He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach and through
his body. “Come!” he addressed himself,
“let us drink and screw up our courage.”
He filled a glass of brandy, while asking for the reckoning.
An individual in black suit and with a napkin under
one arm, a sort of majordomo with a bald and sharp
head, a greying beard without moustaches, came forward.
A pencil rested behind his ear and he assumed an attitude
like a singer, one foot in front of the other; he
drew a note book from his pocket, and without glancing
at his paper, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, near
a chandelier, wrote while counting. “There
you are!” he said, tearing the sheet from his
note book and giving it to Des Esseintes who looked
at him with curiosity, as though he were a rare animal.
What a surprising John Bull, he thought, contemplating
this phlegmatic person who had, because of his shaved
mouth, the appearance of a wheelsman of an American
ship.
At this moment, the tavern door opened. Several
persons entered bringing with them an odor of wet
dog to which was blent the smell of coal wafted by
the wind through the opened door. Des Esseintes
was incapable of moving a limb. A soft warm languor
prevented him from even stretching out his hand to
light a cigar. He told himself: “Come
now, let us get up, we must take ourselves off.”
Immediate objections thwarted his orders. What
is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair
so magnificently? Was he not even now in London,
whose aromas and atmosphere and inhabitants, whose
food and utensils surrounded him? For what could
he hope, if not new disillusionments, as had happened
to him in Holland?
He had but sufficient time to race to the station.
An overwhelming aversion for the trip, an imperious
need of remaining tranquil, seized him with a more
and more obvious and stubborn strength. Pensively,
he let the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat,
and he said to himself, “Now it would be necessary
to rush to the gate and crowd into the baggage room!
What ennui! What a bore that would be!”
Then he repeated to himself once more, “In fine,
I have experienced and seen all I wished to experience
and see. I have been filled with English life
since my departure. I would be mad indeed to go
and, by an awkward trip, lose those imperishable sensations.
How stupid of me to have sought to disown my old ideas,
to have doubted the efficacy of the docile phantasmagories
of my brain, like a very fool to have thought of the
necessity, of the curiosity, of the interest of an
excursion!”
“Well!” he exclaimed, consulting his watch,
“it is now time to return home.”
This time, he arose and left, ordered the driver to
bring him back to the Sceaux station, and returned
with his trunks, packages, valises, rugs, umbrellas
and canes, to Fontenay, feeling the physical stimulation
and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his home
after a long and dangerous voyage.
