Monsieur Monde Vanishes Read Online Free PDF Page A

chair, but it had been a wink so brief, automatic, and unsmiling as to seem more like a sort of Masonic sign.
    Was Monsieur Monde so very unlike the rest, with his sleek look, his expensive suit, his custom-made shoes? He thought so. He longed for the transformation to have taken place.
    And meanwhile he was distressed because the assistant had a pink plaster on the nape of his neck, a bulging plaster which must conceal a horrid purplish boil. It distressed him, too, to see a tobacco-stained forefinger moving to and fro under his eyes, and to breathe the sickening smell of nicotine mingled with shaving soap. And yet there was something pleasurable about this slight pain!
    He was still too new to it all. The transformation was not yet complete. He didn’t want to look to the right or the left, in the chalk-scrawled mirror, at the row of men behind him, all reading sports papers and, from time to time, glancing unconcernedly at the occupants of the armchairs.
    On the day of his First Communion, at the Lycée Stanislas, after he had walked gingerly back to his seat with downcast eyes, he had stayed motionless for a long time with his face buried in his hands, waiting for the promised transformation.
    What was happening now was so much more essential! He could not possibly have explained it, or even thought about it in a logical way.
    When, a short while before, he had decided … But he hadn’t decided anything! He had had nothing to decide. What he was living through was not even a completely new experience. He must have dreamed about it often, or have thought about it so much that he felt he had done it all before.
    He looked at himself, as the barber’s fingers held his cheek taut, and he said to himself: ‘That’s that! The die is cast!”
    He felt no surprise. He had been expecting this for a long time, all his life long. But his nostrils were still unaccustomed to the cheap scents that he was now inhaling deeply; hitherto he had only caught a whiff of them as some workman in his Sunday best passed by. He was offended by the tobacco-stained finger, and the plaster, and the towel of dubious cleanliness around his neck.
    He was the odd man out, the one who felt surprised, for instance, to see ten people deep in the same sports papers; it was he who must seem strange, whom others would maybe point at?
    If he had not yet experienced the ecstasy of release, it was because the transformation had barely begun. He was still too new to it, of course.
    Once before he had got rid of that toothbrush mustache which had just been shaved off. It was a long time ago, two or three years after his second marriage. He had gone home, to Rue Ballu, in high spirits, feeling rejuvenated. His wife had looked at him with those little black eyes—they were hard eyes already—and had said: “What’s come over you? You look indecent.”
    He did not look indecent, but he looked a different man. There was suddenly something ingenuous about his expression, owing to the pouting upper lip and the alternately pleading or sulky look of his whole mouth.
    He paid and went out awkwardly, apologizing as he brushed against the crossed legs of those who were waiting.
    Initiations are always painful, and this was an initiation. He dived into the street and began walking through districts he hardly knew. He was haunted by the feeling that everybody was watching him and he felt guilty; guilty, for instance, of having shaved off his mustache, like a criminal who’s afraid of being recognized, and guilty, too, because of the three hundred thousand francs with which his pockets were bulging.
    Suppose that policeman at the corner of the boulevard were to stop him and ask him …
    He sought out the darkest, most mysterious streets, those where the lights reminded him somewhat of those of his youth.
    Wasn’t it extraordinary to be doing at the age of forty-eight, exactly forty-eight, what he had nearly done thirty