"MauriceBlanchot-DeathSentence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blanchot Maurice)

will represent only the shell of an enigma, and I hope those who love me will
have the courage to destroy it, without trying to learn what it means. I will
give more details about this later. If these details are not there, I beg them
not to plunge unexpectedly into my few secrets, or read my letters if any are
found, or look at my photographs if any turn up, or above all open what is
closed; I ask them to destroy everything without knowing what they are
destroying, in the ignorance and spontaneity of true affection.

Because of something I did, someone had a very vague suspicion of this "proof"
towards the end of 1940. Since she knew almost nothing of the story, she was not
even able to skim the truth of it. She only guessed that something was shut up
in the closet. (I lived in a hotel then.) She saw the closet, and made a move to
open it, but at that moment she was overcome by a strange attack. Falling on the
bed, she began to tremble incessantly; all night long she trembled without
saying anything; at dawn, she began breathing hoarsely. It went on for about an
hour, then sleep overpowered her and gave her a chance to recover. (That person,
who was still very young, had more good sense than sensitivity. Even she
complained about her unfailing calm. But at that moment her rationality deserted
her. I should add that although she had never had an attack before, it could
have been the effect of an unsuccessful poisoning attempt two or three years
earlier; sometimes poison is reawakened, stirred up, like a dream, in a body
that has been very badly shaken.)

The principal dates should be found in a little notebook locked in my desk. The
only date I can be sure of is the 13th of October - Wednesday, the 13th of
October. But that is hardly important. Since September I had been living in
Arcachon. It was during the Munich crisis. I knew she was as ill as anyone could
be. I had stopped off in Paris at the beginning of September, as I was returning
from a trip, and had gone to see her doctor. He gave her three more weeks to
live. Yet she got up every day; she lived on equal terms with an exhausting
fever, she shivered for hours, but in the end she overcame the fever. On the 5th
or 6th of October, I think, she was still going for rides in the car with her
sister, along the Champs Elysees.

Although she was several months older than I was, she had a very young face
which the disease had hardly touched. It is true that she wore make-up, but
without make-up she seemed even younger, she was almost too young, so that the
main effect of the disease was to give her the features of an adolescent. Only
her eyes, which were larger, blacker, and more brilliant than they should have
been - and sometimes pushed from their sockets by the fever - had an abnormal
fixity. In a photograph taken during September her eyes are so large and so
serious that one must fight against their expression in order to see her smile,
though her smile is very conspicuous.

After I spoke to the doctor, I told her, "He gives you another month."

"Well, I'll tell that to the queen mother, who doesn't believe I'm really ill."

I don't know whether she wanted to live or die. During the last few months, the
disease she had been fighting for ten years had been making her life more