Free The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas (fils) Page A

the shivering increased, and he had a true nervous fit, in the middle of which, for fear of frightening me, he murmured while pressing my hand, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing; I just wish I could cry.”
    I heard his chest heave, and a flush spread to his eyes, but tears would not come.
    I made him breathe the smelling salts that had served me, and when we arrived at his place, only the shivering still manifested itself.
    With help from the servant I put him to bed, had a big fire lit in his bedroom, and ran to find my doctor, to whom I related what had just happened.
    He hurried over.
    Armand was purple. He was delirious, and stammered incoherent words, in which only the name Marguerite could be distinctly heard.
    â€œWell?” I said to the doctor when he had examined the patient.
    â€œHe has brain fever, no more, no less, and that’s a good thing, because I believe, God forgive me, that otherwise he would have gone mad. Luckily the physical illness will kill the psychological illness, and in one month he will be delivered from one, and perhaps from the other.”

CHAPTER VII
    Illnesses like the one Armand had contracted are convenient in that if they don’t kill you on the spot, they are quickly conquered.
    Fifteen days after the events I have just described, Armand was much better, and we had formed a firm friendship. I had hardly left his room the entire time he was sick.
    Spring had scattered its flowers in profusion, its leaves, its birds and its songs, and my friend’s window opened cheerfully onto his garden, whose restorative scents drifted up to him.
    The doctor had given him permission to leave his bed, and we often chatted, sitting by the open window, at the hour when the sun is at its hottest, from noon until two o’clock.
    I took care not to speak to him of Marguerite, still fearing that the name might awaken a dormant unhappy memory in the seemingly calm patient; but Armand, on the contrary, seemed to take pleasure in speaking of her, not the way he had done in the past, with tears in his eyes, but with a gentle smile that reassured me about his mental state.
    I had noticed that since his last visit to the cemetery, where the spectacle had taken place that had brought on this violent crisis, his psychological pain seemed to have been dwarfed by the illness, and for him the death of Marguerite no longer belonged to the past. A sort of consolation had come from the certainty he had obtained, and to chase away the dark image that frequently came to him, he sank into happy memories of his relationship with Marguerite, and seemed to want to think of none but those.
    His body was too worn out from his attack and from his recovery from the fever to permit him to surrender to violent emotion, and the joys of the springtime and of the world around him led his thoughts, despite himself, to cheerful visions.
    He still stubbornly refused to tell his family of the danger he was in, and until he had recovered, his father was unaware of his illness.
    One night we had stayed by the window longer than usual; the weather had been magnificent, and the sun had set in a twilight of shimmering azure and gold. Although we were in Paris, the foliage that surrounded us seemed to isolate us from the world, even if from time to time the sound of a carriage faintly interrupted our conversation.
    â€œIt was at about this time of the year, on the evening of a day like this one, that I met Marguerite,” Armand told me, caught up in his thoughts and not in what I was telling him.
    I said nothing.
    He turned toward me and said, “I must tell you this story; you will get a book out of it that no one will believe, but that perhaps will be interesting to write.”
    â€œYou can tell me about it later, my friend,” I said. “You’re not well enough yet.”
    â€œThe evening is warm, I’ve eaten my chicken breast,” he said to me, smiling. “I don’t have a fever,