... having been breathed out

During a rather burning season of jealousy, I myself ran some risks. A rival of mine, very insecure in her happiness, thought of me strongly, and strongly I thought of her. But I made the mistake of letting myself go back to my writing, which demanded my attention, and to abandon my other task of antagonism, of daily and secret defiance. In short, I postponed my curses during three or four months, while Madame X continued hers, devoting her long hours of leisure to this. And I soon became aware of the results of such inequality. I began by falling into a ditch in the Place du Trocadéro, then I caught bronchitis. Then, in the Métro, on my way to the publisher, I lost the last part of a manuscript of which I had not kept a duplicate. A taxi driver short-changed me, leaving me on a rainy night without a sou. Then a mysterious epidemic bore off three of my Angora kittens…

To put an end to the series of misfortunes, I had only to arouse myself from an inexcusable negligence and to return once more to an even exchange of mental trajectories with Madame X. And we lived on mutually bad terms until the bond between us was worn out and space ceased to be a pathway of wicked beams of thought, a harp of resonant waves, a starry ether hung with signs and portents. I was not the only one to regret it, for we had quarreled without feeling any fundamental antipathy. Time recompenses honorable adversaries. Mine, as soon as she stopped being an adversary, had some delightful anecdotes to tell which could amuse only ourselves.

“One day when I was going to Rambouillet to murder you…”

The rest of this story was a gay vaudeville, an involved tale of a missed train, a stalled car, a gold-mesh handbag that burst open at the bottom, spilling out an indiscreet revolver upon the Rambouillet pavement, of inopportune encounters, of a friend who read in the periwinkle blue eyes of Madame X a homicidal intent and by some fond diplomacy diverted her from it…

“My dear,” she exclaimed, “just count all these little happenings which raised chance obstructions between you and me in the town of Ramouillet! Can you deny that they were providential?”

“God forbid! There is one, especially, that I would hate to forget.”

“Which one?”

“You see, I wasn’t in Rambouillet at the time. I didn’t set foot there that year.”

“You weren’t in Rambouillet?”

“I was not in Rambouillet.”

“Well! That is the absolute limit!”

This limit revived, for some unknown reason, a little of the former resentment in the periwinkle eyes that questioned mine. But it was only a fleeting gleam. In vain we tried—in vain we still try—to upset each other by violent arguments, a tone of defiance quite out of keeping with our calm remarks: we soon recover our cordial relations. The powerful bond that was our youthful and mutual hatred can no longer unite us.

With that beautiful blue-eyed woman, whose light chestnut hair was exactly the shade of mine—and with such and such another and still another woman—I have ceased to exchange, shall never more exchange because of a man and through a man that menacing thought, those reflections from mirror to mirror, that tireless emanation which the wronged lover himself… “What are you thinking about?” he asked them. They were thinking about me. “But where are you, please?” he asked me when he saw I was not listening to him. “In the moon?” I was in spirit close to some woman, my invisible presence was upsetting her. We lacked nothing, these women and I: we had every kind of trouble.

… for mine is the very human pleasure of witnessing catastrophes.