The kiss to the leper

JEAN PELOUEYRE was lying on his bed. He opened his eyes and listened for a moment to the buzzing of the grasshoppers outside. The sun was pouring in through the blinds like some bright, hot metal, and he stood up swallowing the bitterness in his mouth. He was so short that he could see his wretched face in the low mirror between the windows: hollow cheeks, a long red nose that looked as though it had been worn away to a point like a well-sucked stick of barley-sugar, a sharp angle of close-cut hair pointing down over a wrinkled forehead. He made a face at the reflection and saw two rows of decayed teeth. He had never so hated himself, but a few pitying words escaped his lips: "Out for a walk, you poor devil," and his hand went to his ill-shaven chin. But how was he to get out without waking his father? Between one and four, M. Jêrome Péloueyre imposed complete silence upon the house, and these hours of repose kept him from dying of nightly insomnia. The house was numbed; no door could be shut or opened, not a word or a sneeze could break the silence to which, by ten years of complaints and entreaties, he had trained Jean and the servants. Even the people in the street lowered their voices as they passed beneath his windows, and carriages drove a block out of their way to avoid rattling past his door.

In spite of this conspiracy surrounding him, M. Jêrome, half awake, was conscious of a clatter of plates, a bark and a cough. Did he think that complete silence would procure him a death-like repose, flowing smoothly and inevitably like a river to the ocean? His awakenings were always unpleasant and he would go down shivering, even in the middle of summer, to read in a chair by the kitchen fire. Its flames were reflected upon his bald head, and Cadette, busy over her sauces, paid no more attention to her master than to the hams hanging from the rafters. He, on the contrary, watched the old peasant, full of wonder that she could have been born in the reign of Louis Philippe, to live through wars and revolutions, so much history, and yet have nothing in her head but the pig she annually fattened, whose death at each Christmas moistened with sparse tears her old and bleary eyes.

In spite of his father's siesta, Jean Péloueyre was unable to resist the call of the intense heat outside; there would be nobody about, and he could follow the thin line of shade in front of the houses without fear of a burst of laughter from some woman sewing at an open door. Mirth always broke forth as he sneaked past, but at two o'clock all the women would be asleep, or at least lying on their beds perspiring and cursing the flies. He opened a well-oiled door silently and crossed the hall; a sweet damp smell came from the food cupboards, and the kitchen beyond added further burdens to the musty atmosphere. The soft patter of his slippers seemed to deepen the silence. From a rack, surmounted by a boar's head, he took down his 24-calibre; it was well known by all the magpies in the neighbourhood, for Jean was their sworn enemy. An umbrella stand bristled with the property of pail generations; his great uncle Ousilanne's gun-stick, his grandfather Lapeignine's fishing-rod and sword-stick, and other iron-shod implements that kept alive the memory of visits to Baguères de Bigorre. A stuffed heron stood upon a table near the outer door.

Jean slipped out into the street. The heat, like the sun-warmed water in a fishpond, opened and closed in again upon him, and he thought he would visit a grove of alders where the stream that flowed through the village loitered for a moment, breathing up the coolness of its source. Mosquitoes, however, had bothered him the last time he had gone there, and feeling in the mood for talking to someone, he set out for Doctor Pieuchon's house. The doctor's son Robert, a medical student, had come home for his holiday that morning.

The streets were empty and silent--not a sign of life, save when a ray of sunlight struck through half-opened shutters and shone upon an old woman's spectacles. Jean was walking now between high garden walls; he loved this little passage because there no hidden eyes could see him, and he could meditate to his heart's content. These meditations of his were accompanied by frowns, gestures, laughter, and recitations--a pantomime that never failed to amuse those who witnessed it. But here, the walls and the branches of the trees offered a pleasant protection. Still, he would certainly prefer the tangled confusion of the streets in a great city, where one could talk to oneself without fear of meeting again the people one passed. At all events, that was what Daniel Trasis wrote him from Paris. Daniel, against the will of his family, had launched into literature, and Jean imagined his thickset figure plunging into the Parisian whirlpool, and disappearing from view like a diver. But he had no doubt learned to swim now and was struggling breathlessly towards some definite aims: Fame, Fortune, Love; fruits of which Jean Péloueyre would never be able to partake.

