Act of Passion Read Free

keep me from committing suicide.
    It is my calmness that worries them, what the papers called my want of conscience, my cynicism.
    I am calm, that's a fact, and this letter should convince you of it. Although I am only a simple family doctor, I have studied, enough psychiatry to recognize the letter of a madman.
    Too bad, your Honour, if you think the contrary. It would be a great disillusionment to me.
    For I still enjoy the illusion of possessing one friend, and that friend, strange as it may seem, is you.
    What a lot of things I have to tell you now that I cannot be accused of trying to save my neck and that Maître Gabriel is not there any longer to step on my toes every time I express a truth too simple for him to understand!
    We both of us belong to what is called, at home, the liberal professions and what, in certain less advanced milieus, is designated more pretentiously by the term intelligentsia. Doesn't the word make you want to laugh? No matter. We belong then to a good middle class, more or less cultivated, the class which furnishes the country with officials, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, quite a few deputies, senators and ministers.
    However, from what I have gathered, you are a generation ahead of me. Your father was already a magistrate while mine was still tilling the soil.
    Don't tell me that it is of no importance. You would be wrong. You would make me think of the rich who are always saying that money doesn't count in life.
    Naturally! Because they have it. But if you don't have any, what then? Have you too ever suffered from the lack of it?
    Now take my 'toad's head,' as the witty reporter said. Supposing you had been in my place in the prisoner's dock, he wouldn't have mentioned toads' heads.
    One generation more or less makes a difference. You yourself are the proof. Already your face is longer, your skin does not shine, you have the easy manners which my daughters are only now acquiring. Even your glasses, your myopia ... Even your calm, precise way of wiping the lenses with your little chamois skin ...
    If you had been named magistrate at La Roche-sur-Yon instead of obtaining an appointment in Paris, we should in all probability have become, if not friends, at least friendly acquaintances, as I said before. By the force of circumstances. You would have, I am sure, in all sincerity considered me an equal, but I, deep down, would always have been a little envious of you.
    Don't deny it. You have only to look around you. Think of those of your friends who, like me, belong to the first rising generation.
    Rising where, I wonder. But let that pass.
    You were born at Caen and I was born at Bourgneuf-en-Vendée, a village several miles from a little town called La Châtaigneraie.
    Of Caen I shall have more to say later, for it holds a memory which only recently - since my crime, to use that word — I consider one of the most important of my life.
    Why not tell you right away, since it takes us to surroundings you know so well?
    I have gone to Caen a dozen times or more, for I have an aunt there, a sister of my father's, who married a man in the china business. You must certainly know his shop on the Rue Saint-Jean, a hundred yards from the Hôtel de France, just where the tram runs so close to the pavement that the pedestrians have to glue themselves against the houses.
    Every time I went to Caen it rained. And I liked the rain of your city. I like it for being fine, gentle and silent; I like it for the halo it throws around the landscape, for the mystery with which, in the twilight, it surrounds everybody you meet, especially the women.
    Now that I think of it, I remember it was on my first visit to my aunt's. It had just grown dark and everything was shining in the rain. I must have been a little over sixteen. At the corner of the Rue Saint-Jean and another street whose name I've forgotten and which, not having any shops, was completely dark, a girl in a beige raincoat stood waiting, and there were