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Title: The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII.

Author: Guy de Maupassant

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, VOLUME VIII. ***

The Works of
Guy de Maupassant

VOLUME VIII

PIERRE ET JEAN
AND OTHER STORIES

ILLUSTRATED

NATIONAL LIBRARY COMPANY

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1909, By

BIGELOW, SMITH & CO.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Pierre Et Jean. 1
Dreams 184
Moonlight 189
The Corsican Bandit 195
A Dead Woman's Secret 200
The Cake 206
A Lively Friend 213
The Orphan 221
The Blind Man 230
A Wife's Confession 235
Relics of the Past 242
The Peddler 247
The Avenger 257
All Over 265
Letter Found on a Drowned Man 274
Mother and Son 282
The Spasm 290
A Duel 298
The Love of Long Ago 305
An Uncomfortable Bed 311
A Warning Note 315
The Horrible 324
A New Year's Gift 333
Beside a Dead Man 342
After 348
A Queer Night in Paris 356

Boitelle 369

OF "THE NOVEL"
do not intend in these pages to put in a plea for this little novel. On the
contrary, the ideas I shall try to set forth will rather involve a criticism
of the class of psychological analysis which I have undertaken in Pierre
et Jean. I propose to treat of novels in general.
I am not the only writer who finds himself taken to task in the same terms
each time he brings out a new book. Among many laudatory phrases, I
invariably meet with this observation, penned by the same critics: "The
greatest fault of this book is that it is not, strictly speaking, a novel."
The same form might be adopted in reply:
"The greatest fault of the writer who does me the honor to review me is that
he is not a critic."
For what are, in fact, the essential characteristics of a critic?
It is necessary that, without preconceived notions, prejudices of "School,"
or partisanship for any class of artists, he should appreciate, distinguish, and
explain the most antagonistic tendencies and the most dissimilar
temperaments, recognizing and accepting the most varied efforts of art.
Now the Critic who, after reading Manon Lescaut, Paul and Virginia, Don
Quixote, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Werther, Elective Affinities
(Wahlverwandschaften), Clarissa Harlowe, Émile, Candide, Cinq-Mars,
René, Les Trois Mousquetaires, Mauprat, Le Père Goriot, La Cousine Bette,
Colomba, Le Rouge et le Noir, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Notre-Dame de
Paris, Salammbo, Madame Bovary, Adolphe, M. de Camors, l'Assommoir,
Sapho, etc., still can be so bold as to write "This or that is, or is not, a
novel," seems to me to be gifted with a perspicacity strangely akin to
incompetence. Such a critic commonly understands by a novel a more or
less improbable narrative of adventure, elaborated after the fashion of a
piece for the stage, in three acts, of which the first contains the exposition,
the second the action, and the third the catastrophe or dénouement.

And this method of construction is perfectly admissible, but on condition
that all others are accepted on equal terms.
Are there any rules for the making of a novel, which, if we neglect, the tale
must be called by another name? If Don Quixote is a novel, then is Le
Rouge et le Noir a novel? If Monte Christo is a novel, is l'Assommoir? Can
any conclusive comparison be drawn between Goethe's Elective Affinities,
The Three Mousqueteers, by Dumas, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, M. de
Camors by Octave Feuillet, and Germinal, by Zola? Which of them all is
The Novel? What are these famous rules? Where did they originate? Who
laid them down? And in virtue of what principle, of whose authority, and of
what reasoning?
And yet, as it would appear, these critics know in some positive and
indisputable way what constitutes a novel, and what distinguishes it from
other tales which are not novels. What this amounts to is that without being
producers themselves they are enrolled under a School, and that, like the
writers of novels, they reject all work which is conceived and executed
outside the pale of their esthetics. An intelligent critic ought, on the
contrary, to seek out everything which least resembles the novels already
written, and urge young authors as much as possible to try fresh paths.
All writers, Victor Hugo as much as M. Zola, have insistently claimed the
absolute and incontrovertible right to compose—that is to say, to imagine or
observe—in accordance with their individual conception of originality, and
that is a special manner of thinking, seeing, understanding, and judging.
Now the critic who assumes that "the novel" can be defined in conformity
with the ideas he has based on the novels he prefers, and that certain
immutable rules of construction can be laid down, will always find himself
at war with the artistic temperament of a writer who introduces a new
manner of work. A critic really worthy of the name ought to be an analyst,
devoid of preferences or passions; like an expert in pictures, he should
simply estimate the artistic value of the object of art submitted to him. His
intelligence, open to everything, must so far supersede his individuality as
to leave him free to discover and praise books which as a man he may not
like, but which as a judge he must duly appreciate.

But critics, for the most part, are only readers; whence it comes that they
almost always find fault with us on wrong grounds, or compliment us
without reserve or measure.
The reader, who looks for no more in a book than that it should satisfy the
natural tendencies of his own mind, wants the writer to respond to his
predominant taste, and he invariably praises a work or a passage which
appeals to his imagination, whether idealistic, gay, licentious, melancholy,
dreamy, or positive, as "striking" or "well written."
The public as a whole is composed of various groups, whose cry to us
writers is:
"Comfort me."
"Amuse me."
"Touch me."
"Make me dream."
"Make me laugh."
"Make me shudder."
"Make me weep."
"Make me think."
And only a few chosen spirits say to the artist:
"Give me something fine in any form which may suit you best, according to
your own temperament."
The artist makes the attempt; succeeds or fails.
The critic ought to judge the result only in relation to the nature of the
attempt; he has no right to concern himself about tendencies. This has been
said a thousand times already; it will always need repeating.
Thus, after a succession of literary schools which have given us deformed,
superhuman, poetical, pathetic, charming or magnificent pictures of life, a

realistic or naturalistic school has arisen, which asserts that it shows us the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
All these theories of art must be recognized as of equal interest, and we
must judge the works which are their outcome solely from the point of view
of artistic value, with an a priori acceptance of the general notions which
gave birth to each. To dispute the author's right to produce a poetical work
or a realistic work, is to endeavor to coerce his temperament, to take
exception to his originality, to forbid his using the eyes and wits bestowed
on him by Nature. To blame him for seeing things as beautiful or ugly, as
mean or epic, as gracious or sinister, is to reproach him for not being made
on this or that pattern, and for having eyes which do not see exactly as ours
see.
Let him be free by all means to conceive of things as he pleases, provided
he is an artist. Let us rise to poetic heights to judge an idealist, and then
prove to him that his dream is commonplace, ordinary, not mad or
magnificent enough. But if we judge a materialistic writer, let us show him
wherein the truth of life differs from the truth in his book.
It is self-evident that schools so widely different must have adopted
diametrically opposite processes in composition.
The novelist who transforms truth—immutable, uncompromising, and
displeasing as it is—to extract from it an exceptional and delightful plot,
must necessarily manipulate events without an exaggerated respect for
probability, molding them to his will, dressing and arranging them so as to
attract, excite, or affect the reader. The scheme of his romance is no more
than a series of ingenious combinations, skillfully leading to the issue. The
incidents are planned and graduated up to the culminating point and effect
of the conclusion, which is the crowning and fatal result, satisfying the
curiosity aroused from the first, closing the interest, and ending the story so
completely that we have no further wish to know what happened on the
morrow to the most engaging actors in it.
The novelist who, on the other hand, proposes to give us an accurate picture
of life, must carefully eschew any concatenation of events which might
seem exceptional. His aim is not to tell a story to amuse us, or to appeal to
our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the occult and

