Monsieur Monde Vanishes Read Online Free PDF Page B

winter, which always seems gloomier because it suggests lingering autumn rather than approaching spring.
    Why, on this occasion, was the house on Rue Ballu empty? The servants had gone out; obviously, because it was Sunday. But his wife, Thérèse, who looked so fragile and so innocent? Thérésè … well! …
    The two children were ill. No; just the girl, who was five and had whooping cough. As for Alain, who was only one, he was going through a phase of bringing up whatever he drank.
    Their mother had gone out, nonetheless. She had invented some excuse or other. In those days she seemed the picture of innocence, and nobody suspected.
    In short, he was all alone. It wasn’t quite dark yet. It was freezing. Not only the house but the whole of Paris seemed empty, with the occasional rumble of a car along the paved streets. The little girl was coughing. Sometimes he gave her a spoonful of cough syrup from a bottle that stood on the mantelpiece; he could still point out the exact spot.
    The day before, that morning, just an hour previously, he had adored his wife and children.
    Dusk was spreading through the house, ash-gray, and he forgot to put on the lights. He walked to and fro, always returning to the window with its floral patterned lace curtains. That was still another sensation that he recalled with obsessive accuracy: the mesh of the lace between his forehead and the cold pane.
    Suddenly, as he looked down into the street at the man in a greenish overcoat who was lighting the only gas lamp within his field of vision, he was seized by a sense of detachment from everything: his daughter had coughed and he had not turned around, the baby might have been vomiting in his cradle; he stared at the figure of the man going off, and felt himself as it were impelled forward, he had an irresistible longing to go off too, to go straight ahead.
    To go somewhere!
    He had even been downstairs into his study, for no apparent reason, perhaps with some thought of going away? He had stayed there motionless for a long while, as though dazed, in the same place, and he had given a start when the cook—the one who had been there before he was born, and who had since died—had exclaimed, with her hat still on her head and mittens on her frozen hands:
    â€œHave you gone deaf? Don’t you hear the child screaming his head off?”
    And now he was in the street. He walked along, gazing with something akin to terror at the shadowy figures that brushed against him and at the endless tangle of dark streets, crammed with invisible life.
    He had a meal somewhere near the Bastille—he remembered crossing Place des Vosges diagonally—in a little restaurant where there were paper napkins on the marble-top tables.
    â€œTomorrow!”
    Then he went for a walk along the Seine. In this, again, he was involuntarily performing an old-established rite.
    He still felt diffident and awkward. He was really too new to it. To do the thing properly, to carry it through, he ought to have gone down one of the flights of stone steps leading to the water’s edge. Whenever he crossed the Seine in the morning he used to glance under the bridges, in order to revive another very ancient memory, dating from the days when he went to the Lycée Stanislas and would sometimes make his way there leisurely on foot: under the Pont Neuf he had caught sight of two old, or ageless, men, gray and shaggy as neglected statues; they were sitting on a heap of stones, and while one of them ate a sausage the other bandaged his feet with strips of cotton.
    He did not know what time it was. He had not thought about it once since leaving the bank. The streets were emptying. Buses were becoming fewer. Then groups of people passed him talking very loudly, presumably on their way back from theaters or the movies.
    His plan was to choose a third-rate hotel like the one he had noticed a short while before in a little street close to Place des Vosges.