"I am so mentally ill that I went for a walk to Père Lachaise cemetery yesterday. I looked at all the graves, standing in a row like dominoes, and I thought to myself: 'I shall soon be there,' and then I returned home, quite determined to pretend to be ill, and so escape, but I could not.
"Oh! You don't know what it is. Ask a smoker who is poisoning himself with nicotine whether he can give up his delicious and deadly habit. He will tell you that he has tried a hundred times without success, and he will, perhaps, add: 'So much the worse, but I had rather die than go without tobacco.' That is just the case with me. When once one is in the clutches of such a passion or such a vice, one must give oneself up to it entirely."
He got up and gave me his hand. I felt seized with a tumult of rage, and with hatred for this woman, this careless, charming, terrible woman; and as he was buttoning up his coat to go out I said to him, brutally perhaps:
"But, in God's name, why don't you let her have a lover, rather than kill yourself like that?"
He shrugged his shoulders without replying, and went off.
For six months I did not see him. Every morning I expected a letter of invitation to his funeral, but I would not go to his house from a complicated feeling of contempt for him and for that woman; of anger, of indignation, of a thousand sensations.
One lovely spring morning I was walking in the Champs Elysées. It was one of those warm days which makes our eyes bright and stir up in us a tumultuous feeling of happiness from the mere sense of existence. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and turning round I saw my old friend, looking well, stout and rosy.
He gave me both hands, beaming with pleasure, and exclaimed:
"Well, on my word--yes. By Jove! I congratulate you; you have indeed changed in the last six months!"
He flushed scarlet, and said, with an embarrassed laugh:
I looked at him so obstinately that he evidently felt uncomfortable, so I went on:
"Yes, perfectly, thank you." Then changing his tone, "How lucky that I should have come across you, old fellow. I hope we shall often meet now."
But I would not give up my idea; I wanted to know how matters really stood, so I asked:
"Don't you remember what you told me six months ago? I suppose--I--eh--suppose you resist now?"