Suddenly Madame Caravan, consumed with rage, rushed
at him, exclaiming: “You are a thief, a
footpad, a cur! I would spit in your face!
I—I —would——”
She could find nothing further to say, suffocating
as she was with rage, while he went on sipping his
coffee with a smile.
His wife returning just then, Madame Caravan attacked
her sister-in-law, and the two women—the
one with her enormous bulk, the other epileptic and
spare, with changed voices and trembling hands flew
at one another with words of abuse.
Chenet and Braux now interposed, and the latter, taking
his better half by the shoulders, pushed her out of
the door before him, shouting: “Go on,
you slut; you talk too much”; and the two were
heard in the street quarrelling until they disappeared
from sight.
M. Chenet also took his departure, leaving the Caravans
alone, face to face. The husband fell back on
his chair, and with the cold sweat standing out in
beads on his temples, murmured: “What shall
I say to my chief to-morrow?”
He was slowly dying, as consumptives die. I saw
him each day, about two o’clock, sitting beneath
the hotel windows on a bench in the promenade, looking
out on the calm sea. He remained for some time
without moving, in the heat of the sun, gazing mournfully
at the Mediterranean. Every now and then, he
cast a glance at the lofty mountains with beclouded
summits that shut in Mentone; then, with a very slow
movement, he would cross his long legs, so thin that
they seemed like two bones, around which fluttered
the cloth of his trousers, and he would open a book,
always the same book. And then he did not stir
any more, but read on, read on with his eye and his
mind; all his wasting body seemed to read, all his
soul plunged, lost, disappeared, in this book, up
to the hour when the cool air made him cough a little.
Then, he got up and reentered the hotel.
He was a tall German, with fair beard, who breakfasted
and dined in his own room, and spoke to nobody.
A vague, curiosity attracted me to him. One day,
I sat down by his side, having taken up a book, too,
to keep up appearances, a volume of Musset’s
poems.
And I began to look through “Rolla.”
Suddenly, my neighbor said to me, in good French:
“Do you know German, monsieur?”
“Not at all, monsieur.”
“I am sorry for that. Since chance has
thrown us side by side, I could have lent you, I could
have shown you, an inestimable thing—this
book which I hold in my hand.”
“What is it, pray?”
“It is a copy of my master, Schopenhauer, annotated
with his own hand. All the margins, as you may
see, are covered with his handwriting.”
I took the book from him reverently, and I gazed at
these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed
the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of
dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.
