The young man stood at the carriage door for a minute, and went off, turning back once as he went. His eyes were full of gentleness, like those of Henri Deslois.
The train whistled once, as though to warn me, and as it moved off it whistled a second time, a long whistle like a scream.
And now may I tell you what I know about Marguerite Audoux, the author of the book you have just read? I know very little more of her than you do, for you have read the book, and Marguerite Audoux is Marie Claire. If Marie Claire in English does not please you, the fault is mine. I have tried hard to translate into English the uneducated, unspoilt purity of language, the purity of thought which are the characteristics of the French; but the task was no easy one, much as I loved it in the doing.
Marguerite Audoux herself is a plump and placid little woman, of about thirty-five. She lives in a sixth-floor garret in the Rue Leopold Robert, in Paris. From her window she has a view of roof-tops and the Montparnasse cemetery. When she learned of the success of her book, with which she had lived for six years, she cried. "I felt dreadfully frightened at first," she said, "I felt very uneasy. I felt as though I had become known too quickly, as though I were a criminal of note. Now my one wish is to work again." She reads a good deal. Her favourite authors are Chateaubriand and Maeterlinck. In Maeterlinck she loves the mystery. "We never know people properly," she says. "They are just as difficult to understand as things that happen are. We never know whose fault it is when good or bad things happen, and we don't really know whether we ought to be angry or to be sorry with people who do harm. Wicked people are like a thunderstorm, don't you think? And a lazy woman is like a hot room. Both are unhealthy, but they cannot help it."
Marguerite Audoux does not say these things to be clever. She says them quite simply, and they express her natural way of thought, which is simplicity and purity itself.
She wrote her book when and how she could, on scraps of cheap paper, and she does not know herself, now, whether she hoped to have it published when she wrote it. She did hope for publication when she had finished it, but that was because she was hungry.