• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1699 0

figures, but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished forces which, like a powerful clock, it had allowed, notch by notch, to descend from my brain into the rest of my body where they now accumulated as far as the top of my knees the unimpaired abundance of their store. If it is true that the sea was once upon a time our native element, in which we must plunge our blood to recover our strength, it is the same with oblivion, with mental nothingness; we seem then to absent ourselves for a few hours from time, but the forces which have gathered in that interval without being expended measure it by their quantity as accurately as the pendulum of the clock or the crumbling hillocks of the hour-glass. Moreover, one does not emerge more easily from such a sleep than from a prolonged spell of wakefulness, so strongly does everything tend to persist; and if it is true that certain narcotics make us sleep, to have slept for a long time is an even more potent narcotic, after which we have great difficulty in making ourselves wake up. Like a sailor who sees plainly the quay where he can moor his boat, still tossed by the waves, I had every intention of looking at the time and of getting up, but my body was constantly cast back upon the tide of sleep; the landing was difficult, and before I attained a position in which I could reach my watch and confront its time with that indicated by the wealth of accumulated materials which my exhausted limbs had at their disposal, I fell back two or three times more upon my pillow.

At length I could reach and read it: “Two o’clock in the afternoon!” I rang, but at once I plunged back into a sleep which this time must have lasted infinitely longer if I was to judge by the refreshment, the vision of an immense night outlived, which I experienced on awakening. And yet, since my awakening was caused by the entry of Françoise, and since her entry had been prompted by my ringing the bell, this second sleep which, it seemed to me, must have been longer than the other and had brought me so much well-being and forgetfulness, could not have lasted for more than half a minute.

My grandmother opened the door of my bedroom, and I asked her countless questions about the Legrandin family.

It is not enough to say that I had returned to tranquillity and health, for it was more than a mere interval of space that had divided them from me the day before; I had had all night long to struggle against a contrary tide, and then I not only found myself again in their presence, but they had once more entered into me. At certain definite and still somewhat painful points beneath the surface of my empty head which would one day be broken, letting my ideas dissolve for ever, those ideas had once again taken their proper place and resumed that existence by which hitherto, alas, they had failed to profit.

Once again I had escaped from the impossibility of sleeping, from the deluge, the shipwreck of my nervous storms. I no longer feared the threats that had loomed over me the evening before, when I was deprived of rest. A new life was opening before me; without making a single movement, for I was still shattered, although quite alert and well, I savoured my weariness with a light heart; it had isolated and broken the bones of my legs and arms, which I could feel assembled before me, ready to come together again, and which I would rebuild merely by singing, like the architect in the fable.12

Suddenly I remembered the fair girl with the sad expression whom I had seen at Rivebelle and who had looked at me for a moment. Many others, in the course of the evening, had seemed to me attractive; now she alone arose from the depths of my memory. I felt that she had noticed me, and expected one of the Rivebelle waiters to come to me with a whispered message from her. Saint-Loup did not know her and believed that she was respectable. It would be very difficult to see her, to see her constantly. But I was prepared to make any sacrifice: I thought now only of her. Philosophy distinguishes often between free and necessary acts.