MICHEL TOURNIER
175
into the apartment. Finally she halted, seemed to hesitate, and then
collapsed. While she was in her death throes Lucien possessed her
for the last time.
None of this was premeditated, and yet from then on his acts
followed one another as if they were part of a long-matured plan. He
dressed, and rushed back to his office. Then he returned to the apart–
ment with the insulting, threatening letters he had dictated to Bob
and put them in a drawer in Edith's dresser. Finally he went home
and immediately dialed Bob's number. The telephone rang for a long
time. At last a grumpy, sleepy voice answered.
"Murderer! You've strangled your wife!" was all that Lucien
said, in a disguised voice. Then he repeated this accusation three
times, for Bob was showing the most obtuse lack of understanding.
Two days later the papers carried this news item and went on
to say that the suspect number one - the victim's husband, whose
letters found at the scene of the crime left no doubt about his inten–
tions - had taken to flight, but that his arrest was no doubt immi–
nent.
Lucien dissimulated himself within his character of the ill–
favored clerk, a suffering, mocked little man, but the memory of the
superman he had become through renouncing the extra four inches
his special shoes added to his height haunted him day and night.
Because he had finally had the courage of his own monstrosity, he
had seduced a woman. She had deceived him. He had killed her,
and his rival, the husband, doubling as a ridiculous tall man, was
everywhere being hunted by the police! His life was a masterpiece,
and there were moments when he was overwhelmed with breathtak–
ing joy at the thought that he only had to take his shoes off to become
immediately what he really was, a man apart, superior to the gigan–
tic riffraff, an irresistible seducer and infallible killer! All the misery
of the past years was due to his having refused the fearsome choice
that was his destiny. In cowardly fashion he had shrunk from cross–
ing the Rubicon into dwarfism, as he might have hesitated at the
threshold of a temple. But he had finally dared to take the step. The
slight quantitative difference that he had accepted in deciding to re–
ject his platform shoes in Edith's bathroom had brought about a
radical qualitative metamorphosis. The horrible quality of dwarfism
had infused him and turned him into a fabulous monster. In the
grayness of the lawyer's office where he spent his days he was haun–
ted by dreams of despotism. By chance, he had read a document
