IT WAS IABLE: the st of bitter almonds always re-minded him of the fate of ued love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he ehe still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic oppo in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold ide.
He found the corpse covered with a bla on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the develop-ing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dah a snow-white chest, ao him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn was just beginning to illumihe stifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him t ohe authority of death. The other win-dows, as well as every other k in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, whicreased the oppressive heavi-ness.
A ter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumblier trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixative solution, was o the body. There were old magazines and neers every-where, piles of ives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand. Although the air ing through the windourified the atmosphere, there still remained for the one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love iter almonds. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory iion, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence.
A polispector had e forward with a very young medical student who was pleting his forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity that on this occasion had more of dolehan veion, for no one was unaware of the degree of his friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.
The emieacher shook hands with each of them, as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general ical medie, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the bla with the tips of his index finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspe. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was -pletely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, looking fifty years older than he had the night before. He had luminous pupils, yellowish beard and hair, and an old scar sewn with baling knots across his stomach. The use of crutches had made his torso and arms as broad as a galley slave』s, but his defenseless legs looked like an orphan』s. Dr. Juvenal Urbino studied him for a moment, his heart ag as it rarely had in the long years of his futile struggle against death.
「Damn fool,」 he said. 「The worst was over.」
He covered him again with the bla and regained his academic dignity. His eightieth birthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once agaied the temptation to retire. He had said: 「I』ll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventual