Monsieur Monde Vanishes Read Free Page B

since her husband had been arrested during a brawl, she had been penniless.
    When Madame Monde had crossed the sidewalk, on which the police-station lamp shed a red glow, and when Joseph the chauffeur had swiftly opened the door of the car and closed it behind her, she gave him the address of her lawyer, whom she had left an hour previously and who was expecting her return.
    Everything she had told the Superintendent was true, but sometimes nothing is less true than the truth.
    Monsieur Monde had wakened at seven o’clock in the morning; noiselessly, and without letting any cold air under the covers, he had slipped out of the bed where his wife lay motionless. This was his invariable habit. Each morning, he pretended to believe she was asleep. He avoided lighting the bedside lamp, and crept around the huge bed in the darkness, which was streaked by faint gleams of light filtering through the shutters; barefooted, holding his slippers in his hand. And yet he knew that if he glanced at the pillow he would see his wife’s little black eyes gleaming.
    Only when he reached the bathroom did he take a deep breath; he turned the bath on full and plugged in his electric razor.
    He was a stout, or more precisely a corpulent, man. His scanty hair was fair, and in the morning, when it was ruffled, it gave his rosy face a childish look.
    Even his blue eyes, all the time he watched himself in the glass while shaving, wore an expression of surprise that was like a child’s. It was as if every morning, when he emerged from the ageless world of sleep, Monsieur Monde felt surprised to meet in his mirror a middle-aged man with wrinkled eyelids and a prominent nose topping a sandy toothbrush mustache.
    Pouting at himself to stretch the skin under the razor, he invariably forgot the running bath water and would rush to the faucets just as the sound of the overflow betrayed him, through the door, to Madame Monde.
    When he had finished shaving he would look at himself a little longer, complacently yet with a certain pang of regret because he was no longer the chubby, somewhat ingenuous young man he had once been, and could not get used to the idea of being already embarked on the downward slope of life.
    That morning, in the bathroom, he had remembered that he was just forty-eight years old. That was all. He was forty-eight. Soon he would be fifty. He felt tired. In the warm water he stretched out his muscles as though to shake off the fatigue accumulated during all those years.
    He was nearly dressed when the ringing of an alarm clock overhead told him that his son Alain was now about to get up.
    He finished dressing. He was meticulous about his appearance. He liked his clothes to be uncreased and spotless, his linen soft and smooth, and sometimes on the street or in his office he would look down with satisfaction at his gleaming shoes.
    He was forty-eight years old today. Would his wife remember? His son? His daughter? Nobody, most likely. Perhaps Monsieur Lorisse, his old cashier, who had been his father’s cashier, would say to him solemnly: “Best wishes, Monsieur Norbert.”
    He had to go through the bedroom. He bent over his wife’s forehead and brushed it with his lips.
    â€œYou won’t be needing the car?”
    â€œNot this morning. If I need it in the afternoon I’ll call you at the office.”
    His house was a very odd one; as far as he was concerned, there was not another one like it in the world. When his grandfather had bought it, it had already had a number of owners. And each of them had altered it in some way, so that there was no longer any recognizable plan. Some doors had been blocked up, others put in in different places. Two rooms had been thrown into one, a floor had been raised, and a passage introduced with unexpected twists and even more unexpected steps on which visitors were apt to stumble, and on which Madame Monde herself still stumbled.
    Even on the sunniest days the light in