Act of Passion Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself, took his pipe out of his pocket and, recovering his normal voice, remarked as he rose:
    'That must be Mathieu shooting hares in the Low Meadow.'
    Two years went by. I didn't realize that my father was already old, older than the other fathers. More and more frequently he would get up in the night and I could hear the sound of water and voices whispering, and in the morning he would seem tired. At table my mother would push a little cardboard box towards him, saying:
    'Don't forget your pill...'
    Then, one day when I was nine and at school, one of the neighbours, old man Courtois, came into the classroom and spoke to the teacher in a low voice. Both of them looked at me.
    'Now, children, I want you to behave yourselves. Alavoine, my boy, will you come out to the courtyard with me?'
    It was summer. The cement in the courtyard was hot. There were moss roses around the windows.
    'Come here, son ...'
    Old Courtois had already reached the entrance and was leaning against the wrought-iron gate. The teacher put his arm round my shoulder just as my father used to do. The sky was very blue and filled with the song of larks.
    'You are a little man now, aren't you, Charles, and I think you love your mama dearly? Well, from now on, you will have to love her even more, because she is going to need you very much.'
    Long before he reached the last words, I had understood. And although I had never thought that my father could die, I had a picture of him dead, saw him lying full length at the foot of the haystack as I had seen him that September evening two years before.
    I did not cry, your Honour. No more than at the trial. So much for the gentlemen of the press, who would have another chance to call me a slimy toad. I did not cry, but I felt as if I had no more blood in my veins, and when old Courtois, holding me by the hand, took me home with him, I walked on feathers, I went through a universe as weightless as feathers.
    They didn't let me see my father. When I got home he was already in his coffin. Everybody who came to the house, where food and drink had to be served from morning to night and from night to morning, everybody kept repeating, as they shook their heads:
    'And to think how he loved to hunt and you never saw him without his gun!'
    Thirty-five years later a lawyer puffed up with importance and flushed with vanity was to insist upon asking my poor mother:
    'Are you sure that your husband did not commit suicide?'
    Our peasants of Bourgneuf had more tact. Naturally they gossiped among themselves. But they didn't find it necessary to say anything to my mother.
    My father committed suicide. And what of it?
    My father drank.
    And I, your Honour, am very much tempted to tell you something. But, even with your intelligence, I'm afraid you won't understand.
    I won't say that the best men are the ones who drink, but at least they are the ones who have caught a glimpse of something, something they could never attain, something the desire for which has hurt them to the quick, something which perhaps my father and I were staring at that evening when we sat together at the foot of the haystack, our eyes reflecting the colour of the sky.
    Think of saying that to the gentlemen of the law and to that snake of a reporter.
    I should rather begin telling you about Jeanne, my first wife.
     
    One day at Nantes, when I was twenty-five, solemn personages presented me with my degree of Doctor of Medicine. The same day, after the ceremonies during which I had sweat blood, a gentleman at the door handed me a small box containing a fountain-pen on which my name and the date were engraved in gold letters.
    That fountain-pen gave me more pleasure than all the rest. It was the first thing I had ever received for nothing.
    You aren't as lucky at the Faculty of Law, your Honour, because you are not as directly connected with certain big industries.
    The fountain-pen was given me, as to all the young doctors, by an important pharmaceutical