And as soon as
Guillaume had found him out of danger he had gone off again, once more
vanishing into the unknown. But then through what a long convalescence
he, Pierre, had passed, buried as it were in that deserted house. He had
done nothing to detain Guillaume, for he realised that there was an abyss
between them. At first the solitude had brought him suffering, but
afterwards it had grown very pleasant, whether in the deep silence of the
rooms which the rare noises of the street did not disturb, or under the
screening, shady foliage of the little garden, where he could spend whole
days without seeing a soul. His favourite place of refuge, however, was
the old laboratory, his father's cabinet, which his mother for twenty
years had kept carefully locked up, as though to immure within it all the
incredulity and damnation of the past. And despite the gentleness, the
respectful submissiveness which she had shown in former times, she would
perhaps have some day ended by destroying all her husband's books and
papers, had not death so suddenly surprised her. Pierre, however, had
once more had the windows opened, the writing-table and the bookcase
dusted; and, installed in the large leather arm-chair, he now spent
delicious hours there, regenerated as it were by his illness, brought
back to his youthful days again, deriving a wondrous intellectual delight
from the perusal of the books which he came upon.
The only person whom he remembered having received during those two
months of slow recovery was Doctor Chassaigne, an old friend of his
father, a medical man of real merit, who, with the one ambition of curing
disease, modestly confined himself to the /role/ of the practitioner.
Pages:
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56