deeper meaning of events. By dint of seeing and meditating he has come to
regard the world, facts, men, and things in a way peculiar to himself, which
is the outcome of the sum total of his studious observation. It is this
personal view of the world which he strives to communicate to us by
reproducing it in a book. To make the spectacle of life as moving to us as it
has been to him, he must bring it before our eyes with scrupulous
exactitude. Hence he must construct his work with such skill, it must be so
artful under so simple a guise, that it is impossible to detect and sketch the
plan, or discern the writer's purpose.
Instead of manipulating an adventure and working it out in such a way as to
make it interesting to the last, he will take his actor or actors at a certain
period of their lives, and lead them by natural stages to the next. In this way
he will show either how men's minds are modified by the influence of their
environment, or how their passions and sentiments are evolved; how they
love or hate, how they struggle in every sphere of society, and how their
interests clash—social interests, pecuniary interests, family interests,
political interests. The skill of his plan will not consist in emotional power
or charm, in an attractive opening or a stirring catastrophe, but in the happy
grouping of small but constant facts from which the final purpose of the
work may be discerned. If within three hundred pages he depicts ten years
of a life so as to show what its individual and characteristic significance
may have been in the midst of all the other human beings which surrounded
it, he ought to know how to eliminate from among the numberless trivial
incidents of daily life all which do not serve his end, and how to set in a
special light all those which might have remained invisible to less clear-
sighted observers, and which give his book caliber and value as a whole.
It is intelligible that this method of construction, so unlike the old manner
which was patent to all, must often mislead the critics, and that they will not
all detect the subtle and secret wires—almost invisibly fine—which certain
modern artists use instead of the one string formerly known as the "plot."
In a word, while the novelist of yesterday preferred to relate the crises of
life, the acute phases of the mind and heart, the novelist of to-day writes the
history of the heart, soul, and intellect in their normal condition. To achieve
the effects he aims at—that is to say, the sense of simple reality, and to
point the artistic lesson he endeavors to draw from it—that is to say, a

revelation of what his contemporary man is before his very eyes, he must
bring forward no facts that are not irrefragible and invariable.
But even when we place ourselves at the same point of view as these
realistic artists, we may discuss and dispute their theory, which seems to be
comprehensively stated in these words: "The whole Truth and nothing but
the Truth." Since the end they have in view is to bring out the philosophy of
certain constant and current facts, they must often correct events in favor of
probability and to the detriment of truth; for
"Le vrai peut quelquefois, n'être pas le vraisemblable." (Truth may
sometimes not seem probable.)
The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a commonplace
photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more
complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is
out of the question; it would require at least a volume for each day to
enumerate the endless, insignificant incidents which crowd our existence. A
choice must be made—and this is the first blow to the theory of "the whole
truth."
Life, moreover, is composed of the most dissimilar things, the most
unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless,
without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and
contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous
facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such
characteristic details as are of use to it, from this life overladen with
chances and trifles, and reject everything else, everything by the way.
To give an instance from among a thousand. The number of persons who,
every day, meet with an accidental death, all over the world, is very
considerable. But how can we bring a tile onto the head of an important
character, or fling him under the wheels of a vehicle in the middle of a
story, under the pretext that accident must have its due?
Again, in life there is no difference of foreground and distance, and events
are sometimes hurried on, sometimes left to linger indefinitely. Art, on the
contrary, consists in the employment of foresight, and elaboration in
arranging skillful and ingenious transitions, in setting essential events in a

strong light, simply by the craft of composition, and giving all else the
degree of relief, in proportion to their importance, requisite to produce a
convincing sense of the special truth to be conveyed.
"Truth" in such work consists in producing a complete illusion by following
the common logic of facts and not by transcribing them pell-mell, as they
succeed each other.
Whence I conclude that the higher order of Realists should rather call
themselves Illusionists.
How childish it is, indeed, to believe in this reality, since to each of us the
truth is in his own mind, his own organs. Our own eyes and ears, taste and
smell, create as many different truths as there are human beings on earth.
And our brains, duly and differently informed by those organs, apprehend,
analyze, and decide as differently as if each of us were a being of an alien
race. Each of us, then, has simply his own illusion of the world—poetical,
sentimental, cheerful, melancholy, foul, or gloomy, according to his nature.
And the writer has no other mission than faithfully to reproduce this
illusion, with all the elaborations of art which he may have learnt and have
at his command. The illusion of beauty—which is merely a conventional
term invented by man! The illusion of ugliness—which is a matter of
varying opinion! The illusion of truth—never immutable! The illusion of
depravity—which fascinates so many minds! All the great artists are those
who can make other men see their own particular illusion.
Then we must not be wroth with any theory, since each is simply the
outcome, in generalizations, of a special temperament analyzing itself.
Two of these theories have more particularly been the subject of discussion,
and set up in opposition to each other instead of being admitted on an equal
footing: that of the purely analytical novel, and that of the objective novel.
The partisans of analysis require the writer to devote himself to indicating
the smallest evolutions of a soul, and all the most secret motives of our
every action, giving but a quite secondary importance to the act and fact in
itself. It is but the goal, a simple milestone, the excuse for the book.
According to them, these works, at once exact and visionary, in which
imagination merges into observation, are to be written after the fashion in

which a philosopher composes a treatise on psychology, seeking out causes
in their remotest origin, telling the why and wherefore of every impulse,
and detecting every reaction of the soul's movements under the promptings
of interest, passion, or instinct.
The partisans of objectivity—odious word—aiming, on the contrary, at
giving us an exact presentment of all that happens in life, carefully avoid all
complicated explanations, all disquisitions on motive, and confine
themselves to let persons and events pass before our eyes. In their opinion,
psychology should be concealed in the book, as it is in reality, under the
facts of existence.
The novel as conceived of on these lines gains in interest; there is more
movement in the narrative, more color, more of the stir of life.
Hence, instead of giving long explanations of the state of mind of an actor
in the tale, the objective writer tries to discover the action or gesture which
that state of mind must inevitably lead to in that personage, under certain
given circumstances. And he makes him so demean himself from one end of
the volume to the other, that all his actions, all his movements shall be the
expression of his inmost nature, of all his thoughts, and all his impulses or
hesitancies. Thus they conceal psychology instead of flaunting it; they use it
as the skeleton of the work, just as the invisible bony framework is the
skeleton of the human body. The artist who paints our portrait does not
display our bones.
To me it seems that the novel executed on this principle gains also in
sincerity. It is, in the first place, more probable, for the persons we see
moving about us do not divulge to us the motives from which they act.
We must also take into account the fact that, even if by close observation of
men and women we can so exactly ascertain their characters as to predict
their behavior under almost any circumstances, if we can say decisively:
"Such a man, of such a temperament, in such a case, will do this or that";
yet it does not follow that we could lay a finger, one by one, on all the
secret evolutions of his mind—which is not our own; all the mysterious
pleadings of his instincts—which are not the same as ours; all the mingled
promptings of his nature—in which the organs, nerves, blood, and flesh are
different from ours.

However great the genius of a gentle, delicate man, guileless of passions
and devoted to science and work, he never can so completely transfuse
himself into the body of a dashing, sensual, and violent man, of exuberant
vitality, torn by every desire or even by every vice, as to understand and
delineate the inmost impulses and sensations of a being so unlike himself,
even though he may very adequately foresee and relate all the actions of his
life.
In short, the man who writes pure psychology can do no more than put
himself in the place of all his puppets in the various situations in which he
places them. It is impossible that he should change his organs, which are the
sole intermediary between external life and ourselves, which constrain us
by their perceptions, circumscribe our sensibilities, and create in each of us
a soul essentially dissimilar to all those about us. Our purview and
knowledge of the world, and our ideas of life, are acquired by the aid of our
senses, and we cannot help transferring them, in some degree, to all the
personages whose secret and unknown nature we propose to reveal. Thus, it
is always ourselves that we disclose in the body of a king or an assassin, a
robber or an honest man, a courtesan, a nun, a young girl, or a coarse
market woman; for we are compelled to put the problem in this personal
form: "If I were a king, a murderer, a prostitute, a nun, or a market woman,
what should I do, what should I think, how should I act?" We can only vary
our characters by altering the age, the sex, the social position, and all the
circumstances of life, of that ego which nature has in fact inclosed in an
insurmountable barrier of organs of sense. Skill consists in not betraying
this ego to the reader, under the various masks which we employ to cover it.
Still, though on the point of absolute exactitude, pure psychological
analysis is impregnable, it can nevertheless produce works of art as fine as
any other method of work.
Here, for instance we have the Symbolists. And why not? Their artistic
dream is a worthy one; and they have this especially interesting feature: that
they know and proclaim the extreme difficulty of art.
And, indeed, a man must be very daring or foolish to write at all nowadays.
And so many and such various masters of the craft, of such multifarious
genius, what remains to be done that has not been done, or what to say that

