He spoke only to express his joy.
Sometimes, at night, in his room, after terrible crises, he said to me:
"I am happy. Why grieve and weep?
Your tears do something to spoil my joy, the ardent joy with which I am filled. Oh! I assure you that death is not a high price to pay for the superhuman happiness which you have given me. I was lost; death was in me; nothing could prevent it from being in me.
You have rendered it radiant and pleasant. Then do not weep, dear little one.
I adore you, and I thank you."
My fever of destruction had entirely vanished now.
I lived in a condition of frightful disgust with myself, in an unspeakable horror of my crime, of my murder. There was nothing left me but the hope, the consolation, or the excuse that I had contracted my friend's disease, and would die with him, and at the same time.
And what was to happen happened.
We were then in the month of October, precisely the sixth of October.
The autumn having remained mild and warm that year, the doctors had counselled a prolongation of the patient's stay at the seaside, pending the time when he could be taken to the south.
All day long, on that sixth of October, Monsieur Georges had been quieter.
I had opened wide the large bay-window in his room, and there, lying on his long chair, beside the window, protected from the air by warm coverings, he had breathed for at least four hours, and deliciously, the iodic emanations from the offing.
The life-giving sun, the good sea odors, the deserted beach, now occupied again by the shell-fishermen, delighted him.
Never had I seen him gayer.
And this gaiety on his emaciated face, where the skin, growing thinner from week to week, covered the bones like a transparent film, had something funereal about it, and so painful to witness that several times I had to leave the room in order to weep freely.
He refused to let me read poetry to him.
When I opened the book, he said:
"No; you are my poem; you are all my poems, and far the most beautiful of all."
He was forbidden to talk.
The slightest conversation fatigued him, and often brought on a fit of coughing.
Moreover, he had hardly strength enough to talk.
What was left to him of life, of thought, of will to express, of sensibility, was concentrated in his gaze, which had become a glowing fireplace, in which the soul continually kindled a flame of surprising and supernatural intensity. That evening, the evening of the sixth of October, he seemed no longer to be suffering.
Oh! I see him still, stretched upon his bed, his head high upon his pillow, his long thin hands playing tranquilly with the blue fringe of the curtain, his lips smiling at me, and his eyes, which, in the shade of the bed, shone and burned like a lamp, following all my goings and comings.
They had placed a couch in the room for me, a nurse's couch and—oh! irony, in order doubtless to spare his modesty and mine—a screen behind which I could, undress.
But often I did not lie upon the couch; Monsieur Georges wanted me always by his side.
He was really comfortable, really happy, only when I was near him.
After having slept two hours, almost peacefully, he awoke toward midnight.
He was a little feverish; the spots at the points of his cheek-bones were a little redder.
Seeing me sitting at the head of his bed, my cheeks damp with tears, he said to me, in a tone of gentle reproach:
"What, weeping again?
You wish, then, to make me sad, and to give me pain?
Why do you not lie down?
Come and lie down beside me."
I cried, shaken by sobs:
"Ah! Monsieur Georges, do you wish me, then, to kill you?
Do you wish me to suffer all my life from remorse at having killed you?"
All my life!
I had already forgotten that I wanted to die with him, to die of him, to die as he died.
"Monsieur Georges! Monsieur Georges! Have pity on me, I implore you!"
But his lips were on my lips. Death was on my lips.
"Be still!" he exclaimed, gasping.
"I have never loved you so much as to-night."
Suddenly his arms relaxed and fell back, inert, upon the bed; his lips abandoned mine.
And from his mouth, turned upward, there came a cry of distress, and then a flow of hot blood that spattered my face.
With a bound I was out of bed.
A mirror opposite revealed my image, red and bloody. I was mad, and, running about the room in bewilderment, it was my impulse to call for aid.
But the instinct of self-preservation, the fear of responsibilities, of the revelation of my crime, and I know not what else that was cowardly and calculating, closed my mouth, and held me back at the edge of the abyss over which my reason was tottering. Very clearly and very speedily I realized that it would not do for any one to enter the room in its present condition.
O human misery!
There was something more spontaneous than my grief, more powerful than my fear; it was my ignoble prudence and my base calculations. In my terror I had the presence of mind to open the door of the salon, and then the door of the ante-room, and listen. Not a sound.