Short Fiction

marries to live every day, every hour, every minute, every second with one man; and if this man is deformed, as I am, to marry him is to be condemned to a suffering which will last until death. Oh, I understand, I admire all sacrifices, all devotions when they have a limit, but I do not countenance a woman’s renunciation of the whole of a life in which she hopes for happiness, of all joys, of all dreams, just to satisfy the admiration of the gallery. When I hear, on the floor of my room, the clatter of my stumps and my crutches, the noise like a mill-wheel that I make with every step I take, I feel exasperated to the verge of strangling my servant. Do you think one could allow a woman to bear what one cannot endure oneself? And then, do you suppose they’re pretty, my stumps of legs?⁠ ⁠…”

He was silent. What could I say to him? I felt that he was right. Could I blame her, despise her, even give judgment against him, or against her? No. And yet? This dénouement, conforming as it did to convention, the golden mien, truth and appearances, did not satisfy my appetite for romance. Those heroic stumps called for a splendid sacrifice of which I had been deprived, and I felt cheated thereby.

I asked him abruptly:

“Mme. de Fleurel has children?”

“Yes, a girl and two boys. I am taking these toys to them. Her husband and she have been very good to me.”

The train was climbing the hill of Saint-Germain. It ran through the tunnels, entered the station, came to a standstill.

I was going to offer my arm to help the mutilated officer to descend when two hands were stretched out to him through the open door.

“How do you do, my dear Revalière?”

“Ah, how do you do, Fleurel?”

Behind the man, his wife stood smiling, radiant, still pretty, waving greetings with her gloved fingers. Beside her, a little girl was jumping for joy, and two small boys were staring with greedy eyes at the drum and the gun emerging from the carriage rack in their father’s hands.

When the cripple reached the platform, all the children embraced him. Then they set off, and the small girl lovingly held the polished crossbar of one crutch in her tiny hand, as she would have been able to hold her big friend’s thumb when she walked beside him.

A Portrait

“Look, there’s Milial,” said someone near me. I looked at the man they were pointing out, for I had long wanted to make the acquaintance of this Don Juan.

He was no longer young. His grey hair, a shaggy grey, was a little like one of those skin caps that certain Northern races wear on their heads, and his fine, rather long beard, falling to his chest, also bore a resemblance to fur. He was talking to a woman, leaning towards her, speaking in a low voice, while he looked at her with a tender gaze, eloquent of homage and affection.

I knew his manner of life, or at least such of it as was known to people. He had been loved madly, many times, and his name had been mixed up in various dramas that had taken place. He was spoken of as a very fascinating, almost irresistible man. When, in order to discover whence came these powers he had, I questioned the women who were loudest in his praise, they invariably replied, after having thought about it for a while:

“I don’t know⁠ ⁠… it’s a question of charm.”

Certainly, he was not handsome. He had none of the elegances which we imagine to be attributes of the conquerors of feminine hearts. I used to wonder, with much interest, in what lay his fascination. In his wit?⁠ ⁠… No one had ever quoted his sayings to me, nor even celebrated his intelligence.⁠ ⁠… In his glance?⁠ ⁠… Perhaps.⁠ ⁠… Or in his voice?⁠ ⁠… Some people’s voices have sensuous and irresistible attractions, the savour of exquisite foods. One hungers to hear them, and the sound of their words penetrates our sensibilities, like an epicurean dish.

A friend was passing; I asked him:

“Do you know M. Milial?”

“Yes.”

“Please introduce us.”

A minute later we were exchanging handshakes and conversing between two doors. What he said was just, pleasant to listen to, but in no way superlative. He had indeed a beautiful voice, soft, caressing, musical; but I have heard voices more taking, more moving. One listened to it with pleasure, as one watches the flowing of a pleasant stream. No great effort of thought was necessary to follow it, no hidden meaning roused one’s curiosity, no anticipation kept one’s interest on the alert. His conversation was actually tranquillising, and awoke in us neither a lively desire to respond and contradict, nor a delighted approbation.

It was, moreover, as easy to make a reply to him as to listen. The reply rose to one’s lips of its own accord, as soon as he had finished talking, and the phrases ran towards him as if what he had said made them issue quite naturally from one’s mouth.

I was shortly struck by a reflection. I had known him for a quarter of an hour, and it seemed to me that he was an old friend of mine, that everything about him had been familiar to me for a long time: his face, his gestures, his voice, his ideas.

Abruptly, after a few moments of talk, he seemed to me to have established himself on an intimate footing. All doors between us were open, and perhaps, of my own volition, I would⁠—had he solicited them⁠—have made confidences which ordinarily are given only to one’s oldest friends.

There was certainly a mystery about it. The barriers that separate all creatures, and which time removes one by one, when sympathy, like tastes, an identical intellectual culture, and constant relationship have little by little unpadlocked them, seemed not to exist between him and me, nor, doubtless, between him and all people, men and women, whom chance