“No, no. I’m perfectly comfortable, I assure you,” he declared, while the tone of his voice and the expression of his face said:
“I am horribly uncomfortable, and I hope it’s obvious; but I prefer to be so; and the more uncomfortable I am, the less you will hear me complain.”
I tried to make a joke, but could not succeed in getting him to smile. His manner was ceremonious and stiff, as if he wished to keep me at a distance and imply: “I owe it to you that I am here.”
At the same time he declared himself perfectly satisfied with everything, though all the while eluding my questions and seeming vexed at my insisting. I asked him, however, where his room was.
“Rather too far from the kitchen,” he suddenly exclaimed; and as I expressed my astonishment: “Sometimes during the night, I want something to eat … when I can’t sleep.”
I was near him; I came nearer still and put my hand gently on his arm. He went on in a more natural tone:
“I must tell you that I sleep very badly. When I do go to sleep, I never lose the feeling that I am asleep. That’s not proper sleep, is it? A person who is properly asleep, doesn’t feel that he is asleep. When he wakes up, he just knows that he has been asleep.”
Then, leaning towards me, he went on with a kind of finicky insistence:
“Sometimes I’m inclined to think that it’s an illusion and that, all the same, I am properly asleep, when I think I’m not asleep. But the proof that I’m not properly asleep is that if I want to open my eyes, I open them. As a rule, I don’t want to. You understand, don’t you, that there’s no object in it? What’s the use of proving to myself that I’m not asleep? I always go on hoping that I shall go to sleep by persuading myself that I’m asleep already. …”
He bent still nearer and went on in a whisper:
“And then there’s something that disturbs me. Don’t tell anyone. … I haven’t complained, because there’s nothing to do about it; and if a thing can’t be altered, there’s no good complaining, is there? … Well, just imagine, in the wall, right against my bed and exactly on a level with my head, there’s something that makes a noise.”
He had grown excited as he spoke. I suggested that he should take me to his room.
“Yes! Yes!” he said getting up suddenly. “You might be able to tell me what it is … I can’t succeed in making out. Come along.”
We went up two stories and then down a longish passage. I had never been into that part of the house before.
La Pérouse’s room looked on to the street. It was small but decent. On the bedside table, I noticed, next a prayer book, the case of pistols, which he had insisted on taking with him. He seized me by the arm, and pushing aside the bed a little:
“There! Now! … Put your ear to the wall. … Can you hear it?”
I listened for a long time with the greatest attention. But notwithstanding the best will in the world, I could not succeed in hearing anything. La Pérouse grew vexed. Just then a van drove by, shaking the house and making the windows rattle.
“At this time of day,” I said, in the hopes of pacifying him, “the little noise that irritates you is drowned by the noise of the street. …”
“Drowned for you, because you can’t distinguish it from the other noises,” he exclaimed with vehemence. “As for me, I hear it all the same. In spite of everything, I go on hearing it. Sometimes I am so exasperated by it that I make up my mind to speak to Azaïs or to the landlord. … Oh, I don’t suppose I shall get it to stop. … But, at any rate, I should like to know what it is.”
He seemed to reflect for a few moments, then went on: “It sounds something like a nibbling. I’ve done everything I can think of not to hear it. I pull my bed away from the wall. I put cotton wool in my ears. I hang my watch (you see, I’ve put a little nail there) just at the place where the pipe (I suppose) passes, so that its ticking may prevent my hearing the other noise. … But then it’s even more fatiguing, because I have to make an effort to distinguish it. Absurd, isn’t it? But I really prefer to hear it without any disguise, since I know it’s there all the same. … Oh! I oughtn’t to talk to you in this way. You see, I’m nothing but an old man now.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, and stayed for some time, as though sunk in a kind of dull misery. The sinister degradation of age is not so much attacking La Pérouse’s intelligence as the innermost depths of his nature. The worm lodges itself in the fruit’s core, I thought, as I saw him give way to his childish despair, and remembered him as he used to be, so firm—so proud. I tried to rouse him by speaking of Boris.
“Yes, his room is near mine,” said he, raising his head. “I’ll show it to you. Come along.”
He preceded me along the passage and opened a neighbouring door.
“The other bed you see there is young Bernard Profitendieu’s.” (I judged it useless to tell him that Bernard had left that very day, and would not be coming back to sleep in it.) He went on: “Boris
