“Wise?” I laughed. “That’s a strange thing to say. What’s troubling you?”
He scrubbed his meaty face with his palm and sighed deeply. “Sit down and let me play the avuncular sage for a few minutes.”
“Sir, if you intend to say anything that—”
“Sit down.” There was a firmness in his voice that impelled me to obey. As he fumbled about in his desk drawer for one of the black Russian cigarettes he occasionally smoked, I had the feeling he was playing for time to consider how to present something awkward to me. “Ah, here we are. Oh, my, these cigarettes are as dried out as an old nun’s hym—heart.” He tossed the box back into the drawer. “All right, let me say this as simply as possible, because I cannot think of a delicate way to approach the matter. Yesterday evening I attended a little party with my companion—very gay affair, very hollow, much laughter but little mirth—and in the course of trivial chat with a man vacationing from Paris I mentioned that my practice was in Salies. The fellow’s face lit up with that special ecstasy of the gossip with a choice morsel to share, and he asked if Salies were not the village the Trevilles had moved to—’fled to’ was his actual expression. I had no interest in his scandalmongering, but it occurred to me that, in my role as your mentor and colleague—don’t bother to give voice to the sarcasm in your face. At all events, I heard him out. Ugly little affair. To say it bluntly out, it appears that your young lady’s father shot and killed a young man in Paris—a promising lad of excellent family who—”
“—What?” I rose. “I don’t believe… What are you saying?”
“Now, now. It was all a wretched accident, of course. After a long inquiry, upon the details of which the smut-hunting journalists battened, Treville was cleared of any intention of wrongdoing. It appears that the young victim had been an occasional visitor to the home. It was common gossip that the lad was paying court to the young Treville girl. Presumably the boy had—or thought he had—an arrangement to meet the young lady rather late one night. He was creeping about the grounds, possibly seeking informal entry into the house—” Doctor Gros raised a hand. “Don’t bother to object. I am making no judgments concerning Mlle Treville’s character. I am simply recounting the tale as told to me. Well… the rest is simple enough. Monsieur Treville, believing the young man to be a prowler or burglar, shot him dead. The judicial investigators found no reason to doubt his version of the event, but of course parlor gossip fabricated its own narrative. Outraged father… in flagrante delicto… that sort of thing. The more generously disposed of their friends suggested that an elopement had been intercepted. The fellow telling me the story dismissed this possibility with a yellow leer. Well, that’s about it. As soon as the legal stew subsided, the Trevilles left, fleeing as far from Paris as they could. And one can’t get much farther from Paris than Salies, either geographically or culturally. I hope you understand that I am telling you all this only because I believe you ought to know.”
In my distress I had drifted to the window of his study, where I stared out into the dark garden. So overcome was I by what I heard, so great was the struggle to comprehend and accept it, that it was several moments before I could mutter, “Yes, yes. I understand that.”
“And you’re not offended by my interference?”
I shook my head. “No… no. Why do you doubt Monsieur Treville’s version of what happened?”
“What makes you assume I do?”
“You began all this by asking if I thought it wise to join the Trevilles in their trip to Alos.”
Doctor Gros was silent for a moment. “Yes. So I did,” he said heavily, letting it go at that.
I turned away. “God! How terrible that must have been for them! The journalists… the whispering. No wonder they choose to live off by themselves, secluded from society. Think of how the rumors and gossip must have lacerated them! Poor Katya! This explains so much of their distant, retiring behavior.”
“Perhaps… perhaps. But it doesn’t quite explain… everything. For instance, it doesn’t explain why they have suddenly decided to flee from Salies. None of our young men have been reported missing, to my knowledge. And even you, although your wits have been battered by love, appear to be in reasonably good health.”
“It’s not a thing to joke about!”
“No, of course not. Terrible taste. Do forgive me.”
“It’s possible that they are fleeing from what happened in Paris. If you learned about it by accident in St. Jean, it’s not beyond imagination that ugly rumors have pursued them even here.”
“Yes, that’s possible. And I pity anyone scarred by the acid of provincial gossip. Gossip gives our women an opportunity to dabble in delicious sin without having to repent, sin they will never experience at first hand, protected from temptation as they are by lack of courage, lack of imagination, and lack of opportunity—which deficiencies they view as proofs of their moral rectitude.” He was silent for a moment; then he spoke haltingly. “Is this… how to put this delicately?… is this your first love, Montjean?”
I did not respond.
“Allow me to assume from your silence that it is. You’re having rather a nasty go of it, and I am sorry. One’s first love is supposed to be all tinted mist and perfume… save for the final recriminations, of course. You’ve had bad luck, son. The tawdriness is not supposed to emerge until one’s later loves.”
I could not conceive of “later loves.” I was sure that my capacity to love was as narrow as it was deep, and that Katya was my love, not one of my loves. As time was to demonstrate, such was the case.
“Well then!” Doctor Gros said, boldly changing the timbre, uncomfortable in this unaccustomed role of the compassionate man. “I suppose I should congratulate you on saving the Hastoy boy’s arm yesterday. I’ve already heard about your noble feat from several sources. However—lest you grow vain—let me assure you that the reason everyone is impressed is that they doubted you were capable.”
“I see.” I forced a watery smile. “You don’t mind if I take tomorrow off and spend it with the Trevilles, do you?”
“My dear boy,” Doctor Gros said, his voice trembling with sincerity as he patted me on the shoulder, “my dear boy. I want you always to view yourself as uniquely dispensable.”
Like so many others, I was spoiled by the magnificent weather of that summer, coming to accept day after day of perfect beauty as the right and normal way of things, forgetting that, as Monsieur Treville had said, cold and darkness are the constants in the vast stretches of the universe, light and warmth existing only in the vicinity of minute star-specks. In a similar way, loneliness and resignation are constants in the life of a man, youth and love being passing moments whose very preciousness lies in their mutability. There would be nothing wrong with clinging to the comfortable fiction that these pleasant ephemera were the eternal conditions of life, were it not that, when they pass, as inevitably they must, we are left to spend the bulk of our days in bitterness, feeling somehow cheated by fate. We end with being plagued by the tortures of envy and hope which deny us the modest, but enduring, pleasures of calm and resignation.
These are, of course, the reflections of age, and they come only after one has accepted his personal mortality. But I was young that summer, and immortal, and there were no leavening traces of calm and resignation in my mood as I walked the two and a half kilometers to Etcheverria. The sunlight poured down upon the countryside like a golden liquid through air refreshed by breezes bearing the scent of grass and flowers. Overhead, puffy fair-weather clouds churned sedately along on their way to the mountains, and birds cried out their joy in the hedgerows. I was filled with a sense of my youth and strength, and with a desire to embrace life—to struggle with it if need be—to fashion fate in the image of my desires.