14 March 1893

I have been keeping this journal for eleven years. I do not know whether it serves any purpose. I know only that writing is the only thing that makes the distance between who I am and who I was feel negotiable. If I stop writing, I fear that the distance will close entirely, and I will be only what I am -- a man who supplies suffering and calls it commerce.

The network continues to expand. This month, 847 grams of morphine left my pharmacy. 2,103 grams of laudanum. 412 grams of chloroform. I track these numbers because they are the only objective measure of my activity. Emotion lies. Numbers do not.

Camille's voice was magnificent last night at the Opéra. She sang the third act of Mignon with a purity that silenced the entire hall for exactly three seconds before the applause began. She looked at me from the stage. I could not tell whether it was real or performance. It did not matter. I applauded with the others, with my hands flat and open, the way one claps when one wishes to participate in something without being visible.

After the performance, I delivered her laudanum tincture. Three drops in warm water, taken thirty minutes before sleep. She drank it without looking at me. She has stopped looking at me during the deliveries. I do not blame her. To look at me is to see the mechanism of her destruction clearly, and she has decided not to see it clearly. This is a rational choice. I respect it.

---

Camille's voice began to fail in November. She told me at dinner, at a small restaurant on the boulevard Malesherbes where the wine is decent and the waiters do not ask questions. She was eating soup -- bouillon, simple, nothing elaborate -- and she stopped halfway through the bowl and set down her spoon and said: "Henri, I cannot reach the high C anymore. Not reliably. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I cannot."

I told her that this was common among singers. I told her that the cough that Dr. Laurent had prescribed my tincture for was likely the cause, and that with careful management -- reduced dosage, regular intervals, periods of abstinence -- she could recover.

She looked at me with eyes that were not angry but tired. "And if I do not want to recover?" she said. "What if I prefer the voice that comes after the tincture to the voice that comes before it? What if the voice after the tincture is truer, because it comes from a place that the voice before the tincture is too afraid to reach?"

I had no answer. I told her this. She nodded, as if she had expected no answer, and finished her soup.

---

Marie-Claire came to the pharmacy on a Tuesday in January. She is a maid at the Opéra, nineteen, with rough hands and a face that is plain in the way that plain faces are sometimes more memorable than pretty ones because they force you to look longer. She is the only person in my orbit who has ever tried to help Camille quit.

"She is dying," Marie-Claire said. She was standing in front of my counter, hands clenched, not crying but close to it. "You know she is dying. You know what the tincture is doing to her. Stop giving it to her."

I listened. I was arranging bottles on the shelf behind the counter -- morphine on the left, laudanum in the center, chloroform on the right -- and I continued to arrange them while she spoke, because the act of arranging gave my hands something to do while my mind processed what she was saying.

"Marie-Claire," I said when she finished, "Camille takes the tincture voluntarily. I am not administering it. I am dispensing it, in accordance with a prescription from Dr. Laurent, for a condition that is well-documented in the medical literature. If you wish to argue with me, argue with the literature."

She stared at me. She did not speak for a long time. Then she said: "You are a monster."

"No," I said. "I am not a monster. Monsters act on passion. I act on calculation. There is a difference."

She left without another word. I finished arranging the bottles. Morphine on the left. Laudanum in the center. Chloroform on the right.

---

I am thirty years old today. My father sent a bottle of brandy and a note that read: "You carry the family name with dignity. The operation is progressing well. Keep up the good work." He signed it "Father," but the handwriting was his secretary's. My father cannot write legibly. He has not written anything in his own hand in ten years. He pays someone to sign his letters. This is one of the many compromises that adulthood requires.

I opened the brandy last night. I poured a glass. I added it to the laudanum. The combination was interesting -- the brandy softened the bitterness of the alkaloid and extended its effects, creating a state that was neither quite清醒 nor quite unconscious, but somewhere in between, in the space where thoughts feel larger than they are and the distance between pain and pleasure seems to collapse. I sat in my chair and watched the gas lamp burn and thought: this is what comfort feels like when it is manufactured. Is it different from natural comfort? The question is meaningless. All comfort is manufactured. All pleasure is purchased. We are all in the same economy.

---

Camille's final performance was on a Friday in April. I had given her a larger dose than usual -- five drops instead of three -- to steady her nerves. She texted me through Marie-Claire before the performance: "Thank you. I can feel it already. The voice is coming back."

She was right. The voice came back with a force and clarity that I have never heard from her, or from any singer, in any theater in Paris. She hit notes that I did not know she could reach -- the highest C I have ever heard from a human voice, sustained for eight full seconds, pure and unwavering, like a blade of light cutting through the darkness of the hall.

The audience rose. Not all of them. Not the aristocrats in the boxes, who remained seated because rising is vulgar. But the gallery -- the standing room, the poor, the students, the women with flowers in their hair -- they all rose, and they cheered, and they called for an encore, and Camille stood at the edge of the stage and smiled and shook her head and walked off into the wings.

She did not come back.

I was in my usual seat -- third row, center -- when she stopped. I saw it happen. She was in the middle of the aria, her hand raised, her mouth open, the note forming -- and then it did not form. The note that should have come did not come. Her hand fell. Her face went blank. The music stopped. The hall went silent. And then the silence was broken by the confused murmur of two thousand people who have never experienced silence in a theater and do not know what to do with it.

She walked off stage and did not return.

Marie-Claire found me in the corridor after the performance. "She stopped singing," she said. Her voice was flat. She had been crying. "She cannot sing anymore. The tincture -- it damaged her vocal cords. Dr. Laurent says it is permanent."

"I know," I said.

"You knew?"

"I suspected."

"You suspected, and you kept giving it to her?"

"She takes it voluntarily."

She looked at me with an expression I have seen only once before -- in the face of a woman whose dog had been run over by a carriage on the rue de Rivoli, and who had stood on the sidewalk and stared at the animal and did not cry and did not speak and did not move for twenty minutes. It was not anger. It was not sorrow. It was the recognition of something irredeemable.

"You are not a monster," she said. "Monsters are more interesting than you. You are just empty."

She walked away. I stood in the corridor of the Opéra, surrounded by the sounds of a crowd that was beginning to leave, and I felt, for the first time in my life, something that was not calculation and was not pleasure and was not pain. It was nothing. It was the absence of everything. It was the condition I had been studying for eleven years, the condition that I had been supplying to hundreds of people in Paris and telling myself was a philosophy, and which was now, finally, reflected back at me with perfect clarity.

I am empty.

---

Camille is in a sanatorium in the countryside near Dieppe. She will live another seven years. She will never sing again. I visit her once a month. She does not speak to me. She looks at the window and watches the sea and does not speak to me. This is fair.

I sit in my pharmacy every day. I dispense prescriptions. I balance the books. I supply the network. 847 grams of morphine. 2,103 grams of laudanum. 412 grams of chloroform.

Last night I closed the ledger and counted the total for the year: 4,287 grams of morphine, 12,003 grams of laudanum, 3,891 grams of chloroform.

I picked up a bottle of laudanum. I poured a glass of water. I added three drops. I drank it.

I sit in my chair. The pharmacy is quiet. The gas lamps burn low. I open my journal to a blank page and write: "Today, I supplied suffering. I will supply it again tomorrow. The world requires my service. I do not enjoy it. But neither do I refuse it. That is the definition of my existence."

The lamp flickers. The page is blank except for these words. Outside, Paris sleeps. I do not. I wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow will be the same. It will always be the same. The ledger will grow thicker. Camille's voice will not return. Marie-Claire will continue to try, and continue to fail. And I will continue to supply.

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