Then again, to tempt you further, we shall leave the nest together, as you put it, and feed the bats. You’ll see. Although I’m not entirely in my right mind, I can still chat; I can reason; my ideas hold together quite well, with the consequence that you, who are unaware of the special object of my madness, might think that it consists precisely of thinking that I’m mad.
You appear to be curious as to what led me to choose Montivilliers as an abode rather than somewhere else. It’s quite simple.
After the Polish emigration of 1832 my poor father was brought here by a Parisian friend, pampered fêted and, better than that, aided. He always talked to me about Montivilliers with emotion; and I thought that in curing, “at the right price,” the sons of those who has welcomed my father so liberally, I would be repaying a part of his debt.
Another trick of my imagination! The sons know nothing and the fathers have almost forgotten—which was their right. My name awakens none of the particular sympathy on which I was counting. The fault must be in my unfortunately slightly haughty manner. I have refrained, as you will understand, from reminding those who do not remember or pretend not to remember, for they would inevitably suppose the opposite of the truth—which is to say that I am thanking them on my father’s behalf for having attracted their support to myself too.
I therefore keep myself apart, and I am all the more sought after as a physician because of it; but I am considered to be a very odd man who is inordinately fond of solitude and might be a poor sleeper.
Although you only admit it to me covertly, I observe, as I had already foreseen, that Mauplaisant is holding a grudge against me for having left without bidding him farewell. He is not wrong. Nevertheless, please soothe his rancor against me. Make that sage observer of social conventions understand, if you can, that he ought not to be too severe on the unfortunates who have a nature apart, and even more, those who are mad. Madness is not malevolence.
Persuade him, I beg you, of two things. The first is that at the time when I left Paris my soul was full of impressions so indecently romantic that I would have feared, in going to see him, involuntarily showing myself to him naked and offending his intellectual modesty—the amusing modesty that those who do not understand them always have toward slightly subtle sentiments. The second is that in the fashion of Protestants who have no need, in order to render worship to an invisible God, to kneel before an image, it is not necessary for me to shake Mauplaisant’s hand in order to like in him the eternal good fellow who made me a gift of you.
P.S. Ask Allan Kardec or some other spiritist whether he does not believe that Pygmalion could communicate to his Galatea, solely by means of the amorous intensity of his gaze, sufficient magnetic fluid for the statue to walk into his arms. Personally, I find such a thing no more extraordinary than the comprehension and spontaneous movement of the simple feet of a table. And perhaps one would have even less cause for astonishment if Galatea, instead of being a single block of marble, had been composed of some substance that had partaken of organic life, and if the artist had equipped it with the articulations appropriate to a human body.
III
Melanski’s letter agitated me in several ways: penetrated by weaknesses that he judged himself to be madness, but astonishing nevertheless in that it said things to me that were apparently sane, at least as far as its postscript. Curious to know the secret of all that, and piqued that he had not confessed it to me, I was even more flattered that he felt a need for me, and even happier that I might revive a little with him, so I decided enthusiastically to leave for Montivilliers.
I arrived there at six o’clock the following evening. When I emerged from the omnibus, as I paid the conductor, I said: “Do you happen to know where the new doctor lives?”
“The Pole?” he replied, placing one hand on my arm and extending the other. “You have only to take that street there, which is the Rue aux Juifs, and follow the subsequent street, which is the Rue Assiquet, and you’ll arrive at a square where ten chestnut trees are planted in a circle, which is the Place Assiquet. Monsieur Melanski’s house is on the square. But you’ll need a man to carry your trunk...”
Spotting one of his comrades who as stationed there, he planted my trunk on his shoulders, recommending him to take “the monsieur” to Monsieur Melanski’s house.
The face of the old woman attracted by our ringing the doorbell seemed petrified by the sight of me. The hour cried out that I might expect dinner, the trunk that I expected accommodation. And who was I, great God? Why was I troubling that peaceful household? It was not concealed from me very well that my importunity was keenly felt.
