For a Night of Love Read Free Page A

to return more quickly into his shadow. His clumsiness left him prey to a continual sense of fright, a pathological longing for ordinariness and obscurity. He seemed to have resigned himself to growing old in this way, without friendship, without love affairs, with the tastes of a cloistered monk.
    And this life did not weigh heavily on his broad shoulders. Julien, at heart, was very happy. He had a calm and transparent soul. His daily life, dominated by fixed rules, was imbued with serenity. In the morning he would go to his office, and placidly take up his work where he had left off the night before; then, he would have a bread roll for lunch, and continue his writing; then he had dinner, went to bed, slept. The next day, the sun would rise on the same schedule, week by week, month by month. This slow procession came to be accompanied by a soft and gentle music, rocking him in the daydream of those oxen that pull the cart along and then spend the evening ruminating among fresh straw. He drank in all the charm of monotony. Sometimes, after dinner, he would enjoy going down the rue Beau-Soleil, and sitting on the bridge, waiting for nine o’clock. He let his legs dangle over the water, watching the Chanteclair flowing along beneath him, with the pure murmur of its silver waves. Willows, along bothriver-banks, trailed their pale heads in their own reflections. From the sky drifted down the fine ashen hues of dusk. And there he would remain, in the midst of this great calm, held in its charm and reflecting vaguely that the Chanteclair must be as happy as he was, gliding continually over the same waterweeds , in such a pleasant silence. When the stars came out, he would go home to bed, his lungs filled with freshness.
    These weren’t by any means the only pleasures Julien indulged in. On his days off, he would set out on foot by himself , happily walking for miles and coming back exhausted. He had also made friends with a mute wood-carver: arm in arm they would stroll up and down the riverside walk for entire afternoons, without even exchanging a sign. At other times, ensconced in the back of the Café des Voyageurs, he and the mute would get stuck into interminable games of draughts, punctuated by long periods of immobility while they planned their moves. He had once had a dog that had got run over by a carriage, and he remembered him with such religious devotion that he didn’t want any more pets. At the post office, they teased him about a kid girl, a ten-year-old, barefooted ragamuffin who sold boxes of matches: he would give her a big handful of coins without buying any of her wares; but he was cross at being noticed and made sure no one was watching when he slipped her the money. He was never seen out, of an evening, with some piece of skirt on the ramparts. The working girls of P***, streetwise lasses with nothing to learn about life, had themselves ended up leaving him alone, seeing him choked with shyness in their presence, convinced as he was that their friendly come-hitherish laughter was really mockery. Some of the townspeople said he was stupid, others maintained that you had to watch boys like that, the quiet ones, the loners.
    Julien’s paradise, the place where he could breathe easily, was his room. Only there did he feel safe from the world. There he could stand tall, laugh to himself; and, when he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, he couldn’t get over his surprise at how young he looked. The room was huge; he had furnished it with a big settee, and a round table with two upright chairs and an armchair. But this still left room for him to walk about: the bed was set well back in the recesses of a deep alcove; a small walnut chest of drawers, between the two windows, seemed no bigger than a child’s toy. He would pace up and down, stretching his legs, never tiring of his own company. He never wrote, outside his office hours, and reading tired him. As the old woman who kept the guest house where