Like Death

by Guy de Maupassant

  The countess and Olivier remained alone, standing behind the hangings of the closed doors. “Sit down, my friend,” she said softly.

  But he answered, almost violently, “No, thank you. I too must be leaving now.”

  She murmured beseechingly, “Oh! Why?”

  “Because I seem to have no reason to be here. I beg your pardon for having come without warning you.”

  “Olivier, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing’s the matter; I merely regret having disturbed a premeditated pleasure party.”

  She seized his hand. “What do you mean? They’re leaving because they’re going to the opening of the sessions. And I was left behind. Actually, Olivier, you were positively inspired to come today, when I’m here alone.”

  He laughed, sneeringly. “Inspired! Yes, I was inspired!”

  She seized both his wrists, and looking deep into his eyes, she whispered, very low, “Confess that you love her.”

  He freed his hands, unable to control his impatience any longer. “You’re insane to have any such idea.”

  Again she seized his arms, her fingers entreatingly tightening his sleeves. “Olivier! Confess, confess! I prefer knowing the truth. I’m certain of it, but I prefer knowing. I’d rather—Oh! You don’t understand what’s happened to my life.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “How can I help it? Is it my fault you’re losing your mind?”

  She held him, drawing him toward the room behind them where no one could hear them. She dragged him by his shirt, clinging to him, panting for breath. Once she’d led him as far as the little round divan, she forced him to collapse onto it, after which she seated herself beside him. “Olivier, my friend, my only friend! I beg you, tell me you love her. I know it, I feel it in everything you do. There’s no way I can doubt it. I’m dying from it, but I must know it from your own lips.” Still struggling, she sank down, kneeling at his feet. Her voice was quivering. “Oh, my friend, my friend, my only friend! It’s true you love her, isn’t it?”

  Even as he struggled to raise her, he kept insisting, “Why, no! Not at all! I swear to you I’m doing no such thing!”

  She stretched a hand toward his lips and closed her fingers over them, stammering, “Oh! Don’t lie. I’m suffering enough as it is!” And her head fell sobbing on this man’s knees.

  He could see only the back of it—a mass of blond hair mixed with many white ones—and he was overwhelmed by immense pity, immense grief. Burying his hands in that mass of heavy hair, he raised her head violently, turning toward him two bewildered eyes from which tears were flowing freely. And then, upon those tearful eyes, he pressed his lips again and again, repeating, “Any! Any! My dear, dear Any!”

  Then the countess, trying to smile and speaking in the voice of a child choking with grief, managed to say, “Oh, my friend, tell me you still love me a little.”

  He embraced her again. “Yes, dearest Any, I still love you.”

  She rose and seated herself beside him once more, seized his hands again, looked into his eyes, and said quite tenderly, “We’ve loved each other such a long time. It shouldn’t end like this.”

  And he asked, as he pressed her to him, “Why should it end at all?”

  “Because I’m old, and because Annette resembles too closely what I was when you first knew me.”

  It was his turn to close her sorrowing mouth with his fingertips, saying, “Not again! I beg you, speak no more of it. I swear you’re mistaken.”

  “Oh!” she repeated. “If you could just love me a little!”

  “I do love you,” he said once more. Then they remained a long time without uttering a word, hands clasped, terribly moved and terribly sad.

  Finally she broke the silence, murmuring, “Oh! The hours I still must live through will not be gay.”

  “I’ll try to sweeten them for you.”

  The shadow of the cloudy skies that precede twilight by two hours was darkening the drawing room now, gradually burying both of them under the gray mist of an autumn evening.

  The clock struck the hour.

  “We’ve been here a long while,” she said. “You must go. Someone might come, and we’re not exactly calm.”

  He rose, clasped her in his arms, kissing her half-open mouth the way he used to; then they crossed both drawing rooms arm in arm, like a newly married couple.

  “Goodbye, my friend.”

  “Goodbye, my friend.”

