The Putter-to-Sleep
The Seine spread before my house without a wrinkle, varnished by the morning sun. It lay there, a lovely, wide, slow, long flood of silver, tarnished in places; and on the further side of the river a line of tall trees stretched along the bank a huge wall of verdure.
The feeling of life which begins again each morning, of life, fresh, gay, loving, shivered in the leaves, fluttered in the air, shimmered in the water.
They brought me my newspapers which the postman had just left and I went out on to the bank with tranquil step to read them.
In the first I opened I caught the words “Suicide Statistics” and I was informed that this year more than eight thousand five hundred persons had killed themselves.
At that moment I saw them! I saw this hideous massacre of desperate creatures, tired of life. I saw people bleeding, their jaw shattered, their skull smashed, their chest pierced by a bullet, slowly dying, alone in a little hotel bedroom, and thinking nothing of their wound, always of their misery.
Others I saw, throat gaping or stomach ripped open, still holding in their hand the kitchen knife or the razor.
I saw others, seated before a glass in which matches were soaking, or sometimes before a little bottle with a red label. They would watch it with rigid eyes, motionless; then they would drink it, then wait; then a grimace would cross their faces, contract their lips; a fear crept into their eyes, for they did not know how much they would suffer before the end.
They would get up, stop, fall, and with hands clutching their stomachs, feel their organs burned and their entrails corroded by the liquid’s flames, before their consciousness was overcast.
Others again I saw hanging from a nail in the wall, from the window fastening, from the ceiling bracket, from the beam of a barn, from the branch of a tree, beneath the evening drizzle. And I guessed all that they had done before they hung there, tongue lolling, motionless. I guessed the anguish of their hearts, their last hesitations, their movements in fixing the rope, trying whether it held firmly, passing it about their neck and letting themselves fall.
Others still I saw lying on their wretched beds, mothers with their little children, old men starving with hunger, girls torn with the agony of love, all rigid, stifled, suffocated, while in the centre of the room still smoked the charcoal brazier.
And some I glimpsed walking to and fro by night on deserted bridges. These were the most sinister. The water eddied beneath the arches with a soft whisper. They did not see it … they guessed its presence, scenting its chilly odour! They desired it and feared it. They did not dare! However, they must. The hour was striking from some distant clock, and suddenly, in the wide silences of the darkness, there swept by me, quickly stifled, the splash of a body falling into the river, a few screams, the slapping of water beaten with hands. Sometimes there was nothing more than the plunge of their fall, when they had bound their arms or tied a stone to their feet.
Oh! poor folk, poor folk, poor folk, how I felt their anguish, how I died their deaths. I have passed through all their miseries; in one hour I have undergone all their tortures. I have known all the sorrows which led them to that place; for I feel degradation, deceiver of life, as no one more than I has felt it.
Yes, I have understood them, those feeble things, who—tormented by ill fortune, having lost their loved ones, awakened from their dreams of later reward, from the illusion of another existance, in which God would at last be just, after giving way to savage anger, and disabused of the mirage of happiness—have had enough of life, and would end this relentless tragedy or shameful comedy.
Suicide; it is the strength of them who have nothing left, the hope of them who believe no more, the sublime courage of the conquered! Yes, there is at least one door from this life; we can always open it and pass to the other side. Nature has made one gesture of pity; she has not imprisoned us. Mercy for the desperate!
While for the merely disabused, let them march forward free-souled and calm-hearted. They have nothing to fear, since they can depart; since behind them stands ever this door that the gods we dream of can never close.
So I meditated on this crowd of willing dead: more than eight thousand five hundred in a year. And it came to me that they had come together to hurl into the world a prayer, to cry their will, to demand something, to be later made real, when the world will understand better. It seemed to me
