I learned one day that my old friend Pauline de S., who had been
suffering from cancer for a long time, would not last out the year, and as
she was so fully aware of the fact her doctor, unable to deceive her
considerable intelligence, had confessed the truth to her. But she also
knew that up to the very last month and barring any unforeseen but always
possible accidents she would maintain her presence of mind and even a
certain level of physical activity. Now that I knew that her last
illusions had been dispelled it would be extremely painful for me to go
and see her. However one evening I made up my mind to go and visit her the
next day. That night I found it impossible to sleep. Things became evident
to me as they must have done to Pauline herself, so close to death as she
was, and so differently to the way things usually appear to us. Pleasures,
amusements, people's lives, even our own private troubles now seemed
insignificant, insipid, derisory, ridiculously, dreadfully small and
unreal. Meditations on life and on the soul, the depths of feeling to be
found in the arts where we feel ourselves descend into the very heart of
our being, goodness, forgiveness, pity, charity, openly visible
repentance, these were the only things that were real. I arrived at her
house with a full heart, in one of those moments when all we can feel of
ourselves is the soul, the soul which was overflowing, unconcerned about
anything else, on the brink of tears. I went in. She was sitting in her
usual armchair close to the window and her face was not marked with grief
as it had been for the last few days in my imagination. Her emaciation and
her sickly pallor were purely physical. Her features had retained their
jovial expression. She was holding a political pamphlet in her hand which
she put aside when I came in. We chatted for an hour. Her glittering
conversation continued to flow as it had in the past and at the expense of
various people she knew. A fit of coughing after which she spat a little
blood brought it to a stop. When the fit had abated she said to me: "Go
now, dear friend, I really don't want to be too tired this evening because
I have a few people coming to dinner. But let's try to see each other in
the next few days. Take a box for a matinée. Evenings at the theatre are
too exhausting for me."
"Which theatre?" I asked her.
"Which ever you want. But certainly not to see your dreary Hamlet
or Antigone, you know my tastes, something fun, a play by
Labiche if one is on at the moment, or failing that an operetta."
I left stupefied. On later visits I learned that reading of the Gospels
or L'Imitation, music and poetry, meditations, repentance for
injuries caused or forgiveness for injuries received, conversations with
deep thinkers, priests, with dear friends or old enemies, or even internal
monologues, were things that were absent from the place in which she was
finishing her life. Not to mention the physical self pity that she was
insufficiently nervous and too unyielding to feel. I often wondered if it
was not a posture, a mask, if a part of her life that she was hiding from
me was not the real one as it must have been. I knew later that that was
not the case, that with other people, and even when she was alone she was
the same as she was with me, as she was before. It seemed to me
that there was a hard-heartedness in that, a singular aberration. Oh,
insensitive creature that I was, who had seen death so close at hand and
yet had resumed my life of frivolity. What could surprise me that was not
always there before my eyes! Has the doctor not condemned us, each and
every one, and do we not know it, that we are surely going to die? Yet do
we not see many who consider death carefully in order to leave life with
dignity?
Created 13.10.19