has not been said? Which of us all can boast of having written a page, a
phrase, which is not to be found—or something very like it—in some other
book? When we read, we who are so soaked in (French) literature that our
whole body seems as it were a mere compound of words, do we ever light
on a line, a thought, which is not familiar to us, or of which we have not
had at least some vague forecast?
The man who only tries to amuse his public by familiar methods, writes
confidently, in his candid mediocrity, works intended only for the ignorant
and idle crowd. But those who are conscious of the weight of centuries of
past literature, whom nothing satisfies, whom everything disgusts because
they dream of something better, to whom the bloom is off everything, and
who always are impressed with the uselessness, the commonness of their
own achievements—these come to regard literary art as a thing unattainable
and mysterious, scarcely to be detected save in a few pages by the greatest
masters.
A score of phrases suddenly discovered thrill us to the heart like a startling
revelation; but the lines which follow are just like all other verse, the further
flow of prose is like all other prose.
Men of genius, no doubt, escape this anguish and torment because they bear
within themselves an irresistible creative power. They do not sit in
judgment on themselves. The rest of us, who are no more than persevering
and conscientious workers, can only contend against invincible
discouragement by unremitting effort.
Two men by their simple and lucid teaching gave me the strength to try
again and again: Louis Bouilhet and Gustave Flaubert.
If I here speak of myself in connection with them, it is because their
counsels, as summed up in a few lines, may prove useful to some young
writers who may be less self-confident than most are when they make their
début in print. Bouilhet, whom I first came to know somewhat intimately
about two years before I gained the friendship of Flaubert, by dint of telling
me that a hundred lines—or less—if they are without a flaw and contain the
very essence of the talent and originality of even a second-rate man, are
enough to establish an artist's reputation, made me understand that
persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of the craft, might, in some happy

hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm, by the fortunate occurrence of a
subject in perfect concord with the tendency of our mind, lead to the
production of a single work, short but as perfect as we can make it. Then I
learned to see that the best-known writers have hardly ever left us more
than one such volume; and that needful above all else is the good fortune
which leads us to hit upon and discern, amid the multifarious matter which
offers itself for selection, the subject which will absorb all our faculties, all
that is of worth in us, all our artistic powers.
At a later date, Flaubert, whom I had occasionally met, took a fancy to me. I
ventured to show him a few attempts. He read them kindly and replied: "I
cannot tell whether you will have any talent. What you have brought me
proves a certain intelligence; but never forget this, young man: talent—as
Chateaubriand[1] says—is nothing but long patience. Go and work."
[1] The idea did not originate with Chateaubriand.

I worked; and I often went to see him, feeling that he liked me, for he had
taken to calling me, in jest, his disciple. For seven years I wrote verses, I
wrote tales, I even wrote a villainous play. Nothing of all this remains. The
master read it all; then, the next Sunday while we breakfasted together, he
would give me his criticisms, driving into me by degrees two or three
principles which sum up the drift of his long and patient exhortations: "If
you have any originality," said he, "you must above all things bring it out; if
you have not you must acquire it."
Talent is long patience.
Everything you want to express must be considered so long, and so
attentively, as to enable you to find some aspect of it which no one has yet
seen and expressed. There is an unexplored side to everything, because we
are wont never to use our eyes but with the memory of what others before
us have thought of the things we see. The smallest thing has something
unknown in it; we must find it. To describe a blazing fire, a tree in a plain,
we must stand face to face with that fire or that tree, till to us they are
wholly unlike any other fire or tree. Thus we may become original.
Then, having established the truth that there are not in the whole world two
grains of sand, two flies, two hands, or two noses absolutely alike, he would

make me describe in a few sentences some person or object, in such a way
as to define it exactly, and distinguish it from every other of the same race
or species.
"When you pass a grocer sitting in his doorway," he would say, "a porter
smoking his pipe, or a cab stand, show me that grocer and that porter, their
attitude and their whole physical aspect, including, as indicated by the skill
of the portrait, their whole moral nature, in such a way that I could never
mistake them for any other grocer or porter; and by a single word give me
to understand wherein one cab horse differs from fifty others before or
behind it."
I have explained his notions of style at greater length in another place; they
bear a marked relation to the theory of observation I have just laid down.
Whatever the thing we wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but
one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it. We must seek
till we find this noun, this verb, and this adjective, and never be content
with getting very near it, never allow ourselves to play tricks, even happy
ones, or have recourse to sleights of language to avoid a difficulty. The
subtlest things may be rendered and suggested by applying the hint
conveyed in Boileau's line:
"D'un mot mis en sa place enseigna le pouvoir." "He taught the power of a
word put in the right place."
There is no need for an eccentric vocabulary to formulate every shade of
thought—the complicated, multifarious, and outlandish words which are
put upon us nowadays in the name of artistic writing; but every
modification of the value of a word by the place it fills must be
distinguished with extreme clearness. Give us fewer nouns, verbs, and
adjectives, with almost inscrutable shades of meaning, and let us have a
greater variety of phrases, more variously constructed, ingeniously divided,
full of sonority and learned rhythm. Let us strive to be admirable in style,
rather than curious in collecting rare words.
It is in fact more difficult to bend a sentence to one's will and make it
express everything—even what it does not say, to fill it full of implications
of covert and inexplicit suggestions, than to invent new expressions, or seek

out in old and forgotten books all those which have fallen into disuse and
lost their meaning, so that to us they are as a dead language.
The French tongue, to be sure, is a pure stream, which affected writers
never have and never can trouble. Each age has flung into the limpid waters
its pretentious archaisms and euphuisms, but nothing has remained on the
surface to perpetuate these futile attempts and impotent efforts. It is the
nature of the language to be clear, logical, and vigorous. It does not lend
itself to weakness, obscurity, or corruption.
Those who describe without duly heeding abstract terms, those who make
rain and hail fall on the cleanliness of the window panes, may throw stones
at the simplicity of their brothers of the pen. The stones may indeed hit their
brothers, who have a body, but will never hurt simplicity—which has none.
Guy de Maupassant.
La Guillette, Etretat, September, 1887.

