Paul Bourget

“ A CHRISTMAS MEMORY
THOUGH he was your cousin," I said to Claude after reading a telegram which he handed to me, "you surely cannot grieve for his death. He has done justice on himself; and I did not expect it of him. His suicide spares your old uncle the scandal of a shocking trial. But what a history! That old woman murdered merely for the sake of her trumpery savings! To come to such an end, through degradation after degradation—he whom we once knew so proud, so elegant! ”

“ Lucien was caught in the set. What more can I tell you? I know all you'll say,—that it was a mere coincidence, and probably not the first time my cousin had cheated; and that a passion for gambling like his is sure to ruin a man in the long run. But why have I never been able to overcome the remorse caused me by this one, solitary, dishonest action of my childhood, which made me an honest man for the rest of my life? Why should this Christmas Eve, so gay and happy for others, be to me the most melancholy, the most depressing of anniversaries? ”

“ I shall live to be very old before I forget the awful despair which took possession of me as I turned the corner by the hospital, I made a misstep, my foot slipped, I fell on the snow, and as I fell the gold-piece dropped from my fingers. ”

“ I saw myself in my sister's presence telling her that lie. I felt, as I thought of it, that my cheeks would burn, and that all within me would cry out—what? My theft. Yes, a theft! To steal is to take something that does not belong to us, and that piece of gold did not belong to me. It belonged to the first beggar I met on the way home, and that beggar was the blind man at the Capucins. ”

“ Impossible. She would speak of them. He would tell her he did not give them, and I should be lost. Should I wait a few weeks and declare they were the fruit of my saving? On the fingers of my empty hand I counted up the weeks, and found it would take half a year to give that tale any semblance of probability, and by that time the sabre might be sold. Bah! how silly I was not to have thought at once of a good way! I would go out with my nurse in the afternoon, taking the coin in the palm of my hand, and then, suddenly, I would stoop as if to pick it up, and show it to her. ”

“ What hinders me from giving, not this bit but the other bit to a beggar? Who will see me do it? Besides, if I had told my desire to my cousin he would have given the ten francs to me; he is so kind and good.'—I had reached this stage in my reflections when we passed beneath the windows of the club to which my cousin belonged when he lived at home, I had heard my sister on one occasion call it a 'hell.' The word came back to my mind, and with it a sudden vision of hell such as Abbé Martel, you remember, used to describe in a way to make our flesh creep. ”

“ My shoes I took in my hand—at the risk of losing my Christmas presents if the child Jesus came down the chimney in my absence. Then I crept down the staircase, my heart beating violently at the least sound, and opened the door into the garden, the creaking of which made me almost faint away. A minute more and I was in the street, all alone, for the first time in my life after eleven o'clock at night. You know how susceptible I was of being terrified, owing to that weakness of the nervous system which I had in common with my poor sister. Is there any childish panic that I have not endured? ”

“ He then turned me over to my nurse Miette, who was waiting at the foot of the great staircase, with a brown hood on her head, goloshes on her feet, and a lantern in her hand."
"That's truly characteristic of a gambler," I interrupted; "it is like Italy, where on Saturdays they put a small boy, dressed in white for the occasion, to draw the numbers of the lottery."
"A good deal of snow had fallen the night before," continued Claude, paying no attention to my remark, "so that in order not to slip we had to walk very slowly through the silent streets. ”

“ My sister Blanche was ill, as usual; her headache had been so severe during the day that she was forced to go to bed. My brother-in-law, foreseeing the approaching catastrophe, did not leave her bedside, and they both consented that I should go and dine with my uncle. She did not understand, my poor dear sister, that her sick-room, so warm and quiet, was the place I liked best in the world. You know how good she was to me after the death of my father and mother. If she had lived I should have been a different man! ”

“ I have been in battle, and I believe in presentiments; I have played cards and seen others play, and I believe in fetiches.'"
"Can you swear he was wrong," I exclaimed, laughing,—"you who could not play a hand at baccarat if Jacques Molan looked at you?"
"What do we really know of what we are pleased to call chance?" said Claude. "But at that time it was not the idea that struck my mind, it was the word. In those days all unknown terms, or words I could only half understand, fairly bewitched me. What a shudder ran through me when I heard those mysterious syllables, 'fetich' ”

“ It is with children as it is with lovers: whatever is conceived of as possible is instantly accepted as a reality. I turned and re-turned in my bed, a prey to such anxiety that I finally sat up, lighted a candle, and looked at my watch. ”

“ He always left his house the back way, by the street that runs near the wall of the building where they manufacture those aerated waters. I should like to know if the little boys of the present day still play as we did in that brook, and find bits of colored glass in it. What lots of such glass you and I picked up when your nurse Miette and my nurse Mion sat talking on a bench that was three trees off."'
"If I could not bear the sadness of my old uncle's eyes," continued Claude, "it was for stronger reasons than you have ever suspected. Ah! I'm talking about old, old matters. ”

“ They spoke of presentiments, and so on to superstitions, apropos of the statue of the marshal in the Place d'Armes opposite to my sister's house. They told how at Eylau, and before he rode his cavalry to the charge, that brave man twice recoiled, as though he had seen death face to face. ”