Page:Calvary mirbeau.djvu/163

Rh he had been an artist once upon a time, a scientist, or simply a happy and kind-hearted man. And tall and upright, with a gaze full of hope, he marched towards glory or happiness. . . . One day he met that woman at the house of a friend. . . and that woman, too, wore a perfumed veil, a small muff, an otter skin cap, a heavenly smile, and an air of angelic sweetness. . . . And forthwith he fell in love with her. . . . I followed step by step the development of his love affair, I counted up his weaknesses, his moments of cowardice, his growing downfalls up to the time of his sinking into this armchair for cripples and paralytics.

And what I imagined his life was to him, my own life was to me, those were my own feelings, it was my own dread of the future, my own anguish. . . . Little by little my hallucination took on a singular physical form, and it was myself that I saw in this velvet cap, in this morning robe with this battered body, this murky beard, and Juliette who stood over my shoulder like an owl. . ..

Juliette! . . . She walked about in the study, weary of body, her whole figure betraying boredom, yawning and sighing. She could not think of anything to distract her. Most often she would place the card table not far from me and lose herself in the card combinations of a complicated "patience," or she would stretch herself out on the sofa, spread a napkin over her dress, place upon it some tiny instruments of tortoise shell, microscopic containers of ointment, and begin polishing her nails, fiercely filing them and making them shine more lustrously than agate. She would examine them every five minutes, looking for the reflection of her image in the polished surfaces:

"Look my dear! Aren't they beautiful! And you, too, Spy, look at your mistress' pretty nails."

The light friction of the nail brush, the imperceptible