Free The Counterfeiters by André Gide Page A

to be done in all shipwrecks, but that naturally one didn’t mention it.
    “I think I fainted then; at any rate, I can’t remember anything more, just as one remains deaf for a long time after a noise that has been too tremendous.
    “And when I came to myself on board the X., which picked us up, I realized that I was no longer the same, that I never could again be the same sentimental young girl I had been before; I realized that a part of myself had gone down with the
Bourgogne
; that henceforth there would be a whole heap of delicate feelings whose fingers and hands I should hack away to prevent them from climbing into my heart and wrecking it.”
    She looked at Vincent out of the corner of her eye and, with a backward twist of her body, went on: “It’s a habit one must get into.”
    Then, as her hair, which she had pinned up loosely, was coming down and falling over her shoulders, she rose, went up to a mirror and began to re-arrange it, talking as she did so:
    “When I left America a little later, I felt as if I were the golden fleece starting off in search of a conqueror. I may sometimes have been foolish … I maysometimes have made mistakes—perhaps I am making one now in talking to you like this—but you, on your side, don’t imagine that because I have given myself to you, you have won me. Make certain of this—I abominate mediocrity and I can love no one who isn’t a conqueror. If you want me, it must be to help you to victory; if it’s only to be pitied and consoled and made much of … no, my dear boy—I’d better say so at once—
I’m
not the person you need—it’s Laura.”
    She said all this without turning round and while she was continuing to arrange her rebellious locks, but Vincent caught her eye in the glass.
    “May I give you my answer this evening?” he said, getting up and taking off his oriental garments to get into his day clothes. “I must go home quickly now so as to catch my brother Olivier before he goes out. I’ve got something to say to him.”
    He said it by way of apology, to give colour to his departure; but when he went up to Lilian, she turned round to him smiling, and so lovely that he hesitated.
    “Unless I leave a line for him to get at lunch time,” he added.
    “Do you see a great deal of him?”
    “Hardly anything. No, it’s an invitation for this afternoon, which I’ve got to pass on to him.”
    “From Robert?… 
Oh! I see!
1  …” she said, smiling oddly. “That’s a person, too, I must talk to you about.… All right! Go at once. But come back at six o’clock, because at seven his car is coming to take us out to dinner in the Bois.”
    Vincent walks home, meditating as he goes; he realizes that from the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.
    1 In English in the original.

VIII :
Edouard and Laura
    Il faut choisir d’aimer les femmes ou de les connaître; il n’y a pas de milieu
.
    C HAMFORT .
    Edouard, as he sits in the Paris express, is reading Passavant’s new book,
The Horizontal Bar
, which he has just bought at the Dieppe railway station. No doubt he will find the book waiting for him when he gets to Paris, but Edouard is impatient. People are talking of it everywhere. Not one of his own books has ever had the honour of figuring on station book-stalls. He has been told, it is true, that it would be an easy matter to arrange, but he doesn’t care to. He repeats to himself that he hasn’t the slightest desire to see his books in railway stations—but it is the sight of Passavant’s book that makes him feel the need of repeating it. Everything that Passavant does, and everything that other people do round about him, rubs Edouard up the wrong way: the newspaper articles, for instance, in which his book is praised up to the skies. It’s as if it were a wager; in every one of the three papers that he buys on landing, there is a eulogy of
The