Here there is a blank in my life.  For three whole weeks I remained unconscious.  When I awoke at last I found myself in a strange room.  A man who was nursing me told me quietly that he had picked me up one morning on the Boulevard Montparnasse and had brought me to his house.  He was an old doctor who had given up practicing.

When I attempted to thank him he sharply answered that my case had seemed a curious one and that he had wished to study it.  Moreover, during the first days of my convalescence he would not allow me to ask a single question, and later on he never put one to me.  For eight days longer I remained in bed, feeling very weak and not even trying to remember, for memory was a weariness and a pain.  I felt half ashamed and half afraid.  As soon as I could leave the house I would go and find out whatever I wanted to know.  Possibly in the delirium of fever a name had escaped me; however, the doctor never alluded to anything I may have said.  His charity was not only generous; it was discreet.

The summer had come at last, and one warm June morning I was permitted to take a short walk.  The sun was shining with that joyous brightness which imparts renewed youth to the streets of old Paris.  I went along slowly, questioning the passers-by at every crossing I came to and asking the way to Rue Dauphine.  When I reached the street I had some difficulty in recognizing the lodginghouse where we had alighted on our arrival in the capital.  A childish terror made me hesitate.  If I appeared suddenly before Marguerite the shock might kill her.  It might be wiser to begin by revealing myself to our neighbor Mme Gabin; still I shrank from taking a third party into confidence.  I seemed unable to arrive at a resolution, and yet in my innermost heart I felt a great void, like that left by some sacrifice long since consummated.

The building looked quite yellow in the sunshine.  I had just recognized it by a shabby eating house on the ground floor, where we had ordered our meals, having them sent up to us.  Then I raised my eyes to the last window of the third floor on the left-hand side, and as I looked at it a young woman with tumbled hair, wearing a loose dressing gown, appeared and leaned her elbows on the sill.  A young man followed and printed a kiss upon her neck.  It was not Marguerite.  Still I felt no surprise.  It seemed to me that I had dreamed all this with other things, too, which I was to learn presently.

For a moment I remained in the street, uncertain whether I had better go upstairs and question the lovers, who were still laughing in the sunshine.  However, I decided to enter the little restaurant below.  When I started on my walk the old doctor had placed a five-franc piece in my hand.  No doubt I was changed beyond recognition, for my beard had grown during the brain fever, and my face was wrinkled and haggard.  As I took a seat at a small table I saw Mme Gabin come in carrying a cup; she wished to buy a penny-worth of coffee.  Standing in front of the counter, she began to gossip with the landlady of the establishment.