He decides to go into a shop to ask the way to the Rue de Corinthe. It is a small bookstore that also sells stationery, pencils, and paints for children. The saleswoman stands up to wait on him:
“Monsieur?”
“I’d like a very soft gum eraser, for drawing.”
“Yes of course, Monsieur.”
The ruins of Thebes.
On a hill above the city, a Sunday painter has set up his ease in the shade of cypress trees, between the scattered shafts c columns. He paints carefully, his eyes shifting back to his subject every few seconds; with a fine brush he points up man details that are scarcely noticeable to the naked eye, but which assume a surprising intensity once they are reproduced in the picture. He must have very sharp eyes. One could count the stones that form the edge of the quay, the bricks of the gabled end, and even the slates in the roof. At the corner of the fence the leaves of the spindle trees gleam in the sun, which emphasizes their outlines. Behind, a bush rises above the hedge, a bare bush whose every twig is lined with a bright streak where the light hits it, and a dark one on the shadow side. The snapshot has been taken in winter, on an exceptionally clear day. What reason could the young woman have for photographing this house?
“It’s a pretty house, isn’t it?”
“Well yes, if you like it.”
She cannot have been the tenant who preceded Dupont; the latter took up residence there some twenty-five years ago, and inherited it from an uncle. Has she been the servant there? Wallas sees again the gay, slightly provocative face of the saleswoman; thirty to thirty-five years old at the most, prepossessing maturity with full, rounded form; warm complexion, shining eyes, dark hair, an uncommon physical type in this country-actually reminiscent of the women of southern Europe or the Balkans.
“Well yes, if you like it.”
With a throaty little laugh, as if he had just indulged in some flattering compliment. His wife? That would be strange. Didn’t Laurent say she was running a shop now? Around fifteen years younger than her husband…dark, with black eyes… that’s who it is!
Wallas leaves the bookstore. A few yards farther on, he reaches a crossroad. Opposite him stands the red placard: “For drawing, for school, for the office…”
It is here that he got off the streetcar, before lunch. Again he follows the arrow toward the Victor-Hugo stationery shop.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Down below, directly beneath his eyes, a cable runs along the surface of the water.
Leaning over the parapet, he sees it rising from under the arch, straight and taut, apparently no thicker than his thumb; but distance is deceptive when there is no object of comparison. The coiled strands follow each other smoothly, giving the impression of great speed. A hundred spirals a second, perhaps?…Actually, that would still be no great rate of speed, that of a man walking briskly-that of the tug pulling a train of barges along a canal.
Beneath the metal cable is the water, greenish, opaque, chopping slightly in the wake of the already distant tug.
The first barge has not yet appeared under the bridge; the cable still runs along the water, without anything to suggest that it must soon be interrupted. Yet the tug is now reaching the next footbridge and, in order to pass under it, begins lowering its smokestack.
2
“Daniel was a melancholy man…melancholy and solitary…But he wasn’t the kind of man to commit suicide-anything but. We lived together almost two years in that house in the
Rue des Arpenteurs (the young woman stretches out her arm and points east-unless she is merely indicating the big photograph on the other side of the partition, in the shopwindow) and not once during those two years did he ever reveal the slightest sign of discouragement or doubt. It wasn’t just a front: that serenity was the true expression of his nature.”
“You were saying, just now, that he was melancholy.”
“Yes. That probably isn’t the right word. He wasn’t melancholy…He certainly wasn’t gay: gaiety didn’t mean anything once you got through the garden gate. But melancholy didn’t either. I don’t know how to tell you… Boring? That isn’t right either. I enjoyed listening to him, when he was explaining something to me… No, what made it impossible to live with Daniel was that you felt he was alone, definitively alone. He was alone, and it didn’t bother him. He wasn’t made for marriage, or for any other kind of attachment. He had no friends. At the School of Law, his courses were popular, but he didn’t even know his students’ faces… Why did he marry me?…I was very young, and I felt a kind of admiration for this older man; everyone I knew admired him. I had been brought up by an uncle, and Daniel came to his house for dinner now and then. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, it can’t be interesting for you.”
“Yes, yes it is,” Wallas protests. “On the contrary, we need to know if Dupont’s suicide is plausible, if he might have had reasons to kill himself-or if he was capable of doing it without any reason.”
“Oh, not that! There was always a reason-for his least action. When it didn’t appear at the moment, you found out later that there had been one all the same, a precise, long deliberated reason that left no aspect of the question in doubt. Daniel did nothing without having decided to do it in advance, and his decisions were always rational; unchangeable too, of course…A lack of imagination, if you like, but to an extraordinary degree…I had nothing but virtues to reproach him for, really: never doing anything without thinking first, never changing his mind, never being wrong.”
“But you said his marriage was a mistake?”
“Well yes, of course, in his relations with human beings he risked making mistakes. You could even say that he did nothing but make mistakes. Yet in the long run he was right anyway: his only mistake was in supposing the rest of the world was as reasonable as he was.”
“Do you think he might have been somewhat bitter about this incomprehension?”
“You don’t understand the kind of man he was. Absolutely unshakable. He was sure of being right, and that was enough for him. If other people enjoyed themselves over chimeras, too bad for them.”
“He might have changed as he grew older; you hadn’t seen him since…”
“Oh yes, we’ve seen each other several times: he was still the same. He talked to me about his work, about how he spent his time, the few people he still saw. He was happy, in his way; a thousand miles from any thought of suicide, anyway; satisfied with his monk’s life between his old deaf housekeeper and his books…His books…his work…that was all he lived for! You know the house, gloomy and silent, muffled with rugs, full of old-fashioned ornaments no one is allowed to touch. Once inside you felt uncomfortable, as if you were choking in the gloom that took away any desire to joke, to laugh, to sing…I was twenty… Daniel seemed comfortable there and didn’t understand that someone else might feel differently. Besides, he rarely left his study where no one was allowed to move anything. Even at the beginning of our marriage, he only left the house to do his errands, three times a week; the minute he came back he went upstairs and shut himself in; and he often spent some of the night there. I only saw him during meals, when he came down to the dining room, punctually at noon and at seven.
“When you told me he was dead, just now, it gave me a funny feeling. I don’t know how to describe it to you…What difference could there be between Daniel living and Daniel dead? He wasn’t ever alive…Not that he lacked personality, or character…But he was never alive.”
“No, I haven’t seen him yet. I plan on going there when I leave here.”
“What’s his name?”
“Doctor Juard.”
“Oh He’s the one who performed the operation?”