PIERRE ET JEAN
CHAPTER I

schah!" exclaimed old Roland suddenly, after he had remained
motionless for a quarter of an hour, his eyes fixed on the water,
while now and again he very slightly lifted his line sunk in the sea.
Madame Roland, dozing in the stern by the side of Madame Rosémilly, who
had been invited to join the fishing-party, woke up, and turning her head to
look at her husband, said:
"Well, well! Gérome."
And the old fellow replied in a fury:
"They do not bite at all. I have taken nothing since noon. Only men should
ever go fishing. Women always delay the start till it is too late."
His two sons, Pierre and Jean, who each held a line twisted round his
forefinger, one to port and one to starboard, both began to laugh, and Jean
remarked:
"You are not very polite to our guest, father."
M. Roland was abashed, and apologized.
"I beg your pardon, Madame Rosémilly, but that is just like me. I invite
ladies because I like to be with them, and then, as soon as I feel the water
beneath me, I think of nothing but the fish."
Madame Roland was now quite awake, and gazing with a softened look at
the wide horizon of cliff and sea.
"You have had good sport, all the same," she murmured.
But her husband shook his head in denial, though at the same time he
glanced complacently at the basket where the fish caught by the three men

were still breathing spasmodically, with a low rustle of clammy scales and
struggling fins, and dull, ineffectual efforts, gasping in the fatal air. Old
Roland took the basket between his knees and tilted it up, making the silver
heap of creatures slide to the edge that he might see those lying at the
bottom, and their death-throes became more convulsive, while the strong
smell of their bodies, a wholesome reek of brine, came up from the full
depths of the creel. The old fisherman sniffed it eagerly, as we smell at
roses, and exclaimed:
"Cristi! But they are fresh enough!" and he went on: "How many did you
pull out, doctor?"
His eldest son, Pierre, a man of thirty, with black whiskers trimmed square
like a lawyer's, his moustache and beard shaved away, replied:
"Oh, not many; three or four."
The father turned to the younger. "And you, Jean?" said he.
Jean, a tall fellow, much younger than his brother, fair, with a full beard,
smiled and murmured:
"Much the same as Pierre—four or five."
Every time they told the same fib, which delighted father Roland. He had
hitched his line round a row-lock, and folding his arms he announced:
"I will never again try to fish after noon. After ten in the morning it is all
over. The lazy brutes will not bite; they are taking their siesta in the sun."
And he looked round at the sea on all sides, with the satisfied air of a
proprietor.
He was a retired jeweler who had been led by an inordinate love of
seafaring and fishing to fly from the shop as soon as he had made enough
money to live in modest comfort on the interest of his savings. He retired to
le Havre, bought a boat, and became an amateur skipper. His two sons,
Pierre et Jean, had remained at Paris to continue their studies, and came for
the holidays from time to time to share their father's amusements.
On leaving school, Pierre, the elder, five years older than Jean, had felt a
vocation to various professions and had tried half a dozen in succession,

but, soon disgusted with each in turn, he started afresh with new hopes.
Medicine had been his last fancy, and he had set to work with so much
ardor that he had just qualified after an unusually short course of study, by a
special remission of time from the minister. He was enthusiastic, intelligent,
fickle, but obstinate, full of Utopias and philosophical notions.
Jean, who was as fair as his brother was dark, as deliberate as his brother
was vehement, as gentle as his brother was unforgiving, had quietly gone
through his studies for the law and had just taken his diploma as a licentiate,
at the time when Pierre had taken his in medicine. So they were now having
a little rest at home, and both looked forward to settling at Havre if they
could find a satisfactory opening.
But a vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies which grow up
between brothers or sisters and slowly ripen till they burst, on the occasion
of a marriage perhaps, or of some good fortune happening to one of them,
kept them on the alert in a sort of brotherly and non-aggressive animosity.
They were fond of each other, it is true, but they watched each other. Pierre,
five years old when Jean was born, had looked with the eyes of a little
petted animal at that other little animal which had suddenly come to lie in
his father's and mother's arms and to be loved and fondled by them. Jean,
from his birth, had always been a pattern of sweetness, gentleness, and good
temper, and Pierre had by degrees begun to chafe at everlastingly hearing
the praises of this great lad whose sweetness in his eyes was indolence,
whose gentleness was stupidity, and whose kindliness was blindness. His
parents, whose dream for their sons was some respectable and
undistinguished calling, blamed him for so often changing his mind, for his
fits of enthusiasm, his abortive beginnings, and all his ineffectual impulses
toward generous ideas and the liberal professions.
Since he had grown to manhood they no longer said in so many words:
"Look at Jean and follow his example," but every time he heard them say
"Jean did this—Jean does that," he understood their meaning and the hint
the words conveyed.
Their mother, an orderly soul, a thrifty and rather sentimental woman of the
middle class, with the soul of a soft-hearted book-keeper, was constantly
quenching the little rivalries between her two big sons to which the petty

events of their life in common gave rise day by day. Another little
circumstance, too, just now disturbed her peace of mind, and she was in
fear of some complication; for in the course of the winter, while her boys
were finishing their studies, each in his own line, she had made the
acquaintance of a neighbor, Mme. Rosémilly, the widow of a captain of a
merchantman who had died at sea two years before. The young widow—
quite young, only three-and-twenty—a woman of strong intellect who knew
life by instinct as the free animals do, as though she had seen, gone through,
understood, and weighed every conceivable contingency, and judged them
with a wholesome, strict, and benevolent mind, had fallen into the habit of
calling to work or chat for an hour in the evening with these friendly
neighbors, who would give her a cup of tea.
Father Roland, always goaded on by his seafaring craze, would question
their new friend about the departed captain; and she would talk of him, and
his voyages, and his old-world tales, without hesitation, like a resigned and
reasonable woman who loves life and respects death.
The two sons on their return, finding the pretty widow quite at home in the
house forthwith began to court her, less from any wish to charm her than
from the desire to cut each other out.
Their mother, being practical and prudent, sincerely hoped that one of them
might win the young widow, for she was rich; and then she would have
liked that the other should not be grieved.
Mme. Rosémilly was fair, with blue eyes, a mass of light waving hair,
fluttering at the least breath of wind, and an alert, daring, pugnacious little
way with her, which did not in the least answer to the sober method of her
mind.
She already seemed to like Jean best, attracted, no doubt, by an affinity of
nature. This preference, however, she betrayed only by an almost
imperceptible difference of voice and look and also by occasionally asking
his opinion. She seemed to guess that Jean's views would support her own,
while those of Pierre must inevitably be different. When she spoke of the
doctor's ideas on politics, art, philosophy, or morals, she would sometimes
say: "Your crotchets." Then he would look at her with the cold gleam of an

accuser drawing up an indictment against woman—all women, poor weak
things.
Never till his sons came home had M. Roland invited her to join his fishing
expeditions, nor had he ever taken his wife; for he liked to put off before
daybreak, with his ally, Captain Beausire, a master mariner retired, whom
he had first met on the quay at high tides and with whom he had struck up
an intimacy, and the old sailor Papagris, known as Jean Bart, in whose
charge the boat was left.
But one evening of the week before, as Mme. Rosémilly, who had been
dining with them, remarked, "It must be great fun to go out fishing," the
jeweler, flattered on his passion, and suddenly fired with the wish to impart
it, to make a convert after the manner of priests, exclaimed: "Would you
like to come?"
"To be sure I should."
"Next Tuesday?"
"Yes, next Tuesday."
"Are you the woman to be ready to start at five in the morning?"
She exclaimed in horror:
"No, indeed: that is too much."
He was disappointed and chilled, suddenly doubting her true vocation.
However, he said:
"At what hour can you be ready?"
"Well—at nine?"
"Not before?"
"No, not before. Even that is very early."
The old fellow hesitated; he certainly would catch nothing, for when the sun
has warmed the sea the fish bite no more; but the two brothers had eagerly
pressed the scheme, and organized and arranged everything there and then.

