The other obeyed quietly, put on his hat, took his stick, went out: and the two of them, arm in arm, went down towards the Seine under the clear stars.

Perfumed breaths of air were wafted in the warm night, for all the gardens of the neighbourhood were at that season full of flowers, whose scents, asleep through the day, seemed to awake at the approach of night and to exhale their fragrance, mingled with the light breezes that passed in the shade.

The avenue was deserted and silent with its two rows of gas jets in line up to the Arc de Triomphe. But lower down Paris muttered in its red fog. It was a sort of continuous roar to which as in answer came, from the plain afar, the whistle of a train rushing full steam ahead, speeding across the provinces to the sea.

The outside air, striking the two men on the face, startled them at first, shook the doctor’s equilibrium, and accentuated in Caravan the dizzy spells which had been overtaking him since dinner. He went on like a man in a dream, his spirit torpid, paralysed, without any vibrant grief, seized by a sort of moral torpor which kept him from suffering, finding even a comfort which the lukewarm exhalations spreading in the night increased.

When they were at the bridge, they turned to the right, and the river swept on to their faces a fresh breath of air. It was flowing, melancholy and quiet, behind a curtain of high poplars; and the stars seemed to swim in the water, moving with the current. A thin whitish mist floating on the bank at the farther side brought a wet scent to their lungs, and Caravan stopped brusquely, struck by this smell of the river which stirred in his heart very old memories.

And suddenly he saw again his mother, long ago, in his childhood, on her knees before their door, down in Picardy, washing in the thin trickle of water which flowed through the garden the heaped up linen beside her. He heard her beating-stick in the quiet silence of the country, her voice crying: ‘Alfred, bring me some soap.’ And he felt this same flowing scent, this same mist rising from the dripping earth, this marshy vapour whose savour had remained with him, unforgettable, which was coming back to him precisely on this very evening when his mother had just died.

He stopped rigid in another attack of passionate despair. It was like a blaze of light illuminating in a single flash the whole extent of his misfortune; and the encounter with this wandering breeze threw him into the black abyss of irremediable sorrow. He felt his heart torn in pieces by this endless separation. His life was cut in half: and all his youth disappeared, swallowed up in this death. All the ‘long ago’ was finished: all the memories of adolescence were vanished: nobody any more could speak to him of long- ago things, the people that he had formerly known, his native country, himself, the intimacy of this past life: it was a part of his being that had ceased to exist: it was for the other part to die now.

And the file past of awakened memories began. He saw again ‘mamma’, younger, dressed in clothes shabby by long use, worn so long that they seemed inseparable from her person; he found her again in a thousand forgotten episodes; with expressions that had been effaced from his memory, her gestures, her intonations, her habits, her whims, her fits of temper, the lines of her face, the movements of her thin figure, all the familiar attitudes that she would take no more.

And, clutching the doctor, he groaned. His flabby legs trembled: all his fat body was shaken by sobs, and he stammered: ‘My mother, my poor mother!’

But his companion, still drunk, and dreaming of finishing the evening in haunts that he frequented in secret, was impatient at this sharp attack of sorrow, and made him sit down on the grass by the river, and almost at once left him on the pretext of seeing a patient.

Caravan wept for a long time: then, when he was at the end of his tears, when all his sufferings had, so to speak, poured out, he experienced again a sense of comfort, of repose, a sudden tranquillity.