Short Fiction

talk to you for a few minutes?” he said.

She answered:

“I’d like you to.”

They went into a small sitting-room, and a rather surprised footman lit its candles.

Then, when they were alone, he went on:

“How am I to know the truth? I have implored you a thousand times to speak, you remained silent, impenetrable, inflexible, inexorable, and now you come to me today and tell me that you lied. For six years you have found it in your heart to let me believe a thing like that! No, it’s now you’re lying, I don’t know why, out of pity for me, perhaps?”

She replied, with a grave sincere air:

“But if I had not lied I should have had four more children in the last six years.”

He cried:

“Is it a mother talking like that?”

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t feel in the least as a mother towards children who are not born, I’m content to be the mother of those I have and to love them with all my heart. I am, we are women of the civilised world. We no longer are and we refuse to be mere females who replenish the earth.”

She rose, but he seized her hands.

“One word, only one word, Gabrielle. Will you tell me the truth?”

“I have just told you it. I have never deceived you.”

He looked her squarely in the face, so lovely as she was, with her eyes grey as cold skies. In her dusky hair, in that shadowy night of black hair, shone the diadem powdered with diamonds like a milky way. Then he felt suddenly, by some intuition he felt that this being before him was not only a woman destined to perpetuate her race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires, garnered in us by the centuries, turned aside from primitive and divine goal to wander towards a mystic beauty half-seen and intangible. So that some of them flourish only for our dreams, adorned with all the poetry, the romantic luxury, the conceits and the aesthetic charm that civilisation has gathered round woman, this statue of flesh that engenders as many fevers of the senses as immaterial appetites.

Her husband remained standing in front of her, dazed by this tardy and obscure discovery, reaching directly back to the cause of his old jealousy and understanding it hardly at all.

At last he said:

“I believe you. I feel that at this moment you are not lying: and indeed it always seemed to me before that you were lying.”

She held out her hand:

“We are friends then?”

He took this hand and kissed it, answering:

“We are friends. Thank you, Gabrielle.”

Then he went out, still looking at her, marvelling that she was still so lovely, and feeling in himself the birth of a strange emotion, an emotion perhaps more terrible than the simple love of old.

Who Knows?

I

My God! My God! So at last I am going to write down what has happened to me. But shall I be able to? Shall I dare?⁠—so fantastic, so inexplicable, so incomprehensible, so crazy is it.

If I were not certain of what I had seen, certain that there has been in my reasoning no faulty link, no error in my investigations, no lacuna in the relentless sequence of my observations, I would have believed myself to be merely the victim of an hallucination, the sport of a strange vision. After all, who knows?

I am today in a private asylum; but I entered it voluntarily, urged thereto by prudence, and fear. Only one living creature knows my story. The doctor here. I am going to write it. I hardly know why. To rid myself of it, for it fills my thoughts like an unendurable nightmare.

Here it is:

I have always been a recluse, a dreamer, a sort of detached philosopher, full of kindly feeling, content with little, with no bitterness against men or resentment against heaven. I lived alone, all my life, because of a sort of uneasiness that the presence of other people induces in me! How can I explain it? I could not explain it. I don’t refuse to see people, to talk to them, to dine with friends, but when I have endured their nearness for some time, even those with whom I am most intimate, they weary me, exhaust me, get on my nerves, and I suffer an increasing exasperating longing to see them go or to go myself, to be alone.

This longing is more than a desire, it is an irresistible necessity. And if I had to endure the continued presence of the people in whose company I was, if I were compelled, not to listen but to go on for any length of time hearing their conversation, some accident would certainly befall me. What? Ah, who knows? Perhaps merely a fainting fit? Yes, probably that!

I have such a passion for solitude that I cannot even endure the nearness of other people sleeping under my roof: I cannot live in Paris because of the indefinable distress I feel there. I die spiritually, and I am as tortured in my body and my nerves by the vast crowd that swarms and lives round me, even when it sleeps. Oh, the slumber of other people is more unendurable than their speech! And I can never rest when at the other side of the wall I am aware of lives held in suspense by these regular eclipses of consciousness.

Why am I so made? Who knows? The cause is perhaps quite simple. I am quickly wearied of all that exists outside myself. And there are many people similarly constituted.

There are two races dwelling on earth. Those who need other people, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by other people, and who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by other people, while isolation calms them, and the