Tropisms Read Online Free

in the advertisements who, with one finger in the air, smilingly recommends Saponite, the best of soap powders, or the model Salamander: economy, security, comfort.
    â€œThere is nothing,” he said, “you see I went to look for myself, because I won’t be bluffed; nothing that I myself have not already studied clinically countless times, that I have not catalogued and explained.
    â€œThey should not upset you. Look, in my hands they are like trembling, nude little children, and I am holding them up to you in the hollow of my hand, as though I were their creator, their father, I have emptied them for you of their power and their mystery. I have tracked down, harried what was miraculous about them.
    â€œNow they hardly differ from the intelligent, curious and amusing eccentrics who come and tell me their interminable stories, to get me to help them, appreciate them, and reassure them.
    â€œYou can no more be affected than my daughters are when they entertain their girl friends in their mother’s parlor, and chatter and laugh gaily without being concerned with what I am saying to my patients in the next room.”
    This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighborhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, the métros , in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed.
    Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square.
    .
    XII
    They could be seen walking in front of the shop windows, the upper part of their bodies very erect, slightly thrust forward, their stiff legs a bit apart, and their small feet, arched above their very high heels, knocking hard against the pavement.
    With their handbags under their arms, their gauntlet gloves, their little regulation “bibis” at just the right angle on their heads, their long stiff lashes set in bulging lids, their hard eyes, they trotted along in front of the shop windows, stopped all of a sudden, ferreted about with an avid, knowing look.
    Very valiantly, for they had great powers of endurance, they had been hunting in all the shops for a “little sport suit,” in heavy tweed with a pattern, “a sort of little pattern, I can see it perfectly, with little gray and blue checks . . . Oh! you haven’t any! Where can I get it?” and they had resumed their hunt.
    That little blue suit . . . that little gray suit . . . their wide-stretched eyes ferreted about in search of it . . . Little by little it took stronger hold of them, it engrossed them imperatively, became indispensable, became an end in itself, they no longer knew why, but which they felt obliged to achieve at any cost.
    Bravely they went trotting about, climbed four or five flights of dark stairs (nothing could stop them now) “to firms that specialized in English tweeds, where you were sure to find it” and, a bit annoyed, they were beginning to grow weary (they were about to lose heart), they begged: “No, no, no, you know perfectly what I mean, with sort of little checks, and diagonal stripes . . . No, that’s not it, that’s not it at all . . . Oh, dear! you haven’t got it? Where on earth am I going to find it? I’ve looked everywhere . . . Oh, there, perhaps? You think so? Very well. I’ll go there . . . Good-bye . . . Yes, of course, I’m extremely sorry, yes I’ll come again . . .”; and they smiled nevertheless, pleasantly,