Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

“Even though I have taken a thousandth of a second to give her a child and she’s going to take nine months…”

“Pierre!” screeched Hedwige, blushing furiously, “please…”

“Believe me, Monsieur Niox, adjust yourself to madame. I can tell from her aura that she has a good influence on you. Otherwise, you’ll go back to your bad habits. Pfft! Lost like a meteorite in astral space!”

“I can assure you I’m looking after myself, doctor.”

“Good, very good. You’re not alone on our terrestrial globe, you should think of others, of those who do not have your openness of judgement. You’re an intelligent man and you’re letting yourself get caught in the oldest, best-known trap of all: tomorrow, pigs may fly.”

Hedwige wore an inscrutable smile. Regencrantz gave her a crafty look.

“A doctor is allowed to be indiscreet,” he said. “Does Monsieur Niox make you happy? Dare tell me in his presence.”

“You are not indiscreet,” she replied, “and I make no secret of my happiness.”

“I see,” said Regencrantz solemnly. “He makes you happy, but he makes you feel seasick. If I were President of France, I would punish you, Monsieur Niox.”

“Presidents don’t punish, they reprieve.”

“I would sentence you to stand still.”

“Under arrest,” Pierre corrected him.

“No, no! I know your interesting language very well, I said ‘to stand still, to several days not moving’.”9

“Why not for an entire life, like a fakir?”

“That would be a fair punishment. It’s the one St Simeon Stylites inflicted on himself. I’ve got a leaflet about him that I’ll show you. The case of this saint is a curious one.”

“Do you also take replicas of saints?”

The doctor had a good appetite: he made sure he got not just his lunch, but his dinner too. He polished off his third chop, the half-kilo of sautéed potatoes that Pierre piled on his plate, and he droned on knowledgeably:

“Before climbing up his pillar, Simeon was a successful man.”

“A runner… a womaniser,” laughed Pierre.

“Ha, ha, very good!10 Yes, a runner who was admired and very popular. He resolved everything in Rome. Princes came from the far ends of the earth to consult him, and kings used to disguise themselves so that they were not seen asking his advice; all they then had to do was to make use of this advice in order to keep their people happy. His fame spread even to the Persians and the Scythians. Since he was modest and wanted to avoid all those bores who were preventing him from concentrating on his salvation, he dedicated himself to solitude and hoisted himself up onto a pillar six cubits high, then onto another of twenty-two cubits, and finally onto a third that rose thirty-two cubits above the crowd.”

“For someone who didn’t care for fame…” Pierre intervened.

“They sent up his food by a rope. He remained night and day, stuck up there, not moving, in the same position, because his platform was too narrow for him to stretch out on it.”

“Were there railings?” asked Hedwige, who felt giddy listening to this story.

“That’s much debated… I also have a leaflet about a Lombard deacon who tried to imitate the Stylite in Dresden. The cold caused his toenails to fall out and the bishops convened to make him come down from his pillar. Do you understand, my dear fellow, the lesson these sages are giving you?”

“Regencrantz, you bore me with your sermons, which are outdated in any case. You’re out of touch; you’d do better to ask Hedwige questions and, above all, to eat. Another slice of foie gras?”

Pierre emptied the entire dish onto his guest’s plate.

“With pleasure. So, madame, your husband is no longer a velocipedist? Have you cured him? Ha! ha!”

Hedwige held out both hands, palms up, in a gesture of charming modesty; her supple fingers reached outwards like a cornucopia, and only her golden eyes were laughing while, out of politeness, her expression remained serious, for she found the little doctor excessively comical. He looked less like a little doctor, she thought, than a large microbe.

“I am cured, as you say,” Pierre continued, “even though this word does not mean anything since I was never ill — a drop of red wine, doctor? — I am cured or, rather, I have adopted a new approach. You remember, Regencrantz, I often spoke to you about this bath of slowness in which France wallows. We continue to think of ourselves as light-footed and speedy without noticing that every other country has overtaken us. At the Olympic Games, I suffered a martyr’s death watching those whom we persist in calling ‘clumsy Germans’, as in eighteenth-century fairy tales, outperform us in the preliminary heats. Nowadays, it’s we who churn out copious one-thousand-page theses and they who turn everything upside down with the Essay on Relativity , which has three pages. Here people reckon that’s not being serious. The French think only of their own centre of gravity; they have positioned it so low (left of centre) that they haven’t any spurt left. Our army is nothing but a load of office scribblers on wheels; we have put springs everywhere to deaden the shock; but where has anyone seen a racing vehicle that has springs? The sprinter would be killed at the first bend. In any case, we don’t make sprinters; we are artists, we build statues of sprinters… a shot of brandy, Regencrantz?”

“With pleasure… and then?”

“Well, afterwards… I met Hedwige, daughter of the slow-paced Boisrosé family, and she taught me to love slowness. There can be no question that speed is a dead end: the ambassadors who used carriages brought peace with them, while ministers who travel by air bring war. Just go to the cinema and watch an accident in slow motion, as God might have arranged it: it’s just a succession of caresses; the plane skims the ground; the ground smashes the aircraft to pieces with more delicacy than the gourmet peels his fig, and the flames that are about to send the passengers up in smoke resemble a fire that has not been lit properly. It is speed, which by bringing two people intimately closer together, produces the deadly shock… All this, my good friend, has made me reflect and it has occurred to me that by rushing about too quickly I could be well on the way to affecting my feelings for my wife and my most precious concerns might become like hard corks.”

Thoughtful all of a sudden, Pierre looked at Hedwige.

“One question, Regencrantz…” he said briskly.

“I’m listening.”

Pierre reconsidered:

“No. Pretend I said nothing.”

They moved to the café. Pierre took the doctor to one side. And very hurriedly, in a low voice:

“This is what I wanted to ask you: Hedwige will have her baby in October. Just imagine that, not till October! I feel as though I could never wait that long. Isn’t there a way…”

“What way? What do you mean?” asked Regencrantz stiffly. “Nature moves at her own pace. Be like her.”

“Ah!” said Pierre, disappointed, as he turned his head towards Hedwige to make sure she wasn’t listening. “Forgive my ignorance, doctor, I wanted so much to save time… I’m longing to know what sex it is… The fortune tellers always get it wrong. Might there not be some scientific procedure…”

“At four months, some Americans dye the mother’s cells and those of the child at the same time, and as a result, know its sex.”

“That’s wonderful! In less than two months, I could know!”

“Yes, but I have to tell you that it’s not recommended at all. In Europe, you won’t find any doctor who is prepared to do it. You’ll have to make do with fortune tellers.”

“Too bad,” Pierre sighed, resigned to the fact. “I’ll do as I always do, I’ll wait.”