  And the portiere fell behind him. He went down the stairs, turned toward La Madeleine, and began walking without realizing what he was doing, stunned as if he had received a blow, his heart palpitating in his breast like a burning rag. For two or three hours, or perhaps longer, he walked straight ahead in a sort of mental stupor, a physical prostration that left him just enough strength to put one foot in front of the other. He discovered that he had returned home to reflect.

  So, then, he loved that little girl. Now he could understand everything he had felt near her since that walk in the Parc Monceau when he had found in her mouth the summons of a scarcely recognized voice, the voice that had once awakened his heart to that slow, irresistible revival of an almost unrecognizable love not yet grown cold but which he was determined not to recognize.

  What should he do? But what could he do? Once she was married he would avoid seeing her, that was all. Meanwhile he would keep coming to the house so no one could have any suspicion: He would hide his secret from everyone.

  He dined at home, which he was quite unaccustomed to do. Then he ordered a fire to be laid in the large stove in his studio, for the night promised to be very cold. He even ordered the chandeliers to be lit, as if he feared dark corners, and shut himself up inside. What strange, profound, frightfully sad emotions had seized him! He felt them in his throat, in his breast, in all his relaxed muscles, as well as in his sinking soul. The room’s walls oppressed him: All his life was held between them, his life as an artist, his life as a man. Every painted study hanging there recalled a success, every piece of furniture was some kind of recollection. But successes and recollections were things of the past.

  His life? How short it seemed: so empty, yet so full. He had made pictures and more pictures and still more pictures, and he had loved one woman. He recalled the exultant evenings after their meetings in this same studio. He had walked entire nights with his entire being full of fever. In the joy of happy love, the joy of worldly success, the unique intoxication of glory, he had tasted never-to-be-forgotten hours of inward triumph.

  He had loved a woman, and that woman had loved him. From her he had received that baptism which reveals to a man the mysterious world of emotions and love. She had opened his heart almost by force, and now he might never close it again. Another love enters, in spite of himself, through that breach, another or rather the same love rekindled by a new face, the same face strengthened by all the force this effort to adore demands as it grows old.

  So he loved this little Annette. There need be no more struggles, resistances, or denials. He loved her with the despair of knowing that he would receive no pity at all from her, knowing that she would always be unaware of his excruciating torment, and that another man would wed her. At this constantly recurring thought, impossible to dismiss, he was possessed by an animal desire to howl like a chained dog, for like such a creature he was powerless, enslaved, bound. Growing more and more nervous the more he reflected, the more he kept crossing with rapid steps the vast apartment illuminated as if for a feast. Finally, unable to bear any longer the pain of that reopened wound, he thought he would try to soothe it with the recollection of his former love, to drown it in the evocation of his first and greatest passion.

  From the closet where he kept it, he took the copy of the countess’s portrait he had painted for himself, placed it upon his easel, and seating himself before it, gazed at it searchingly: he tried to see her again, to find her living as he had previously known her. But it was always Annette who appeared upon the canvas. The mother ha
d disappeared, had vanished, leaving in her place that other face which resembled hers so strangely. It was a young girl, her hair a little lighter, her smile a little more roguish, her manner a little more mocking, and he felt now that he belonged body and soul to that young creature as he had never belonged to the older one, as a sinking boat belongs to the billows.

  He rose, and in order to dismiss the apparition he turned the painting over; then, filled with sadness, he went to his bedroom to get and bring into the studio the desk drawer in which all the letters of his love were sleeping. They were there as in a bed, one on top of the other, forming a thick layer of thin pieces of paper. Into this layer he dipped his hands—into all those phrases that spoke of the two of them, this bath of their long intimacy. He gazed at that narrow coffin in which was laid the mass of piled-up envelopes on which his name, his name alone, was always written. He realized that a love, that the tender attachment of two beings one for the other, that the history of two hearts was told therein, in that yellowish wave of papers with spots made by red seals, and as he bent over them he inhaled an old scent, the melancholy odor of enclosed letters.

