Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

meagerness of his luggage?
    â€œIt’s on the second floor. The elevator doesn’t work at this time of night.… If you’ll come this way …”
    It was a comfortable room, with a small washroom beyond a glass partition. Over the mantelpiece there was a large mirror, and Monsieur Monde looked at himself in it, a long, serious look, shook his head, started to heave a sigh but suppressed it, and took off his somewhat tight-sleeved jacket, his tie, his shirt.
    Then he inspected his lonely room and felt a slight regret, which he hardly dared admit to himself, for not having listened to the woman who had spoken to him a short while before, by the water’s edge.
    Finally he got into bed and pulled the blanket right up to his nose.

3
    Tears were gushing from behind his closed eyelids, swelling them as they streamed forth. They were no ordinary tears. They gushed in a warm, endless flow from some deep spring, they gathered behind the barrier of his lashes and then poured freely down his cheeks, not in separate drops but in zigzagging rivulets like those that run down windowpanes on rainy days; and the patch of wetness beside his chin spread ever wider on his pillow.
    Monsieur Monde could not have been asleep, could not have been dreaming, since he was conscious of a pillow and not of sand. And yet, in his thoughts, he was not lying in the bedroom of some hotel of which he did not even know the name. He was lucid, not with an everyday lucidity, the sort one finds acceptable, but on the contrary the sort of which one subsequently feels ashamed, perhaps because it confers on supposedly commonplace things the grandeur ascribed to them by poetry and religion.
    What was streaming from his whole being, through his two eyes, was all the fatigue accumulated during forty-eight years, and if they were gentle tears, it was because now the ordeal was over.
    He had given up. He had stopped struggling. He had hurried from far away—the train journey no longer existed, there was only a sense of endless flight—he had hurried here, toward the sea, which, vast and blue, more intensely alive than any human being, the soul of the earth, the soul of the world, was breathing peacefully close to him. For, in spite of the pillow, which was real enough but unimportant, he had ended his journey lying by the sea, he had collapsed beside it, exhausted and already pacified, he had lain down full length on warm golden sand, and there was nothing else in the universe but sea and sand, and himself speaking.
    He was speaking without moving his lips, for which he had no need. He was telling of his infinite aching weariness, which was due not to his journey in a train but to his long journey as a man.
    He was ageless now. He could let his lips quiver like a child’s.
    â€œAlways, for as long as I can remember, I’ve had to make such efforts.…”
    No need to go into details here, as when he complained of anything to his wife.
    Hadn’t the servants whispered among themselves, when he was a tiny boy, that he would never be able to walk because he was too fat? He had been bowlegged for quite a long time.
    At school he used to stare intently, painfully, at the letters on the blackboard, and the teacher used to say: “You’re daydreaming again!”
    It may well have been true, for he usually ended by falling asleep, willy-nilly.
    â€œIt’s pointless trying to make him study.…”
    He remembered standing still in a corner of the playground at Stanislas, while all the others were running about, or sitting at his desk ignored by contemptuous teachers.
    And yet, by dint of patience and fierce effort, he had passed his bachot .
    Lord, how tired he was now! And why were the heaviest burdens laid on his shoulders, when he had done no harm to anyone?
    His father, for instance, had never had to make the slightest effort. He played with life, with money, with women, he lived for his pleasure alone, and he