That was the past, and now I had just died on the narrow couch of a
Paris lodginghouse, and my wife was crouching on the floor, crying
bitterly. The white light before my left eye was growing dim, but I
remembered the room perfectly. On the left there was a chest of drawers,
on the right a mantelpiece surmounted by a damaged clock without a
pendulum, the hands of which marked ten minutes past ten. The window
overlooked the Rue Dauphine, a long, dark street. All Paris seemed to
pass below, and the noise was so great that the window shook.
We knew nobody in the city; we had hurried our departure, but I was not
expected at the office till the following Monday. Since I had taken to
my bed I had wondered at my imprisonment in this narrow room into which
we had tumbled after a railway journey of fifteen hours, followed by a
hurried, confusing transit through the noisy streets. My wife had nursed
me with smiling tenderness, but I knew that she was anxious. She would
walk to the window, glance out and return to the bedside, looking very
pale and startled by the sight of the busy thoroughfare, the aspect
of the vast city of which she did not know a single stone and which
deafened her with its continuous roar.
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