The landau sped along the white road.

‘The station, driver!’

In his head two voices alternated. One, distant and soft, said in the faint, sad voice of the dead, ‘My darling love …’ The other bellowed insistently ‘Papou!’ as accusingly as one yells ‘Stop thief!’ after a robber.

The following night as he went into the club the Comte d’Etreilles stopped him and said: ‘Haven’t seen you for few days. Have you been ill?’

‘Yes, not been too good. I get these migraines, you know, every so often …’

THE LULL-A-BYE

Calm as a millpond and with its surface now burnished by the morning sun, the stretch of the Seine lying directly in front of my house flowed broadly ahead in a long sheet of silver. In the fluttering of the leaves, in the river’s rippling reflections, and palpable in the very air itself, a fresh and happy sense of life renewed was throbbing.

After the postman’s call, the papers were brought to me and with them I sauntered down to the river for a quiet read. In the very first I opened, my eye was drawn to a column entitled ‘Suicide Statistics’ which contained the information that during the previous year alone some 8,500 human beings had taken their own lives.1 Accompanying images sprang immediately to my mind’s eye and I visualized a hideous, self-inflicted massacre of desperate people at the end of their tether. I saw people bleeding, a broken jaw, a smashed skull, a chest shattered by a bullet. I pictured individuals, alone perhaps in some poky hotel room, dying slowly not so much from their wounds as from the relentless pressure of unhappiness in their lives.

I saw some with a slit throat, some disembowelled, the razor or the kitchen knife still clutched in their hand. Others I saw sitting with a box of matches in front of them, and others still with a red-labelled bottle to hand. Motionless, they sat and stared before draining the glass and waiting. Then the contorted face, the twisted lips, the eyes gazing wildly about in terror. So much unimagined pain before the end! One of them stood up to walk, stopped dead in his tracks, clutched his belly, felt his organs consumed by the fire within, till finally he fell unconscious. I saw others hanging from a nail in the wall, from a window catch, an attic rafter, the branch of a tree in the evening rain. I could imagine everything they had been through before reaching their present state – lifeless, and with lolling tongues. I felt the anguish in their hearts as last-minute doubts crept in, as they tied the rope, tested it, slipped the noose over the head and as they finally let go.