“Monsieur Melanski is out,” I was told. “He’s gone to visit a patient two leagues way. He won’t be back before seven or eight o’clock, His dinner is meager and there’s no other bed in the house than his.”
Thus informed, I was scarcely content. Nevertheless, I spurred myself in order to laugh a little.
“Oh, the rogue!” I exclaimed. “He begs me to come and see him as soon as possible; I come running, and he has neither a mattress nor a soup-bowl at my disposal. What did I do to be given a friend like that?”
The old woman, learning that her master was not a stranger to my arrival, began to sing her psalm, that she might perhaps be able to find some cutlets, and that nothing prevented her from making a big omelet preceded by sorrel soup, and with regard to the important question of a bed, strictly speaking, the divan that Monsieur had in his study could take the place of a wooden bed.
I would have embraced her if she had not gone out to execute her culinary program.
While I repeated, as I walked swiftly into the kitchen: “God, how hungry I am! Oh, my poor devil of a stomach! etc.,” although lentils are a detestable thing, I could understand the conduct of Esau. And while I was discovering with a feverish impatience the honest casserole in which were cooking, over a low heat, the two nice ris de veau in red wine sauce destined for Melanski, I heard a carriage stop dead and then a well-known voice cry out: “Pélagie, the big doors!”
I ran straight there, and opened them without groping, as if it had been my métier for a long time. I leave you to imagine the impression that Melanski experienced when he entered the courtyard and saw me beside his cabriolet.
“I’m replacing Pélagie,” I shouted, cheerfully. “Pélagie has better things to do, I assure you, than opening the big doors. Can you imagine, my dear, that I have an appetite—and what an appetite!—and it’s necessary that Pélagie reckon with it. She’s at the butchers, seeing whether he has any cutlets. What a fine invention, cutlets, eh, Melanski? And omelets. We’ll have one. I’m enraged, you see, enraged.”
Melanski’s physiognomy had visibly softened, immediately; there were no demonstrative words, though. Far from exaggerating the pleasure he felt, it was easy to see that he was seeking instead to contain it.
I had gone to the horse and I was holding the reins at the level of the bit. Melanski jumped down; then, embracing me for the first time in his life, he murmured: “Oh, my friend, how much good you’re doing me.”
Nothing more. At the same time, he enveloped me with a gaze moistened by tears; in addition, his hands, in which he was pressing the one that I still had free, was trembling in a strange manner.
That troubled me.
“Come on, my poor friend,” I said to him, with an emotion born of his own, you ought to have been counting on me and expecting to see me face to face. You begged me to come, I came. And that’s not for your benefit, if you please…you know…the little serpents…I’ve come because I find a genuine pleasure in your company.
He repeated, with a slight variation, the only sentence he had spoken to me: “You can’t imagine how much good you’re doing me.” And he added: “At last there’ll be a living being under my roof, for you’re alive.”
“Oh, my word yes, too alive, even,” I replied, while occupying myself with suppressing an unruly movement of the horse. Perhaps if I were less so, hunger w
ouldn’t be clawing me as much as it is—and that Pélagie, who hasn’t come back.”
I redirected my gaze at him. He was weeping copiously.
“Oh, you’re scarcely being reasonable now, my friend. You’re weeping for me as if I were going to die. Wait, damn it! Nunc est bibendum...7 I agree with Horace... Yes, now it’s necessary to drink, and at, especially eat, because what is dangerous is depriving ourselves of it.”
“I’m a child,” said Melanski. “Forgive me, it’s involuntary. For six months, you see, I’ve been living in funereal isolation…seeking amour where it can no longer be, colliding with the inevitable, and I find you, and I sense life palpitating in someone I love, and you take me back to the time before my madness. You’re not a nightmare, my dear friend, you’re not even a dream; you’re a reality. You have flesh on your bones.”