So on the following Tuesday the Pearl had dropped anchor under the white
rocks of Cape la Héve; they had fished till mid-day, then they had slept
awhile, and then fished again without catching anything; and then it was
that father Roland, perceiving, rather late, that all that Mme. Rosémilly
really enjoyed and cared for was the sail on the sea, and seeing that his lines
hung motionless, had uttered in a spirit of unreasonable annoyance, that
vehement "Tschah!" which applied as much to the pathetic widow as to the
creatures he could not catch.
Now he contemplated the spoil—his fish—with the joyful thrill of a miser;
and seeing as he looked up at the sky that the sun was getting low: "Well,
boys," said he, "suppose we turn homeward."
The young men hauled in their lines, coiled them up, cleaned the hooks and
stuck them into corks, and sat waiting.
Roland stood up to look out like a captain:
"No wind," said he. "You will have to pull, young 'uns."
And suddenly extending one arm to the northward, he exclaimed:
"Here comes the packet from Southampton."
Away over the level sea, spread out like a blue sheet, vast and sheeny and
shot with flame and gold, an inky cloud was visible against the rosy sky in
the quarter to which he pointed, and below it they could make out the hull
of the steamer, which looked tiny at such a distance. And to the southward
other wreaths of smoke, numbers of them, could be seen, all converging
toward the Havre pier, now scarcely visible as a white streak with the light-
house, upright, like a horn, at the end of it.
Roland asked: "Is not the Normandie due to-day?" And Jean replied:
"Yes, to-day."
"Give me my glass. I fancy I see her out there."
The father pulled out the copper tube, adjusted it to his eye, sought the
speck, and then, delighted to have seen it, exclaimed:

"Yes, yes, there she is. I know her two funnels. Would you like to look,
Mme. Rosémilly?"
She took the telescope and directed it toward the Atlantic horizon, without
being able, however, to find the vessel, for she could distinguish nothing—
nothing but blue, with a colored halo round it, a circular rainbow—and then
all manner of queer things, winking eclipses which made her feel sick.
She said as she returned the glass:
"I never could see with that thing. It used to put my husband in quite a rage;
he would stand for hours at the window watching the ships pass."
Old Roland, much put out, retorted:
"Then it must be some defect in your eye, for my glass is a very good one."
Then he offered it to his wife.
"Would you like to look?"
"No, thank you. I know beforehand that I could not see through it."
Mme. Roland, a woman of eight-and-forty, but who did not look it, seemed
to be enjoying this excursion and this waning day more than any of the
party.
Her chestnut hair was only just beginning to show streaks of white. She had
a calm, reasonable face, a kind and happy way with her which it was a
pleasure to see. Her son Pierre was wont to say that she knew the value of
money, but this did not hinder her from enjoying the delights of dreaming.
She was fond of reading, of novels and poetry, not for their value as works
of art, but for the sake of the tender melancholy mood they would induce in
her. A line of poetry, often but a poor one, often a bad one, would touch the
little chord, as she expressed it, and give her the sense of some mysterious
desire almost realized. And she delighted in these faint emotions which
brought a little flutter to her soul, otherwise as strictly kept as a ledger.
Since settling at Havre she had become perceptibly stouter, and her figure,
which had been very supple and slight, had grown heavier.

This day on the sea had been delightful to her. Her husband, without being
brutal, was rough with her, as a man who is the despot of his shop is apt to
be rough, without anger or hatred; to such men to give an order is to swear.
He controlled himself in the presence of strangers, but in private he let
loose and gave himself terrible vent, though he was himself afraid of every
one. She, in sheer horror of the turmoil, of scenes, of useless explanations,
always gave way and never asked for anything; for a very long time she had
not ventured to ask Roland to take her out in the boat. So she had joyfully
hailed this opportunity, and was keenly enjoying the rare and new pleasure.
From the moment when they started she surrendered herself completely
body and soul, to the soft, gliding motion over the waves. She was not
thinking; her mind was not wandering through either memories or hopes; it
seemed to her as though her heart, like her body, was floating on something
soft and liquid and delicious which rocked and lulled it.
When their father gave the word to return, "Come, take your places at the
oars!" she smiled to see her sons, her two great boys, take off their jackets
and roll up their shirt-sleeves on their bare arms.
Pierre, who was the nearest to the two women, took the stroke oar, Jean the
other, and they sat waiting till the skipper should say: "Give way!" For he
insisted on everything being done according to strict rule.
Both at once, as if by a single effort, they dipped the oars and lay back,
pulling with all their might, and then a struggle began to display their
strength. They had come out easily, under sail, but the breeze had died
away, and the masculine pride of the two brothers was suddenly aroused by
the prospect of measuring their powers. When they went out alone with
their father they plied the oars without any steering, for Roland would be
busy getting the lines ready, while he kept a lookout in the boat's course,
guiding it by a sign or a word: "Easy, Jean, and you, Pierre, put your back
into it." Or he would say, "Now, then, number one; come, number two—a
little elbow grease." Then the one who had been dreaming pulled harder, the
one who had got excited eased down, and the boat's head came round.
But to-day they meant to display their biceps. Pierre's arms were hairy,
somewhat lean but sinewy; Jean's were round and white and rosy, and the
knot of muscles moved under the skin.

At first Pierre had the advantage. With his teeth set, his brow knit, his legs
rigid, his hands clenched on the oar, he made it bend from end to end at
every stroke, and the Pearl was veering landward. Father Roland, sitting in
the bows, so as to leave the stern seat to the two women, wasted his breath
shouting, "Easy, number one; pull harder, number two!" Pierre pulled
harder in his frenzy, and "number two" could not keep time with his wild
stroke.
At last the skipper cried: "Stop her!" The two oars were lifted
simultaneously, and then by his father's orders Jean pulled alone for a few
minutes. But from that moment he had it all his own way; he grew eager
and warmed to his work, while Pierre, out of breath and exhausted by his
first vigorous spurt, was lax and panting. Four times running father Roland
made them stop while the elder took breath, so as to get the boat into her
right course again. Then the doctor humiliated and fuming, his forehead
dropping with sweat, his cheeks white, stammered out:
"I cannot think what has come over me; I have a stitch in my side. I started
very well, but it has pulled me up."
Jean asked: "Shall I pull alone with both oars for a time?"
"No, thanks, it will go off."
And their mother, somewhat vexed, said:
"Why, Pierre, what rhyme or reason is there in getting in such a state. You
are not a child."
And he shrugged his shoulders and set to once more.
Mme. Rosémilly pretended not to see, not to understand, not to hear. Her
fair head went back with an engaging little jerk every time the boat moved
forward, making the fine wayward hairs flutter about her temples.
But father Roland presently called out:
"Look, the Prince Albert is catching us up!"
They all looked round. Long and low in the water, with her two raking
funnels and two yellow paddle-boxes like two round cheeks, the

Southampton packet came plowing on at full steam, crowded with
passengers under open parasols. Its hurrying, noisy paddle-wheels beating
up the water, which fell again in foam, gave it an appearance of haste as of
a courier pressed for time, and the upright stem cut through the water,
throwing up two thin translucent waves which glided off along the hull.
When it had come quite near the Pearl, father Roland lifted his hat, the
ladies shook their handkerchiefs, and half a dozen parasols eagerly waved
on board the steamboat responded to this salute as she went on her way,
leaving behind her a few broad undulations on the still and glassy surface of
the sea.
There were other vessels, each with its smoky cap, coming in from every
part of the horizon toward the short white jetty, which swallowed them up,
one after another, like a mouth. And the fishing barks and lighter craft with
broad sails and slender masts, stealing across the sky in tow of
inconspicuous tugs, were coming in, faster and slower, toward the
devouring ogre, who from time to time seemed to have had a surfeit, and
spewed out to the open sea another fleet of steamers, brigs, schooners, and
three-masted vessels with their top-weight of tangled antlers. The hurrying
steam-ships flew off to the right and left over the smooth bosom of the
ocean, while sailing vessels, cast off by the pilot-tugs which had hauled
them out, lay motionless, dressing themselves from the mainmast to the
fore-top in canvas, white or brown, and ruddy in the setting sun.
Mme. Roland, with her eyes half-shut, murmured: "Good heavens, how
beautiful the sea is!"
And Mme. Rosémilly replied with a long sigh, which, however, had no
sadness in it:
"Yes, but it is sometimes very cruel, all the same."
Roland exclaimed:
"Look, there is the Normandie just going in. A big ship, isn't she?"
Then he described the coast opposite, far, far away, on the other side of the
mouth of the Seine—that mouth extended over twenty kilometers, said he.
He pointed out Villerville, Trouville, Houlgate, Luc, Arromanches, the little

