Free Vertigo by Pierre Boileau

is… Here’s a taxi… Eurydice chérie … You don’t know how happy you’ve made me.’
    He seized her hand and kissed her gloved fingers.
    ‘And stop looking back into the past,’ he said, shutting the door on her.
    He was tired out, with that peaceful exhaustion he had known as a boy when he had been running the whole day along the banks of the Loire.

FIVE
    The whole morning Flavières had been waiting for Madeleine’s telephone call. At two o’clock he was at their usual rendezvous at the Etoile. She didn’t come. He rang Gévigne up at his office, only to be told he wouldn’t be back from Le Havre till ten o’clock the following morning.
    It was a horrible day, and the night was just as bad. He couldn’t sleep. Well before dawn, he was up, wandering about in his room assailed by ghastly suppositions which he laboured to disprove. No. Nothing could have happened to Madeleine. It was impossible, unthinkable.
    Yet he could think of nothing else!
    He clenched his fists, trying to fight down the rising panic within him. Of course he’d been a fool: he should never have made that declaration to Madeleine. They had been disloyal to Gévigne, both of them. Who knew to what lengths remorse might not drive her, unstable as she was? As for him, he detested himself. For there was nothing with which he could reproach Gévigne. Gévigne had trusted him, had committed Madeleine to his care.
    It was time to call off the whole stupid business. High time… But when Flavières tried to envisage life without Madeleine, he crumbled. His jaw dropped; he had to lean on his desk to prevent himself falling. He felt like hurling insults at God, destiny, the chance that had thrown her across his path, theoccult powers—whatever they might be—which had woven this hideous tangle. He was doomed to be an outcast. The army had rejected him, and now…
    He slumped down in the armchair Gévigne had sat in on that first visit. Wasn’t he, Flavières, making rather heavy weather of it? Passion, a real passion, doesn’t develop in a couple of weeks. With his chin in his hands, he looked coldly at himself. What did he know about love, he who had never yet loved anybody? Of course he had hankered after it, like a poor wretch gazing into a shop-window; he had, so to speak, made passes at it. But there had always been between the good things of life and himself a sort of hard, cold obstacle. And when he had entered the police it had seemed that he was now committed to the defence of all those things in the shop-window, which were thus, for him, more forbidden than ever. Madeleine was one of them. No, he had not the right to stretch out his hand. He couldn’t pass into the camp of the thieves… All right, then. He must give her up… Coward! How could he ever enjoy his share of life if he knuckled under at the first hint of difficulty? Perhaps Madeleine was on the point of falling in love with him.
    ‘Enough of this!’ he said out loud. ‘Enough of this! Why can’t they leave me in peace?’
    To dope himself, he made some strong coffee. From the kitchen he drifted back to his office, then back to the kitchen again. This strange new pain which gnawed at his entrails, constricted his chest making it difficult to breathe, and prevented him thinking clearly about anything, was the thing they called love. He felt himself ready to commit every extravagance and stupidity, and was almost proud of it in spite of his misery. How had he been able to receive that string of clients, studyso many dossiers, and listen to so many confessions, without understanding this elemental thing, his mind obstinately closed to the truth? He had felt like shrugging his shoulders when a client, with tears in his eyes, had cried:
    ‘But I love her!… I love her!’
    He had felt like answering:
    ‘Go on. You make me laugh with that stuff about love. Love indeed! A childish dream! Very pretty, no doubt, and exquisitely pure, but unrealistic. I’m just not