifteen years.
The train stopped at a little station, and, as I was getting out of the carriage, a stout, a very stout man, with red cheeks and a tubby stomach, rushed towards me with open arms, shouting: “Georges.” I embraced him, but I had not recognised him.
“By Gad, you’re no thinner,” I murmured in bewilderment.
“What can you expect?” he laughed in reply. “Happy days! Good living! Good nights! Eating and sleeping, that’s my life!”
I stared at him, searching his large face for the features I had loved. The eyes alone had not changed, but I could no longer see the old light in them, and said to myself: “If it is true that the light in the eyes is the reflection of the brain, then the brain in that head is not the one I once knew so well.”
But his eyes were shining, full of joy and friendship; only they no longer held the intelligent clarity that is as true an index to the worth of a mind as are words.
“Look, these are my two eldest,” said Simon, suddenly.
A girl of fourteen, almost a woman, and a boy of thirteen, in school clothes, advanced with a timid, awkward air.
“Yours?” I murmured.
“Yes,” he replied with a laugh. “How many have you?”
“Five. Three more at home.”
He had answered with a proud, pleased, almost triumphant air; I was smitten with a feeling of profound pity, touched to vague contempt, for the innocent, frank vanity of this reproductive animal who spent his nights generating children between a sleep and a sleep, in his provincial house, like a rabbit in a hutch.
I got into a carriage that he drove himself, and we set off through the town, a sad, sleepy, dull little place, with nothing moving on the streets but a few dogs and two or three servants. From time to time a shopkeeper at his door would touch his hat, and Simon would return his greeting and tell me the man’s name, doubtless to prove to me that he knew all the inhabitants by name. It occurred to me that he might be thinking of becoming a deputy, the favourite dream