river of Caen, and the rocks of Calvados which make the coast unsafe as far
as Cherbourg. Then he enlarged on the question of the sand banks in the
Seine, which shift at every tide so that the pilots of Quillebœuf are at fault if
they do not survey the channel every day. He bid them notice how the town
of Havre divided Upper from Lower Normandy. In Lower Normandy the
shore sloped down to the sea in pasture-lands, fields, and meadows. The
coast of Upper Normandy, on the contrary, was steep, a high cliff, ravined,
cleft and towering, forming an immense white rampart all the way to
Dunkirk, while in each hollow a village or a port lay hidden: Etretat,
Fécamp, Saint-Valery, Tréport, Dieppe, and the rest.
The two women did not listen. Torpid with comfort and impressed by the
sight of the ocean covered with vessels rushing to and fro like wild beasts
about their den, they sat speechless, somewhat awed by the soothing and
gorgeous sunset. Roland alone talked on without end; he was one of those
whom nothing can disturb. Women, whose nerves are more sensitive,
sometimes feel, without knowing why, that the sound of useless speech is as
irritating as an insult.
Pierre and Jean, who had calmed down, were rowing slowly, and the Pearl
was making for the harbor, a tiny thing among those huge vessels.
When they came alongside of the quay, Papagris, who was waiting there,
gave his hand to the ladies to help them out, and they took the way into the
town. A large crowd—the crowd which haunts the pier every day at high
tide—was also drifting homeward. Mme. Roland and Mme. Rosémilly led
the way, followed by the three men. As they went up the rue de Paris they
stopped now and then in front of a milliner's or jeweler's shop, to look at a
bonnet or an ornament; then after making their comments they went on
again. In front of the Place de la Bourse Roland paused, as he did every day,
to gaze at the docks full of vessels—the Bassin du Commerce, with other
docks beyond, where the huge hulls lay side by side, closely packed in
rows, four or five deep. And masts innumerable; along several kilometers of
quays the endless masts, with their yards, poles, and rigging, gave this great
gap in the heart of the town the look of a dead forest. Above this leafless
forest the gulls were wheeling, and watching to pounce, like a falling stone,
on any scraps flung overboard; a sailor boy, fixing a pulley to a cross-beam,
looked as if he had gone up there bird's-nesting.

"Will you dine with us without any sort of ceremony, just that we may end
the day together?" said Mme. Roland to her friend.
"To be sure I will, with pleasure; I accept equally without ceremony. It
would be dismal to go home and be alone this evening."
Pierre, who had heard, and who was beginning to be restless under the
young woman's indifference, muttered to himself: "Well, the widow is
taking root now, it would seem." For some days past he had spoken of her
as "the widow." The word, harmless in itself, irritated Jean merely by the
tone given to it, which to him seemed spiteful and offensive.
The three men spoke not another word till they reached the threshold of
their own house. It was a narrow one, consisting of a ground-floor and two
floors above, in the rue Belle-Normande. The maid, Joséphine, a girl of
nineteen, a rustic servant-of-all-work at low wages, gifted to excess with the
startled, animal expression of a peasant, opened the door, went upstairs at
her master's heels to the drawing-room, which was on the first floor, and
then said:
"A gentleman called—three times."
Old Roland, who never spoke to her without shouting and swearing, cried
out:
"Who do you say called, in the devil's name?"
She never winced at her master's roaring voice, and replied:
"A gentleman from the lawyer's."
"What lawyer?"
"Why M'sieu' Canu—who else?"
"And what did this gentleman say?"
"That M'sieu' Canu will call in himself in the course of the evening."
Maître Lecanu was M. Roland's lawyer, and in a way his friend, managing
his business for him. For him to send word that he would call in the
evening, something urgent and important must be in the wind; and the four

Rolands looked at each other, disturbed by the announcement as folks of
small fortune are wont to be at any intervention of a lawyer, with its
suggestions of contracts, inheritance, law-suits—all sorts of desirable or
formidable contingencies. The father, after a few moments of silence,
muttered:
"What on earth can it mean?"
Mme. Rosémilly began to laugh.
"Why, a legacy, of course. I am sure of it. I bring good luck."
But they did not expect the death of any one who might leave them
anything.
Mme. Roland who had a good memory for relationships, began to think
over all their connections on her husband's side and on her own, to trace up
pedigrees and the ramifications of cousinship.
Before even taking off her bonnet she said:
"I say, father" (she called her husband "Father" at home, and sometimes
"Monsieur Roland" before strangers), "tell me, do you remember who it
was that Joseph Lebru married for the second time?"
"Yes—a little girl named Dumenil, stationer's daughter."
"Had they any children?"
"I should think so! four or five at least."
"Not from that quarter, then."
She was quite eager already in her search; she caught at the hope of some
added ease dropping from the sky. But Pierre, who was very fond of his
mother, who knew her to be somewhat visionary and feared she might be
disappointed, a little grieved, a little saddened if the news were bad instead
of good, checked her:
"Do not get excited, mother; there is no rich American uncle. For my part I
should sooner fancy that it is about a marriage for Jean."

Every one was surprised at the suggestion, and Jean was a little ruffled by
his brother's having spoken of it before Madame Rosémilly.
"And why for me rather than for you? The hypothesis is very disputable.
You are the elder; you, therefore, would be the first to be thought of.
Besides, I do not wish to marry."
Pierre smiled sneeringly:
"Are you in love, then?"
And the other, much put out, retorted:
"Is it necessary that a man should be in love because he does not care to
marry yet?"
"Ah, there you are! That 'yet' sets it right; you are waiting."
"Granted that I am waiting, if you will have it so."
But old Roland who had been listening and cogitating, suddenly hit upon
the most probable solution.
"Bless me! what fools we are to be racking our brains. Maître Lecanu is our
very good friend; he knows that Pierre is looking out for a medical
partnership and Jean for a lawyer's office, and he has found something to
suit one of you."
This was so obvious and likely that every one accepted it.
"Dinner is ready," said the maid. And they all hurried off to their rooms to
wash their hands before sitting down to table.
Ten minutes after they were at dinner in the little dining-room on the
ground-floor.
At first they were silent; but presently Roland began again in amazement at
this lawyer's visit.
"For after all, why did he not write? Why should he have sent his clerk
three times? Why is he coming himself?"

Pierre thought it quite natural.
"An immediate decision is required, no doubt; and perhaps there are certain
confidential conditions which it does not do to put into writing."
Still, they were all puzzled, and all four a little annoyed at having invited a
stranger, who would be in the way of their discussing and deciding on what
should be done.
They had just gone upstairs again when the lawyer was announced. Roland
flew to meet him:
"Good-evening, my dear Maître," said he, giving his visitor the title which
in France is the official prefix to the name of every lawyer.
Mme. Rosémilly rose.
"I am going," she said. "I am very tired."
A faint attempt was made to detain her; but she would not consent, and
went home without either of the three men offering to escort her as they
always had done.
Mme. Roland did the honors eagerly to their visitor.
"A cup of coffee, Monsieur?"
"No, thank you. I have this moment done dinner."
"A cup of tea, then?"
"Thank you, I will not refuse presently. First we must attend to business."
The total silence which succeeded this remark was broken only by the
regular ticking of the clock, and below stairs the clatter of saucepans which
the girl was cleaning—too stupid even to listen at the door.
The lawyer went on:
"Did you, in Paris, know a certain M. Maréchal—Léon Maréchal?"
M. and Mme. Roland both exclaimed at once: "I should think so!"

