I should add that a few days before my own first attack of the disease which nearly killed me, I distinctly remember having seen a three-master pass, flying the flag of Brazil … I told you that my house is situated near the river bank … No doubt he was hidden somewhere aboard that ship. That’s all I have to say, gentlemen.’

Dr Marrande rose to his feet and murmured, ‘I am in as much of a quandary as you all. I cannot tell if this man is mad or whether we both are … or whether … man’s successor is already in our midst …’

DUCHOUX

The atmosphere inside his club as the Baron de Mordiane descended the stairs was like a hothouse and he left his fur coat open. Now, as the great front door closed behind him, the cold pierced through him painfully like a sudden stab of sorrow. Not only had he lost a little money that evening but also he had been having a little stomach trouble lately and had to be careful what he ate. He was just about to go home when the thought of his huge, empty apartment, where his valet would be asleep in the ante-room, and of his bathroom where water would be simmering on the gas burner in readiness for his evening ablutions, and finally of the ancient, sombre bed waiting for him like a mortuary slab, cut deep into him even more painfully than the icy air.

For some years now the burden of solitude had begun to weigh heavily on him as on many another bachelor grown old. There was a time when he had been strong, agile and full of life, when he spent all day on sports and all night at parties. Now he felt weighed down by everything and nothing gave him very much pleasure any more. Exercise tired him too much, suppers and even dining out he found a pain, and women now bored him as much as they had entertained him before.

The monotony of the same kind of evening – with the same friends in the same places at the club where they played the same games in which losses and gains cancelled each other out after a while; the same conversations on the same topics, the same badinage, the same jokes and the same gibes about the same women – sickened him almost to the point of suicide. He could no longer go on with his empty life which was as regular as clockwork and equally meaningless and which, while it appeared on the surface an easy, carefree existence, was actually becoming a real burden. He was looking for something that would soothe and calm him, something comfortable. He had no idea what it might be.