I held my tongue, and thought over those words.  Oh, ethics!  Oh, logic!  Oh, wisdom!  At his age!  So they deprived him of his only remaining pleasure out of regard for his health!  His health!  What would he do with it, inert and trembling wreck that he was?  They were taking care of his life, so they said.  His life?  How many days?  Ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred?  Why?  For his own sake?  Or to preserve for some time longer the spectacle of his impotent greediness in the family.

There was nothing left for him to do in this life, nothing whatever.  He had one single wish left, one sole pleasure; why not grant him that last solace until he died?

After we had played cards for a long time, I went up to my room and to bed; I was low-spirited and sad, sad, sad! and I sat at my window.  Not a sound could be heard outside but the beautiful warbling of a bird in a tree, somewhere in the distance.  No doubt the bird was singing in a low voice during the night, to lull his mate, who was asleep on her eggs.  And I thought of my poor friend’s five children, and pictured him to myself, snoring by the side of his ugly wife.

SUICIDES

To Georges Legrand.

Hardly a day goes by without our reading a news item like the following in some newspaper: 

“On Wednesday night the people living in No. 40 Rue de-----,
were awakened by two successive shots.  The explosions seemed to come from
the apartment occupied by M. X——.  The door was broken in and
the man was found bathed in his blood, still holding in one hand the
revolver with which he had taken his life.

“M.  X——­was fifty-seven years of age, enjoying a comfortable income, and had everything necessary to make him happy.  No cause can be found for his action.”

What terrible grief, what unknown suffering, hidden despair, secret wounds drive these presumably happy persons to suicide?  We search, we imagine tragedies of love, we suspect financial troubles, and, as we never find anything definite, we apply to these deaths the word “mystery.”

A letter found on the desk of one of these “suicides without cause,” and written during his last night, beside his loaded revolver, has come into our hands.  We deem it rather interesting.  It reveals none of those great catastrophes which we always expect to find behind these acts of despair; but it shows us the slow succession of the little vexations of life, the disintegration of a lonely existence, whose dreams have disappeared; it gives the reason for these tragic ends, which only nervous and high-strung people can understand.

Here it is: 

“It is midnight.  When I have finished this letter I shall kill myself.  Why?  I shall attempt to give the reasons, not for those who may read these lines, but for myself, to kindle my waning courage, to impress upon myself the fatal necessity of this act which can, at best, be only deferred.