"He was a friend of yours?"
Roland replied: "Our best friend, monsieur, but a fanatic for Paris; never to
be got away from the boulevard. He was head clerk in the exchequer office.
I have never seen him since I left the capital, and latterly we had ceased
writing to each other. When people are far apart, you know—"
The lawyer gravely put in:
"M. Maréchal is deceased."
Both man and wife responded with the little movement of pained surprise,
genuine or false, but always ready, with which such news is received.
Maître Lecanu went on:
"My colleague in Paris has just communicated to me the main item of his
will, by which he makes your son Jean—Monsieur Jean Roland—his sole
legatee."
They were all too much amazed to utter a single word. Mme. Roland was
the first to control her emotions and stammered out:
"Good heavens! Poor Léon—our poor friend! Dear me! Dear me! Dead!"
The tears started to her eyes, a woman's silent tears, drops of grief from her
very soul, which trickle down her cheeks and seem so very sad, being so
clear. But Roland was thinking less of the loss than of the prospect
announced. Still, he dared not at once inquire into the clauses of the will
and the amount of the fortune, so to work around to these interesting facts
he asked.
"And what did he die of, poor Maréchal?"
Maître Lecanu did not know in the least.
"All I know is," said he, "that, dying without any direct heirs, he has left the
whole of his fortune—about twenty thousand francs a year ($3,840) in three
per cents—to your second son, whom he has known from his birth up, and
judges worthy of the legacy. If M. Jean should refuse the money, it is to go
to the foundling hospitals."

Old Roland could not conceal his delight and exclaimed:
"Sacristi! It is the thought of a kind heart. And if I had no heir I would not
have forgotten him; he was a true friend."
The lawyer smiled.
"I was very glad," he said, "to announce the event to you myself. It is
always a pleasure to be the bearer of good news."
It had not struck him that this good news was that of the death of a friend,
of Roland's best friend; and the old man himself had suddenly forgotten the
intimacy he had just spoken of with so much conviction.
Only Mme. Roland and her sons still looked mournful. She, indeed, was
still shedding a few tears, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief, which she
then pressed to her lips to smother her deep sobs.
The doctor murmured:
"He was a good fellow, very affectionate. He often invited us to dine with
him—my brother and me."
Jean, with wide-open, glittering eyes, laid his hand on his handsome fair
beard, a familiar gesture with him, and drew his fingers down it to the tip of
the last hairs, as if to pull it longer and thinner. Twice his lips parted to utter
some decent remark, but after long meditation he could only say this:
"Yes, he was certainly fond of me. He would always embrace me when I
went to see him."
But his father's thoughts had set off at a gallop—galloping round this
inheritance to come; nay, already in hand; this money lurking behind the
door which would walk in quite soon, to-morrow, at a word of consent.
"And there is no possible difficulty in the way?" he asked. "No lawsuit—no
one to dispute it?"
Maître Lecanu seemed quite easy.
"No; my Paris correspondent states that everything is quite clear. M. Jean
has only to sign his acceptance."

"Good. Then—then the fortune is quite clear?"
"Perfectly clear."
"All the necessary formalities have been gone through?"
"All."
Suddenly the old jeweler had an impulse of shame—obscure, instinctive,
and fleeting; shame of his eagerness to be informed, and he added:
"You understand when I ask all these questions so immediately it is to save
my son disagreeables which he might not foresee. Sometimes there are
debts, embarrassing liabilities, what not! And a legatee finds himself in an
inextricable thorn bush. After all, I am not the heir—but I think first of the
little 'un."
They were accustomed to speak of Jean among themselves as the "little
one," though he was much bigger than Pierre.
Suddenly Mme. Roland seemed to wake from a dream, to recall some
remote fact, a thing almost forgotten that she had heard long ago, and of
which she was not altogether sure. She inquired doubtingly:
"Were you not saying that our poor friend Maréchal had left his fortune to
my little Jean?"
"Yes, madame."
And she went on simply:
"I am much pleased to hear it; it proves that he was attached to us."
Roland had risen.
"And would you wish, my dear sir, that my son should at once sign his
acceptance?"
"No—no, M. Roland. To-morrow, at my office to-morrow, at two o'clock, if
that suits you."
"Yes, to be sure—yes, indeed, I should think so."

Then Mme. Roland, who had also risen and who was smiling after her tears,
went up to the lawyer, and laying her hand on the back of his chair while
she looked at him with the pathetic eyes of a grateful mother, she said:
"And now for that cup of tea, Monsieur Lecanu?"
"Now I will accept it with pleasure, madame."
The maid, on being summoned, brought in first some dry biscuits in deep
tin boxes, those crisp, insipid English cakes which seem to have been made
for a parrot's beak, and soldered into metal cases for a voyage round the
world. Next she fetched some little gray linen doilies, folded square, those
tea-napkins which in thrifty families never get washed. A third time she
came in with the sugar basin and cups; then she departed to heat the water.
They sat waiting.
No one could talk; they had too much to think about and nothing to say.
Mme. Roland alone attempted a few commonplace remarks. She gave an
account of the fishing excursion, and sang the praises of the Pearl and of
Mme. Rosémilly.
"Charming! charming!" the lawyer said again and again.
Roland, leaning against the marble mantelshelf as if it were winter and the
fire burning, with his hands in his pockets and his lips puckered for a
whistle, could not keep still, tortured by the invincible desire to give vent to
his delight. The two brothers, in two armchairs that matched, one on each
side of the center-table, stared in front of them, in similar attitudes full of
dissimilar expression.
At last the tea appeared. The lawyer took a cup, sugared it, and drank it,
after having crumbled into it a little cake which was too hard to crunch.
Then he rose, shook hands, and departed.
"Then it is understood," repeated Roland. "To-morrow, at your place, at
two?"
"Quite so. To-morrow, at two."
Jean had not spoken a word.

When their guest had gone, silence fell again till father Roland clapped his
two hands on his younger son's shoulders, crying:
"Well, you devilish lucky dog! You don't embrace me!"
Then Jean smiled. He embraced his father, saying:
"It had not struck me as indispensable."
The old man was beside himself with glee. He walked about the room,
strummed on the furniture with his clumsy nails, turned about on his heels,
and kept saying:
"What luck! what luck! Now, that is really what I call luck!"
Pierre asked:
"Then you used to know this Maréchal well?"
And his father replied:
"I believe you! Why, he used to spend every evening at our house. Surely
you remember he used to fetch you from school on half-holidays, and often
took you back again after dinner. Why, the very day when Jean was born it
was he who went for the doctor. He had been breakfasting with us when
your mother was taken ill. Of course we knew at once what it meant, and he
set off post-haste. In his hurry he took my hat instead of his own. I
remember that because we had a good laugh over it afterward. It is very
likely that he may have thought of that when he was dying, and as he had
no heir he may have said to himself: 'I remember helping to bring that
youngster into the world, so I will leave him my savings.'"
Mme. Roland, sunk in a deep chair, seemed lost in reminiscences once
more. She murmured, as though she were thinking aloud:
"Ah, he was a good friend, very devoted, very faithful, a rare soul in these
days."
Jean got up.
"I shall go out for a little walk," he said.

His father was surprised and tried to keep him; they had much to talk about,
plans to be made, decisions to be formed. But the young man insisted,
declaring that he had an engagement. Besides, there would be time for
settling everything before he came into possession of his inheritance. So he
went away, for he wished to be alone to reflect. Pierre, on his part, said that
he too was going out, and after a few minutes followed his brother.
As soon as he was alone with his wife, father Roland took her in his arms,
kissed her a dozen times on each cheek, and replying to a reproach she had
often brought against him, said:
"You see, my dearest, it would have been of no good to stay any longer in
Paris and work for the children till I dropped, instead of coming here to
recruit my health, since fortune drops on us from the skies."
She was quite serious.
"It drops from the skies on Jean," she said. "But Pierre?"
"Pierre? But he is a doctor; he will make plenty of money; besides, his
brother will surely do something for him."
"No, he would not take it. Besides, this legacy is for Jean, only for Jean.
Pierre will find himself at a great disadvantage."
The old fellow seemed perplexed: "Well, then, we will leave him rather
more in our will."
"No; that again would not be quite just."
"Drat it all!" he exclaimed. "What do you want me to do in the matter? You
always hit on a whole heap of disagreeable ideas. You must spoil all my
pleasures. Well, I am going to bed. Good-night. All the same, I call it good
luck, jolly good luck!"
And he went off, delighted in spite of everything, and without a word of
regret for the friend so generous in his death.
Mme. Roland sat thinking again, in front of the lamp which was burning
out.