  He wanted to read them again, and searching in the bottom of the drawer, he took out a handful of the oldest ones. As fast as he opened them, the recollections fell out of them quite distinctly, and they stirred his soul. He recognized many he had carried about with him entire weeks, and rediscovered the tiny handwriting that told him such sweet things, the forgotten emotions of former days. Suddenly he felt under his fingers a fine embroidered handkerchief. What was it? He thought a few moments and then remembered. One day, at his house, she had wept because she was a little jealous, and he had stolen the handkerchief bathed with her tears.

  Ah! What sad things! What sad things! Poor woman! From the depths of this drawer, from the depths of his past, all those reminiscences rose like a vapor—nothing more than the palpable vapor of exhausted reality. Yet he suffered for this, and wept upon those letters as one weeps over the dead because they are no more.

  But the stirring of the old love caused the kindling of a new and youthful ardor within him, a wave of irresistible tenderness that brought to mind the radiant face of Annette. He had loved the mother in a passionate burst of voluntary servitude; he was beginning to love this young girl like a slave, like an old trembling slave on whom fetters have been riveted which he would never break. This he felt in the depths of his being, and it terrified him.

  He tried to comprehend how and why she possessed him. He knew her so little. She was hardly a woman, but one whose heart and soul were still sleeping with the sleep of youth.

  He, now, was almost at the end of life. How was it, then, that this child had captivated him with a few smiles and a few more locks of her hair? Ah! The smiles and the hair of that little blond creature made him long to fall on his knees and bow his head to the ground.

  Do we know, do we ever know why a woman’s face suddenly has the power of a poison upon us? It seemed as if we had been swallowing her with our eyes, as if she had become our mind and our body. We were intoxicated by her, maddened by her; we lived on that ingested image, and we would die of it. How one suffers sometimes from the ferocious and incomprehensible power of a face’s form upon a man’s heart. . . .

  Olivier Bertin had resumed his pacing; night was advancing; his fire had gone out. Through the windowpanes the cold from outside was entering. Then he sought his bed, where until daylight he continued to muse and suffer. He was up early, without knowing why or what he was about to do, nervously agitated, as irresolute as a revolving weather vane.

  By dint of seeking some distraction for his mind and some occupation for his body, he remembered that on that very day some members of his club were accustomed to meet every week at the Bain Maure, where they breakfasted after their bath. He dressed quickly, hoping that the hot room and the shower bath would calm his nerves, and he went out. As soon as he stepped outside he felt the cold keen air, that crisp cold of the first frost that kills the last remnants of summer in a single night.

  All along the boulevard fell a thick rain of big yellow leaves, with a dry, soft sound. They fell as far as the eye could reach, from one end of the wide avenue to the other, between the house fronts as if all the stems had been severed from the branches by the sharp edge of a thin blade of ice. The streets and sidewalks were already covered with them, resembling for hours the forest paths at the beginning of winter. All this dead foliage crackled underfoot and was occasionally piled up in light waves by puffs of wind.

  It was one of those transitional days that constitute the end of one season and the beginning of another, weather that had a special savor, the sadness of approaching death or the savor of reviving sap.

  As he crossed the threshold of the Bain Maure, the thought of the heat that would momentarily penetrate his flesh after passing through the frosty air of the streets brought a thrill of satisfaction to Olivier’s sad heart. He undressed, quickly wrapping around his waist the light cloth an attendant handed to him, instantly disappearing behind a padded door opening before him.

  A warm oppressive breath that seemed to come from a distant furnace made him breathe as if he needed air as he crossed the Moorish gallery lit by two Oriental lanterns. Then a woolly Negro, his only apparel a belt around his shining body and muscular limbs, rushed ahead of him to raise a portal at the other end of the chamber, and Bertin entered the hot-air bath, a round silent high-ceilinged room almost as mystical as a temple. Here the light fell from a cupola through trefoils of colored glass into an immense circular chamber paved with flagstones, its walls covered with pottery decorated in the Arab fashion.

