“For someone who didn’t care for fame…” Pierre intervened.
“They sent up his food by a rope. He remained night and day, stuck up there, not moving, in the same position, because his platform was too narrow for him to stretch out on it.”
“Were there railings?” asked Hedwige, who felt giddy listening to this story.
“That’s much debated… I also have a leaflet about a Lombard deacon who tried to imitate the Stylite in Dresden. The cold caused his toenails to fall out and the bishops convened to make him come down from his pillar. Do you understand, my dear fellow, the lesson these sages are giving you?”
“Regencrantz, you bore me with your sermons, which are outdated in any case. You’re out of touch; you’d do better to ask Hedwige questions and, above all, to eat. Another slice of foie gras?”
Pierre emptied the entire dish onto his guest’s plate.
“With pleasure. So, madame, your husband is no longer a velocipedist? Have you cured him? Ha! ha!”
Hedwige held out both hands, palms up, in a gesture of charming modesty; her supple fingers reached outwards like a cornucopia, and only her golden eyes were laughing while, out of politeness, her expression remained serious, for she found the little doctor excessively comical. He looked less like a little doctor, she thought, than a large microbe.
“I am cured, as you say,” Pierre continued, “even though this word does not mean anything since I was never ill — a drop of red wine, doctor? — I am cured or, rather, I have adopted a new approach. You remember, Regencrantz, I often spoke to you about this bath of slowness in which France wallows. We continue to think of ourselves as light-footed and speedy without noticing that every other country has overtaken us. At the Olympic Games, I suffered a martyr’s death watching those whom we persist in calling ‘clumsy Germans’, as in eighteenth-century fairy tales, outperform us in the preliminary heats. Nowadays, it’s we who churn out copious one-thousand-page theses and they who turn everything upside down with the Essay on Relativity, which has three pages. Here people reckon that’s not being serious. The French think only of their own centre of gravity; they have positioned it so low (left of centre) that they haven’t any spurt left. Our army is nothing but a load of office scribblers on wheels; we have put springs everywhere to deaden the shock; but where has anyone seen a racing vehicle that has springs? The sprinter would be killed at the first bend. In any case, we don’t make sprinters; we are artists, we build statues of sprinters… a shot of brandy, Regencrantz?”
“With pleasure… and then?”
“Well, afterwards… I met Hedwige, daughter of the slow-paced Boisrosé family, and she taught me to love slowness. There can be no question that speed is a dead end: the ambassadors who used carriages brought peace with them, while ministers who travel by air bring war. Just go to the cinema and watch an accident in slow motion, as God might have arranged it: it’s just a succession of caresses; the plane skims the ground; the ground smashes the aircraft to pieces with more delicacy than the gourmet peels his fig, and the flames that are about to send the passengers up in smoke resemble a fire that has not been lit properly. It is speed, which by bringing two people intimately closer together, produces the deadly shock… All this, my good friend, has made me reflect and it has occurred to me that by rushing about too quickly I could be well on the way to affecting my feelings for my wife and my most precious concerns might become like hard corks.”
Thoughtful all of a sudden, Pierre looked at Hedwige.
“One question, Regencrantz…” he said briskly.
“I’m listening.”
Pierre reconsidered:
“No. Pretend I said nothing.”
They moved to the café. Pierre took the doctor to one side. And very hurriedly, in a low voice:
“This is what I wanted to ask you: Hedwige will have her baby in October. Just imagine that, not till October! I feel as though I could never wait that long. Isn’t there a way…”
“What way? What do you mean?” asked Regencrantz stiffly. “Nature moves at her own pace. Be like her.”
“Ah!” said Pierre, disappointed, as he turned his head towards Hedwige to make sure she wasn’t listening. “Forgive my ignorance, doctor, I wanted so much to save time… I’m longing to know what sex it is… The fortune tellers always get it wrong. Might there not be some scientific procedure…”
“At four months, some Americans dye the mother’s cells and those of the child at the same time, and as a result, know its sex.”
“That’s wonderful! In less than two months, I could know!”
“Yes, but I have to tell you that it’s not recommended at all. In Europe, you won’t find any doctor who is prepared to do it. You’ll have to make do with fortune tellers.”
“Too bad,” Pierre sighed, resigned to the fact. “I’ll do as I always do, I’ll wait.”
*
Pierre went downstairs with Regencrantz, having offered to drop him by car in the centre of town if, in exchange, he would agree to accompany him beforehand for a brief walk in the Bois de Boulogne.
“Let’s go quickly, doctor, quickly, what they call presto.”
“Quickly, Monsieur Niox? I thought you were cured?”
“Basically, you’re right,” Pierre replied, laughing. “Why quickly? My meeting is not until four o’clock.”
Which did not prevent them from setting off at full tilt down to the Bois.
“Looking at these police lights, flashing red and green alternately,” Regencrantz continued, carrying on with his theme and hanging onto the door handle, “you will observe that we do not advance at a regular pace, but rather in a series of leaps interrupted by stops. This is how nature and genius behave.”
“Let’s get out and walk now,” said Pierre, interrupting him.
The doctor did his best to follow; he ran after him with very short steps, on his heels, taking care not to slip, as though on ice. After a quarter of an hour he could go no farther and spoke in a panting voice:
“One day… I met… a man… the fastest in the world, a famous record-holder…”
“Commodore Swift, perhaps?” asked Pierre respectfully.
“The very man.
“You must hear this anecdote. It’s made for you even in its moral aspect. But let’s stop here, please. I am, as you say, exhausted.”
Struggling for breath, Regencrantz collapsed onto a bench.
“Give me time to tell you my story…”
“I’m listening to you patiently,” said Pierre.
“I had discovered during a trip to the United States that Commodore Swift happened to be at a country club to the north of Salt Lake and it struck me as a unique opportunity to encounter the record-holder. Some friends arranged it all for me. Shortly beforehand, Swift had reached a speed of eight hundred and eighty-two kilometres per hour, that’s two hundred and forty-five metres per second. He had not only brought the earth closer to the air and the car to the aeroplane, and to sound, and to light, and to all the ethereal things that are transmitted and propelled with greater freedom, but he had also gained sovereign rights over all sportsmen and also over all those men in a hurry in the world who, like you, Monsieur Pierre Niox, should recognize him as king.”
“Speed like that, it’s the infinite,” sighed Pierre admiringly.
“Whereas I find that a number, no matter which one, even a record-breaking number, restricts and stifles the infinite,” replied the doctor. “When I walked into the lounge of the country club, it appeared to me to be empty. One man, just one, was there, slumped in an armchair. His legs were stretched out on the table and you could see the thick soles of his shoes, his arms hung down, his eyes were half closed, and he stared at me without blinking; he looked like a piece of furniture or, rather, a building, so rooted to the spot did he seem. Outside, through the thick bay windows of the monastic room, I noticed the beach, extending over a glassy surface which it prolonged, differing from it only in its paler shade of colour. Low, grey clouds sped by.