“Because she loved you. There’s no jealousy without love.”
“Well, you must allow it’s a melancholy business when love, instead of making the happiness of life, becomes its calamity. … That’s no doubt the way God loves us.”
He had become excited while he was speaking and all of a sudden he exclaimed:
“I’m hungry. When I want to eat, that servant always brings me chocolate. I suppose Madame de La Pérouse must have told her that I never took anything else. It would be very kind of you to go to the kitchen … the second door on the right in the passage … and see whether there aren’t any eggs. I think she told me there were some. …”
“Would you like her to get you a poached egg?”
“I think I could eat two. Will you be so kind? I can’t make myself understood.”
“My dear friend,” said I when I came back, “your eggs will be ready in a moment. If you’ll allow me I’ll stay and see you eat them; yes; it will be a pleasure. I was very much distressed just now to hear you say that you were of no good to anyone. You seem to forget your grandson. Your friend, Monsieur Azaïs, proposes that you should go and live with him, at the school. He commissioned me to tell you so. He thinks that now that Madame de La Pérouse is no longer here, there’s nothing to keep you.”
I expected some resistance, but he hardly enquired the conditions of the new existence which was offered him.
“Though I didn’t kill myself, I am none the less dead. Here or there, it doesn’t matter to me. You can take me away.”
It was settled I should come and fetch him the next day but one; and that before then I should put at his disposal two trunks, for him to pack his clothes in and anything else he might want to take with him.
“And besides,” I added, “as you will keep this apartment on till the expiration of your lease, you will always be able to come and fetch anything you need.”
The maid brought in the eggs, which he devoured hungrily. I ordered dinner for him, greatly relieved to see that nature at last was getting the upper hand.
“I give you a great deal of trouble,” he kept repeating. “You are very kind.”
I should have liked him to hand over his pistols to me, and I told him he had no use for them now; but he would not consent to part with them.
“There’s nothing to fear. What I didn’t do that day, I know I shall never be able to do. But they are the only remembrances I have left of my brother—and I need them too to remind me that I am nothing but a plaything in God’s hands.”
IV
The First Day of the Term
The day was very hot. Through the open windows of the Vedels’ school could be seen the treetops of the Gardens, over which there still floated an immense, unexhausted store of summer.
The first day of the term was an opportunity old Azaïs never missed of making a speech. He stood at the foot of the master’s desk, upright and facing the boys, as is proper. At the desk sat old La Pérouse. He had risen as the boys came in; but Azaïs, with a friendly gesture, signed to him to sit down again. His anxious eyes had gone straight to Boris, and this look of his embarrassed Boris all the more because Azaïs, in the speech in which he introduced the new master to his pupils, thought fit to allude to his relationship to one of them. La Pérouse, in the meantime was distressed at receiving no answering look from Boris—indifference, he thought, coldness.
“Oh!” thought Boris, “if only he would leave me alone! If only he wouldn’t make me ‘an object’!” His schoolfellows terrified him. On coming out of the lycée, he had had to join them, and as he walked with them from the lycée to the Vedels’, he had listened to their talk. He would have liked to fall in with it, for he had great need of sympathy, but he was of too fastidious and sensitive a nature, and he could not overcome his repugnance; the words froze on his lips; he reproached himself for his foolishness and tried hard not to let it show; tried hard even to laugh, so as not to be scoffed at; but it was no good; he looked like a girl among the others, and realized it sorrowfully.
They had broken up into groups almost immediately. A certain Léon Ghéridanisol was a central figure and was already beginning to take the lead. Rather older than the others, and more advanced in his studies, of a dark complexion, with black hair and black eyes, Ghéridanisol was neither very tall nor particularly strong—but he had what is called “lip.” Really infernal lip! Even young George Molinier admitted that Ghéridanisol had “made him sit up”; “and you know, it takes a good deal to make me sit up!” Hadn’t he seen him that very morning, with his own eyes, go up to a young woman who was carrying a child in her arms:
“Is that kid yours, Madam?” (This with a low bow.) “It’s jolly ugly, I must say. But don’t worry. It won’t live.”
George was still rocking.
“No? Honour bright?” said Philippe Adamanti, his friend, when George told him the story.
This piece of insolence filled them with rapture; impossible to imagine anything funnier. A stale enough joke. Léon had learnt it from his cousin Strouvilhou, but that was no business of George’s.
At school, Molinier and Adamanti got leave to sit on the same bench as Ghéridanisol—the fifth, so as not to be too near the usher. Molinier had Adamanti on his left hand and Ghéridanisol (Ghéri for short) on his right; at the end of the bench sat Boris. Behind him was Passavant.
Gontran de Passavant’s life has been a
