XXXI
Marriages were frequent during this spring time. Often at evening, during those enervating June nights, Jean would meet these marriage processions meandering across the sands in long fantastic trains. Every one was singing, and the chorus of all these falsetto, monkey-like voices had a syncopated accompaniment of handclapping and tom-toms. There was something ponderously voluptuous, brutishly sensual in these songs and this negro gaiety.
Jean used often to visit his friend Nyaor at Guet n’dar, and the scenes of Yolof family life and domesticity disturbed him.... How lonely he felt, cut off from his own people in this accursed country!... He thought of Jeanne Méry, the girl whom he loved with the pure affection of childhood.... Alas! he had only been six months in Africa.... More than four years to wait until he saw her again!... He began to say to himself that perhaps the courage to endure his solitary existence might fail him, that soon at all costs he might need someone to help him to pass his term of exile.... But whom?...
Fatou-gaye perhaps?... Oh come!... what profanation of himself!... Was he to resemble his comrades, old Virginie’s customers?... To maltreat like them little black girls?... He had a kind of self-respect, instinctive modesty, which had hitherto preserved him from such degradation; he could never stoop so low.