I have retained an impression of that evening that
I can never forget. All that I saw, felt, and
heard, our fishing excursion, the octopus also, perhaps
that harrowing story, amidst those white figures on
the neighboring roofs, all seemed to concur in producing
a unique sensation. Certain meetings, certain
inexplicable combinations of things, decidedly contain
a larger quantity of the secret quintessence of life,
than that which is spread over the ordinary events
of our days, without anything exceptional happening
to them.
“Upon my word, I laughed at it as much as the
rest,” Navarette exclaimed; “I laughed
at it with that profound, cruel pitilessness which
we all of us, who are well made and vigorous, feel
for those whom their step-mother, Nature, has disfigured
in some way or other, for those laughable, feeble
creatures who are, however, more to be pitied than
those poor deformed wretches from whom we turn away
in spite of ourselves.
“I had been the first to make fun of him at
the club, to find those easy words which are remembered,
and to turn that smooth, flabby, pink, ugly face,
like that of an old woman, and of a Levantine eunuch
in which the mouth is like a piece of inert flesh,
and where the small eyes glisten with concentrated
cunning, and remind us of the watchful, angry eyes
of a gorilla, at the same time, into ridicule.
I knew that he was selfish, without any affection,
unreliable, full of whims, turning like a weathercock
with every wind that blows, and caring for nothing
in the world except gambling and old Dresden china.
“However, our intercourse was invariably limited
to a careless, ’Good morning,’ and to
the usual shake of the hands which men exchange when
they meet at the theater or the club, and so I had
neither to defend him, nor to uphold him as a friend.
But I can swear to you that now I reproach myself
for all these effusive jeers and bitter things, and
they weigh on my conscience now that I have been told
the other side, the equivocal enigma of that existence.”
“A Punch and Judy secret,” Bob Shelley
said, throwing the end of his cigar into the fire.
“Oh! yes; we were a hundred miles from the truth
when we merely supposed that he was unfit for service.
This unhappy Lantosque, a well-born, clever man, and
very rich to boot, might have exhibited himself in
some traveling booth, for he was an hermaphrodite;
do you understand? an hermaphrodite. And his
whole life was one of long, incessant torture, of
physical and moral suffering, which was more maddening
than that which Tantalus endured on the banks of the
river Acheron. He had nearly everything of the
woman about him; he was a ridiculous caricature of
our sex, with his shrill voice, his large hips, his
bust concealed by a loose, wide coat, his cheeks,
his chin, and upper lip without a vestige of hair,
and he had to appear like a man, to restrain and stifle
his instincts, his tastes, desires, and dreams, to
fight ceaselessly against himself, and never to allow
anything of that which he endured, nor what he longed
for, nor that which was sapping his very life, to be
discovered.
