“For, after all,” he exclaimed, gesticulating,
“I can’t exile myself—have
a child on my hands.”
He was saying these things to give himself firmness.
“And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah!
no, no, no, no! a thousand times no! That would
be too stupid.”
No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly
at his bureau under the stag’s head that hung
as a trophy on the wall. But when he had the
pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing,
so that, resting on his elbows, he began to reflect.
Emma seemed to him to have receded into a far-off
past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly
placed a distance between them.
To get back something of her, he fetched from the
cupboard at the bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box,
in which he usually kept his letters from women, and
from it came an odour of dry dust and withered roses.
First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots.
It was a handkerchief of hers. Once when they
were walking her nose had bled; he had forgotten it.
Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature
given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him
pretentious, and her languishing look in the worst
possible taste. Then, from looking at this image
and recalling the memory of its original, Emma’s
features little by little grew confused in his remembrance,
as if the living and the painted face, rubbing one
against the other, had effaced each other. Finally,
he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations
relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent,
like business notes. He wanted to see the long
ones again, those of old times. In order to find
them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all
the others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst
this mass of papers and things, finding pell-mell
bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair—hair!
dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of
the box, broke when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the
writing and the style of the letters, as varied as
their orthography. They were tender or jovial,
facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for
love, others that asked for money. A word recalled
faces to him, certain gestures, the sound of a voice;
sometimes, however, he remembered nothing at all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts,
cramped each other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform
level of love that equalised them all. So taking
handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself
for some moments with letting them fall in cascades
from his right into his left hand. At last, bored
and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to the cupboard,
saying to himself, “What a lot of rubbish!”
Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys
in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart
that no green thing grew there, and that which passed
through it, more heedless than children, did not even,
like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