  Men of all ages, almost naked, were walking slowly, gravely, silently; others were seated on marble benches, their arms crossed; others were chatting in an undertone.

  The hot air made everyone pant, even at the entrance. There was something ancient and mysterious about the place, this stifling and decorated circus where human flesh was heated, where black and brown masseurs with copper-colored legs were circulating. The first face the painter recognized was the Count de Landa’s, circling the room like a Roman wrestler, proud of his enormous chest, his large arms crossed over it. A frequenter of the hot-air baths, he seemed a favorite actor on the stage, criticizing the much-discussed musculature of the strong men of Paris in the manner of an expert.

  “Good morning, Bertin,” he said.

  They shook hands, then Landa continued, “Fine weather for sweating, eh.”

  “Yes, magnificent.”

  “Have you seen Rocdiane? He’s down there somewhere. I called to him just as he was waking up. Oh! Just look at that anatomy!” They were passed by a bowlegged little gentleman with slender arms and thin flanks, who made these two models of human vigor smile scornfully.

  Rocdiane came toward them, having recognized the painter.

  They sat down on a long marble slab and began talking as if they were in someone’s drawing room. Attendants circulated constantly, offering trays of drinking water. Everywhere could be heard masseurs’ slaps on bare flesh and the sudden gush of shower-baths, a continuous splashing sound coming from every corner of the great amphitheater and filling the whole place with the light noise of rain.

  At every moment a newcomer greeted the three friends or approached to shake hands: the strapping Duke de Harisson, the tiny Prince Epilati, Baron Flach, and others. Suddenly Rocdiane exclaimed, “Hullo, Farandal!” and the marquis entered, hands on his hips, walking with that ease of well-built men who are never flustered.

  Landa murmured, “Something of a giant, that fellow,” and Rocdiane continued, turning toward Bertin, “Is it true he’s marrying your friends’ daughter?”

  “I think so,” the painter said.

  But that question, put to that man at that moment in that place, made Olivier’s heart quake with despair and rebellion. The horror of all the foreseen realities appeared to him for a second with such acuteness that he struggled for a moment or two against a
brutal desire to hurl himself against the marquis. Then he rose, saying, “I’m tired, I’ll get my massage right away.” An Arab was passing. “Ahmed, are you free now?”

  “Yes, Monsieur Bertin.”

  And Bertin hurried off to avoid shaking hands with Farandal, who was slowly making his way around the hammam.

  He remained scarcely a quarter of an hour in the large calm cooling room, which is surrounded by cells containing beds around a plot of African plants and a jet d’eau falling in drops in the center. He had a sense of being pursued, threatened even—that the marquis was about to join him, and that he would be obliged, with outstretched hand, to treat him as a friend. A friend who wanted to kill him.

  Bertin soon found himself back on the boulevard covered with dead leaves that had stopped falling, the last having been shaken free by a tremendous blast; their red and yellow carpet shivering, stirring, shifting from one pavement to the next, driven by gusts of a rising wind.

  Suddenly a roaring sound came across the roofs, that bellowing of the passing blast, and at the same time a furious gust, which seemed to come from La Madeleine, blew hard through the boulevard.

  The leaves, all the fallen leaves that appeared to be waiting for it, rose as it drew near. They ran before it, assembling, whirling, and rising in a spiral to the housetops. It drove them like a flock, a mad flock that was flying, running away toward the gates of Paris, toward the free sky of the suburbs. And when one large cloud of leaves and dust vanished on the heights of Malesherbes quartier, the streets and sidewalks remained bare, swept strangely clean.

  Bertin was thinking, “What will become of me? What shall I do? Where shall I go?” And he was returning home, unable to think of anything. A kiosk caught his eye, and he purchased seven or eight newspapers, hoping to find something to interest him for an hour or two. “I’ll breakfast here,” he said as he entered his house and went up to his studio.

  But the moment he sat down he realized he wouldn’t be able to stay here, for through his whole frame he felt the excitement of a mad beast.