“God bless my soul, sir, instead of looking at one another out of the corner of our eyes for an hour, wouldn’t it be more sensible to join forces in discovering where we knew each other?”
My neighbour answered pleasantly:
“You’re quite right, sir.”
I told him my name.
“My name is Henry Bouclair. I’m a magistrate.”
He hesitated a moment; then with that uncertainty of glance and voice produced by severe mental tension, he said:
“Oh, just so. I met you at the Poincels, a long time ago, before the war, it must be twelve years since.”
“Yes, sir … ah … you’re Lieutenant Revalière?”
“Yes, I was even Captain Revalière until the day when I lost my feet, both at one stroke, from a passing ball.”
And we looked at one another again, now that we knew each other.
I recalled perfectly having seen this handsome, slender youth who led cotillions with an agile, graceful energy, and who had been nicknamed, I believe, “La Trombe.”31 But behind this vision, sharply evoked, hovered yet another one I could not grasp, some story that I had known and forgotten, one of those stories to which one lends a friendly and short-lived interest, and which leave in one’s mind only an almost imperceptible trace.
There had been a love affair in those days. I recaptured just that particular emotional impression in the depths of my memory, but nothing more, an emotional impression comparable to the scent which—to a dog’s nose—the foot of an animal deposits on the ground.
Little by little, however, the shadows lifted and the face of a young girl rose before my eyes. Then her name burst in my head like an exploding cracker: Mlle. de Mandal. I recalled the whole affair now. It was indeed a love story, but a commonplace one. That young girl loved that young man, when I met him, and people talked of their approaching marriage. He himself seemed very much in love, very happy.
I lifted my eyes towards the rack where all the parcels carried by my neighbour’s servant were shaking with the jolts of the train, and the man’s voice sounded again in my ears as if he had hardly finished speaking.
He had said:
“There you are, sir, that’s the lot. There are five of them: the sweets, the doll, the drum, the gun, and the pâté de foie gras.”
Thereupon, in a flash, a romance developed and unfolded itself in my head. It was, moreover, exactly like all the romances I had read, in which sometimes the young man, sometimes the young girl, marries his or her betrothed after the catastrophe, bodily or financial. So this officer who had been maimed in the war, had after the campaign come back to find the girl who had promised to marry him, and she had kept her word and given herself to him.
I considered it very beautiful but quite simple, as one considers simple all the self-sacrifices and all the dénouements of books and plays. It always seems to us, as we read or as we listen, in these schools of magnanimity, that we should have sacrificed ourselves with enthusiastic pleasure, with superb impulsiveness. But we are put sorely out of temper, next day, when some luckless friend comes to borrow a little money from us.
Then, suddenly, another supposition, less romantic and more realistic, took the place of the first. Perhaps he had married before the war, before the frightful accident when his legs were shot away, and she, desolate and resigned, had been forced to take back, care for, console and sustain this husband, who had left her strong and handsome, and returned with feet mowed off, a dreadful wreckage condemned to immobility, to impotent rages and an inevitable obesity.
Was he happy or in torment? A desire, at first vague, then increasing, at last irresistible, came upon me, to learn his story, to know at least the principal points of it, which would allow me to guess what he could not or would not say.
I talked to him, my thoughts busy all the time. We had exchanged a few commonplace words; and, my eye turned towards the rack, I kept thinking: “So he has three children. The sweets are for his wife, the doll for his little girl, the drum and the gun for his boys, the pâté de foie gras for himself.”
I asked him abruptly:
“You are a father, sir?”
He answered: “No, sir.”
I felt suddenly confused, as if I had committed a gross breach of taste, and I added:
“I beg your pardon. I had imagined that you were, from hearing your man speak of the toys. One hears things without listening, and draws conclusions in spite of oneself.”
He smiled, then murmured:
“No, I am not even married. I never got any farther than the preliminaries.”
I had the air of suddenly remembering.
“Oh … that’s so, you were engaged when I knew you, engaged to Mlle. de Mandal, I think.”
“Yes, sir, you have an excellent memory.”
I became outrageously audacious, and added:
“Yes, I think I remember also having heard that Mlle. de Mandal had married Monsieur … Monsieur …”
He uttered the name placidly:
“M. de Fleurel.”
“Yes, that’s it. Yes … I even remember having heard your wound spoken of in this connection.”
I looked him full in the face; and he blushed. His full, swollen face, which the constant accession of blood had already made purple, took on a still deeper hue.
He replied eagerly, with the abrupt earnestness of a man who is pleading a cause lost beforehand, lost in his mind and in his heart, but which he wishes to carry in the eyes of the world.
“People are wrong, sir, to couple my name with Mme. de Fleurel’s. When I returned from the war, without my feet, alas, I would never, never have allowed her to become my wife. Was such a thing possible? One does not marry to make a parade of generosity, sir: one