With soft footsteps he entered the Pieuchons' house. The servant told him that the doctor and his son were lunching out, but he decided to wait and went into his friend's bedroom, which opened on to the hall. It was the sort of room that discouraged one from wanting to know its occupant: a pipe-rack and some posters of a students' ball on the walls; and on the table, a death's-head made ridiculous by a short pipe stuck between its teeth, and a pile of books for holiday reading: Aphrodite, l'Orgie Latine, Le Jardin des Supplices, Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. A book of selections from Nietzsche claimed Jean's attention, and he looked at a page here and there. The smell of a student's summer clothes came to his nostrils from an open trunk as his eyes fell upon this passage: "What is good? Everything that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. The weak must perish, and we shall help them to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Pity for the weak and helpless--Christianity."

Jean put the book down; and the phrases he had just read ran burning through his mind like the burning afternoon sun that pours into a room when the shutters are opened. Instinctively he went to the window and allowed the scorching light to flow in; then he picked up the book and re-read the appalling passage. He closed his eyes, opened them, and looked at himself in the mirror: a poor, wretched, little, mouse-like face, a miserable body with which adolescence had been unable to work its customary miracle; a pitiable victim for the sacred well of Sparta. His thoughts went back to the time he had spent with the nuns when he was five years old; in spite of the prestige of the Péloueyres, the attractive children were always placed above him. He remembered a competition in reading in which he had read his composition far better than the others, but was placed all the same at the bottom of the class.

Sometimes Jean wondered whether his mother, who had died of consumption when he was very young, would have loved him. M. Jêrome was devoted to this suffering projection of himself; Jean seemed to him like his own tenuous shadow, following his slippered tread through life or waiting at his side when he lay upon his bed, enveloped by the smell of valerian and ether. M. Jêrome's eldest sister might have loathed her nephew were it not that her adoration for her son, Fernand Cazenave (with whom she lived at B----, and who was president of the Town Council) almost prevented her from noticing him. She was scarcely aware of the existence of anyone but her son. From time to time, however, she drew Jean into her consciousness with a word or a smile, for she calculated that this son of a delicate father, this poor wretch defined to celibacy and a premature death, would contribute in some part to Fernand's acquisition of the Péloueyre fortune. Jean looked back over the desert of his life; his three years at school had been a succession of carefully concealed friendships. Neither Daniel Trasis nor the priest who taught him rhetoric had ever understood the hopeless beseeching expression in his eyes.

Jean opened the Nietzsche book at another page and devoured Aphorism 260 from "Beyond Good and Evil" which refers to master-morality and slave-morality. He looked at his face in the mirror again; it would always be yellow in spite of his efforts to acquire a coat of sunburn. He repeated Nietzsche's words over and over again, saturated himself with their meaning until it rushed through his thoughts like an October gale. For a moment his faith seemed shattered, lying at his feet like an uprooted oak tree. But no, no; the tree was still upright; its countless roots had saved it, and, after the storm was spent, Jean felt within him the mysterious calm that he loved--the thick foliage once more hung motionless. He was suddenly conscious of the fact that religion was, for him, before all else, a refuge. It had saved him from his own wretched thoughts through many a sleepless night. Hovering above the altar was Someone who filled the gap left by the friends he had never had, and the Virgin received the devotion that would have gone to his mother. His confidences, never uttered to a fellow being, were poured into the confessional, or they went into silent prayers towards evening in the shadowy coolness of the church. At times like these his heart opened to the pale figures of his imagination that thronged about him. If he had had Daniel's curly hair--his friend had been from birth the object of feminine caresses--would he too have had a following of spinsters and maid-servants? He was one of the class denounced by Nietzsche; he knew that with his abject appearance he was inevitably sentenced to slavery; his personality was made for failure and defeat. His father was like that, after all; very devout too, but better versed in theology than Jean, and lately become a patient reader of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Jean, who cared little for doctrine and professed a religion of ecstasy, approved of his father's for its rational quality. He remembered his father's pet phrase: "Without Faith what would have happened to me?" This Faith, however, did not permit him to hear mass at the risk of catching a cold, and at Festivals he was installed, muffled to the eyes, in the overheated sacristy, so that he could follow the ceremony.

Jean went out and passed again between the high walls under the protecting foliage of the trees; he gesticulated as he went, and for a moment he pretended that he had lost his belief, that its support had suddenly been withdrawn. Nothing remained, nothing! School-day memories came to his lips: Mon malheur passe mon espérance.... Oui, je te loue, O Ciel, de ta persévérance. A little farther on, he addressed himself to the trees, the walls, and the piles of pebbles, protesting that Masters could exist among Christians, and that the Saints, the great Orders, in fact, the whole Church, offered a splendid example of the Will to Power.