Oh, the poor fellow, I thought. He really is dotty. What is he saying to me? And how, in such a mental state, can he exercise his profession of physician? But on that point, I reflected that many monomaniacs have a marvelous tact for uncovering or hiding their monomania at will.
I did not know how to respond to Melanski when, right on time, Pélagie came to break the embarrassment. I helped Melanski to unharness the horse, in order to give Pélagie time to make the soup, for I really was dying of hunger.
At table, he became again as I had known him in Paris. Having me in front of him, is born interlocutor, the man mot imprinted with his ideas and best qualified to draw the out, he made fun of himself loudly, and spoke ill of human society with his habitual profound sarcasm. He was cheerful, with the heart-ending merriment that signifies: after all, that ridiculous dance of infamies is as hilarious as an Opéra ball. He had the same bursts of laughter, like the cawing of a crow.
That was my true Melanski.
When dinner was over, we went to smoke a cigar in the garden, which was rather large, and whipped self-esteem even harder in chatting philosophically at the expense of anything at all.
Soon, Pélagie appeared.
“Monsieur,” she said to Melanski, “you have someone there who can make you talk as I have never seen you do before, but do you know where your friend is going to sleep?”
That kind of admonition suited Pélagie’s broad face very well. There was no means of taking offense at it, and Melanski could no longer be astonished by it.
“Yes, that’s true,” he replied. “Well, put clean sheets in my bed and tidy my room a little. I’ll sleep on the divan in my study.”
“That can’t be,” I protested. “It’s me who’ll sleep on the divan in your study.” I addressed myself to Pélagie. “You hear, Madame? Anyway, we agreed on that before Monsieur arrived, didn’t we?”
Nonplussed, Pélagie ventured the opinion that it was better not to disturb her master’s habits, since I didn’t seem to be a monsieur who would stand on ceremony, that the divan had a perfectly good mattress and that I’d sleep marvelously there. For my part, I supported Pélagie so well that we ended up prevailing.
Being only the housekeeper, she had returned to her own hearth some hours before, after having arranged everything in Melanski’s house, when the latter escorted me to where I was to sleep.
“I rented this house,” he told me, “because of its garden, but, although it’s quite large, there are no rooms in a fit state except for mine, the dining room and this one, which I use for my consultations. I’m waiting before furnishing the other rooms, for the proprietor, who is in no hurry, to render them habitable.”
I assured him that I lacked nothing essential, and took from his bookshelf for myself Nicole’s essay “On the Means of Maintaining Peace Between Men,”8 of which there had been some discussion over dinner and which I had not yet read. After placing a chair equipped with some paper, a pen and ink next to my bed, in order that I could make notes, he shook my hand affectionately and left.
I was harassed by fatigue. Nevertheless, I commenced reading, so ardent was I to possess that capital work by one of our greatest thinkers. The impassioned attention that such reading requires produced the customary effect on my nerves; it agitated them to the point that repose became impossible; and when I ceased reading and blew out my candle at about half past one, it was more to spare my eyes than in the hope of sleeping.
IV
It had probably been five minutes since I had stuck my head to my pillow, my limbs extended and my gaze plunged into darkness, when the study door opened quietly. I saw Melanski appear, a candle in his hand. He was in a nightshirt, walking barefoot, and he had a fixed gaze. I sat up. I moved my lips as if to ask him why he was there; I was about to speak, but fortunately, although I had never seen a sleepwalker, I recognized by the strange attitude of his entire person, that he must be one; and, very emotional, I contented myself with observing him.
He placed his candle on the mantelpiece and advanced in my direction, his hands forward, his gaze still fixed, and, it seemed, heading straight toward me. Almost frightened, I held my breath. However, he veered to the right, stopped in front of an eccentrically-shaped item of furniture of which I had taken no more notice than the others because of the ardor with which I was reading, and appeared to meditate momentarily.
