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Updated: June 23, 2025
Lerondeau will weep for the old zinc fragment for two days, and it will be a long time before he ceases to look distrustfully at the new trough, and to criticise it in those minute and bitter terms which only a connoisseur can understand or invent. Carre, on the other hand, cannot succeed in carrying along his body by the generous impulse of his soul.
Yet I can hardly imagine that there was once a Marie Lerondeau who was a robust young fellow, standing firm and erect between the handles of a plough. I know him only as a man lying on his back, and I even find it difficult to picture to myself what his shape and aspect will be when we get him on his feet again. Marie did his duty bravely under fire.
And he added: "I saw his slough. Lord! he is bad." Lerondeau has a good memory for medical terms. Yes, he saw Carre's slough. He himself has the like on his posterior and on his heel; but the tear that trembles in the corner of his eye is certainly for Carre. And then, he knows, he feels that HIS wounds are going to heal. But it is bad for Marie to hear another complaining before his own turn.
"Well, if the wretched thing is a nuisance, we shall have to get rid of it." After this consent, we shall no doubt make up our minds to do so. Meanwhile Lerondeau is creeping steadily towards healing. Lying on his back, bound up in bandages and a zinc trough, and imprisoned by cushions, he nevertheless looks like a ship which the tide will set afloat at dawn.
When Marie was better, he raised himself on his elbow, and he understood the extent of his injury more clearly. "I shall want a VERY thick sole," he remarked. Now that Lerondeau can sit up, he, too, can estimate the extent of the damage from above; but he is happy to feel life welling up once more in him, and he concludes gaily: "What I shall want is not a sole, but a little bench."
It was written that you should suffer without purpose and without hope. But I will not let all your sufferings be lost in the abyss. And so I record them thus at length. Lerondeau has been brought down into the garden. I find him there, stretched out on a cane chair, with a little kepi pulled down over his eyes, to shade them from the first spring sunshine.
He talks a little, smokes a good deal, and laughs more. I look at his leg, but he hardly ever looks at it himself; he no longer feels it. He will forget it even more utterly after a while, and he will live as if it were natural enough for a man to live with a stiff, distorted limb. Forget your leg, forget your sufferings, Lerondeau. But the world must not forget them.
Finally, when he is tired of singing, he murmurs softly and regularly: "They don't know how that wretched knee hurts me... they don't know how it hurts me." Lerondeau, who is, and always will be, a little boy compared with Carre, is very poor in the matter of cries. But when he hears his complaints, he checks his own cries, Borrows them.
During the long afternoon, I go and sit between two beds beside Lerondeau. I offer him cigarettes, and we talk. This means that we say nothing, or very little.... But it is not necessary to speak when one has a talk with Lerondeau. Marie is very fond of cigarettes, but what he likes still better is that I should come and sit by him for a bit.
Then I went out of the room, because this was a matter between those two lying on the ground, and had nothing to do with me, a robust person, standing on my feet. Since then, Carre has proved that he had a right to preach courage to young Lerondeau. While the dressing is being prepared, he lies on the ground with the others, waiting his turn, and says very little.
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