FILIAL SENTIMENTS OF A PARRICIDE
the telescopes of the invisible, which become at best measures to gauge
one's advancing age. One feels indeed, when one sees the unsteady
gaze of old men, the gaze worn out with endless adaptation to a time
so different, often so distant from their own, blindfold itself in order
to recall the past, one feels indeed that the curve of their gaze, crossing
"the shadow of the days" they have lived, comes to rest several feet
before them, so it seems, but
in
reality fifty or sixty years behind. I
remember how the enchanting eyes of Princess Mathilde were
trans–
formed when they fixed themselves on images of the great men and
magnificent scenes of the beginning of the century. Such images,
emanating from her memories, she saw and we shall never see. At
the moments when my eyes met hers, I had a sense of the super–
natural; her gaze, by some feat of resurrection, firmly and mysteriously
joined the present to the past.
Pleasant and rather distinguished, I said, and it is thus that, in
one of the more vivid images my memory had stored of
him,
I resaw
Henri van Blarenberghe. But after receiving this letter, I retouched
the image in the depths of my memory by interpreting, in terms of
a profounder sensibility, a mind less mundane, certain details of his
glance and bearing which could, indeed, permit of a more sympa–
thetic and arresting meaning than I had at first allowed. Then,
recently, at the request of a friend, I asked him for information con–
cerning an employee of the Chemins de fer de l'Est (M. van Blaren–
berghe was president of the Board of Directors). Because he had
ignored my change of address, his reply, written on the twelfth of last
January, did not reach me until the seventeenth, not fifteen days ago,
less than eight days before the drama.
DEAR SrR,
48,
RUE DE LA BrENFAISANCE
January 12, 1907
I have asked the Compagnie de !'Est for the whereabouts of X, but
they have no record of him. Are you right about the name?-if
so,
the
man has disappeared from the company without a trace ; he must have
had a very provisional and minor connection.
I am distressed at the news of your health since the sad and untimely
death of your parents.
If
it is any consolation to you, I have suffered
many physical and moral ailments in attempting to recover from the
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