He opened the cupboard, made the gesture of unhooking something, and closed it again without having taken anything out, but affecting the inconvenienced stance of a man carrying something heavy—which is to say, crouching down somewhat and trying to keep his tensed left thigh, as much as possible, in the same plane as his crooked right arm, while using his left arm, which he had just disengaged in his imagination, to close the cupboard. Then he straightened up, after taking care to pass the left arm along the corresponding thigh in order to regrasp its portion of the imaginary burden that he was supporting. Finally, with both arms bent in a semicircular fashion, except that the left remained a fraction lower than the right, he went to pick up his candle with his fingertips, without disturbing the flexion of his right arm, cleared his path by using his foot to move the study door, which he had left ajar, closed it from outside, probably in the same fashion in which I had seen him close the cupboard…and I found myself alone.
The first thing that I did was to breathe out noisily in order to relieve a long containment; the second was to light my candle, for, apart from the fact that the darkness was then causing me a vague infantile fear, I wanted to see what the devil that item of furniture was, and what was inside it.
Imagine a cherry-wood box about two meters high and about seventy-five centimeters wide, mounted on a small entablature set on four legs, the door of which, glazed in its upper half, opened from the summit to the base by means of a long rod. One might have thought it the case of one of those monumental pendulum clocks that one sometimes sees in the country.
The glass was covered inside by a small curtain of blue silk. I opened the door; the singular box was absolutely empty. All that I remarked was a peg fixed to the ceiling, from which Melanski thought he was unhooking the nothing that he carried with such astonishing precaution.
I went back to bed, my mind tormented, seeking vainly to guess what the destination of the box might be. In brief, I did not sleep a wink all night.
Since it was impossible for me to deduce anything, ought I to ask Melanski for an explanation of the mystery?
No.
To interrogate him regarding his nocturnal pilgrimage would be to run the risk of frightening him, with regard to habits that he did not know he had, or, if he knew them, the risk of humiliating him by revealing that I had witnessed them—for it was obvious that shortly before, close as he was to me, he had not seen me and was scarcely conscious that I had arrived the day before.
Furthermore, that phenomenon of somnambulism had to be connected in a very narrow manner with the object of his madness, of which he preferred not to inform me; and it was an obligatory delicacy on my part not to force my friend’s secret out of him, as it were.
Sleep only arriving with the morning, I got up late. Melanski
had been up for a long time and had gone out.
I chatted with Pélagie, and when she went to the study to draw the curtains of the divan and tidy the covers, making everything neat, I followed her.
“Why,” I said, negligently, as if I had only just perceived it, “What the devil is this box that resembles a clock-case?”
Pélagie burst out laughing. “Of, that’s like me,” she said, “just like me.” Laughing more loudly, she added: “Yes, yes, a clock-case, one would swear it.”
“But after all,” I said, “what the devil does Melanski use it for?”
“Nothing, I believe. I’ve occasionally seen him put his umbrella and his walking-sticks in it. He’s a little eccentric; he must have bought it on a whim...”
“Good! But that peg, Madame, isn’t made to suspend Monsieur Melanki’s umbrellas and canes, I imagine.”
Pélagie, who was only able to conjecture, like me, made me an ingenious but inconclusive response that scarcely seemed to have any connection with Melanski’s nocturnal gestures, of which she had no knowledge, and which, in consequence, could not give her food for thought. She suggested that the peg might, in principle, be adapted for a small mobile portmanteau that Melanski had probably relegated to the attic because he found it more convenient simply to throw his change of clothes on to a chair than take so many precautions.
At lunch, poor Melanski, increasingly relaxed by my presence, manifested a talkative and expansive, almost cheerful amity. And yet, as I contemplated him in broad daylight, I shivered at the changes that had taken place in his features in a few months. His face had aged, his cheekbones were sticking out in a noticeable fashion, and his gaze still retained a little of the strange fixity that had distressed me the previous evening.
Singular Amours Page 4