CHAPTER II

s soon as he got out, Pierre made his way to the Rue de Paris, the
high-street of Havre, brightly lighted up, lively and noisy. The rather
sharp air of the seacoast kissed his face, and he walked slowly, his
stick under his arm and his hands behind his back. He was ill at ease,
oppressed, out of heart, as one is after hearing unpleasant tidings. He was
not distressed by any definite thought, and he would have been puzzled to
account, on the spur of the moment, for this dejection of spirit and
heaviness of limb. He was hurt somewhere, without knowing where;
somewhere within him there was a pin-point of pain—one of these almost
imperceptible wounds which we cannot lay a finger on, but which
incommode us, tire us, depress us, irritate us—a slight and occult pang, as it
were a small seed of distress.
When he reached the square in front of the theater, he was attracted by the
lights in the Café Tortoni, and slowly bent his steps to the dazzling façade;
but just as he was going in he reflected that he would meet friends there and
acquaintances—people he would be obliged to talk to; and fierce
repugnance surged up in him for this commonplace good-fellowship over
coffee cups and liqueur glasses. So, retracing his steps, he went back to the
high-street leading to the harbor.
"Where shall I go?" he asked himself, trying to think of a spot he liked
which would agree with his frame of mind. He could not think of one, for
being alone made him feel fractious, yet he could not bear to meet any one.
As he came out on the Grand Quay he hesitated once more; then he turned
toward the pier; he had chosen solitude.
Going close by a bench on the breakwater he sat down, tired already of
walking and out of humor with his stroll before he had taken it.
He said to himself: "What is the matter with me this evening?" And he
began to search in his memory for what vexation had crossed him, as we
question a sick man to discover the cause of his fever.
His mind was at once irritable and sober; he got excited, then he reasoned,
approving or blaming his impulses; but in time primitive nature at last
proved the stronger; the sensitive man always had the upper hand over the

intellectual man. So he tried to discover what had induced this irascible
mood, this craving to be moving without wanting anything, this desire to
meet some one for the sake of differing from him, and at the same time this
aversion for the people he might see and the things they might say to him.
And then he put the question to himself, "Can it be Jean's inheritance?"
Yes, it was certainly possible. When the lawyer had announced the news he
had felt his heart beat a little faster. For, indeed, one is not always master of
one's self; there are sudden and pertinacious emotions against which a man
struggles in vain.
He fell into meditation on the physiological problem of the impression
produced on the instinctive element in man, and giving rise to a current of
painful or pleasurable sensations diametrically opposed to those which the
thinking man desires, aims at, and regards as right and wholesome, when he
has risen superior to himself by the cultivation of his intellect. He tried to
picture to himself the frame of mind of a son who has inherited a vast
fortune, and who, thanks to that wealth, may now know many long-wished-
for delights which the avarice of his father had prohibited—a father,
nevertheless, beloved and regretted.
He got up and walked on to the end of the pier. He felt better, and glad to
have understood, to have detected himself, to have unmasked the other
which lurks in us.
"Then I was jealous of Jean," thought he. "That is really vilely mean. And I
am sure of it now, for the first idea which came into my head was that he
would marry Madame Rosémilly. And yet I am not in love myself with that
priggish little goose, who is just the woman to disgust a man with good
sense and good conduct. So it is the most gratuitous jealousy, the very
essence of jealousy, which is merely because it is! I must keep an eye on
that!"
By this time he was in front of the flagstaff, whence the depth of water in
the harbor is signaled, and he struck a match to read the list of vessels
signaled in the roadstead and coming in with the next high tide. Ships were
due from Brazil, from La Plata, from Chili and Japan, two Danish brigs, a
Norwegian schooner, and a Turkish steamship—which startled Pierre as

much as if it had read a Swiss steamship; and in a whimsical vision he
pictured a great vessel crowded with men in turbans climbing the shrouds in
loose trousers.
"How absurd," thought he. "But the Turks are a maritime people, too."
A few steps further on he stopped again, looking out at the roads. On the
right, above Sainte-Adresse, the two electric lights of Cape la Hève, like
monstrous twin Cyclops, shot their long and powerful beams across the sea.
Starting from two neighboring centers, the two parallel shafts of light, like
the colossal tails of two comets, fell in a straight and endless slope from the
top of the cliff to the uttermost horizon. Then, on the two piers, two more
lights, the children of these giants, marked the entrance to the harbor; and
far away on the other side of the Seine others were in sight, many others,
steady or winking, flashing or revolving, opening and shutting like eyes—
the eyes of the ports—yellow, red, and green, watching the night-wrapped
sea covered with ships; the living eyes of the hospitable shore saying,
merely by the mechanical and regular movement of their eyelids: "I am
here. I am Trouville; I am Honfleur; I am the Audemer River." And high
above all the rest, so high that from this distance it might be taken for a
planet, the airy light-house of Etouville showed the way to Rouen across the
sand banks at the mouth of the great river.
Out on the deep water, the limitless water, darker than the sky, stars seemed
to have fallen here and there. They twinkled in the night haze, small, close
to shore or far away—white, red, and green, too. Most of them were
motionless; some, however, seemed to be scudding onward. These were the
lights of the ships at anchor or moving about in search of moorings.
Just at this moment the moon rose behind the town; and it, too, looked like
some huge, divine pharos lighted up in the heavens to guide the countless
fleet of stars in the sky. Pierre murmured, almost speaking aloud: "Look at
that! And we let our bile rise for two-pence!"
On a sudden, close to him, in the wide, dark ditch between the two piers, a
shadow stole up, a large shadow of fantastic shape. Leaning over the granite
parapet, he saw that a fishing-boat had glided in, without the sound of a
voice or the splash of a ripple, or the plunge of an oar, softly borne in by its
broad, tawny sail spread to the breeze from the open sea.

He thought to himself: "If one could but live on board that boat, what peace
it would be—perhaps!"
And then a few steps further again, he saw a man sitting at the very end of
the breakwater.
A dreamer, a lover, a sage—a happy or a desperate man? Who was it? He
went forward, curious to see the face of this lonely individual, and he
recognized his brother.
"What, is it you, Jean?"
"Pierre! You? What has brought you here?"
"I came out to get some fresh air. And you?"
Jean began to laugh.
"I too came out for fresh air." And Pierre sat down by his brother's side.
"Lovely—isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, lovely."
He understood from the tone of voice that Jean had not looked at anything.
He went on:
"For my part, whenever I come here I am seized with a wild desire to be off
with all those boats, to the north or the south. Only to think that all those
little sparks out there have just come from the uttermost ends of the earth,
from the lands of great flowers and beautiful olive or copper colored girls,
the lands of humming-birds, of elephants, of roaming lions, of negro kings,
from all the lands which are like fairy tales to us who no longer believe in
the White Cat or the Sleeping Beauty. It would be awfully jolly to be able to
treat one's self to an excursion out there; but, then, it would cost a great deal
of money, no end—"
He broke off abruptly, remembering that his brother had that money now;
and released from care, released from laboring for his daily bread, free,
unfettered, happy, and light-hearted, he might go whither he listed, to find
the fair-haired Swedes or the brown damsels of Havana. And then one of

those involuntary flashes which were common with him, so sudden and
swift that he could neither anticipate them, nor stop them, nor qualify them,
communicated, as it seemed to him, from some second, independent, and
violent soul, shot through his brain.
"Bah! He is too great a simpleton; he will marry that little Rosémilly." He
was standing up now. "I will leave you to dream of the future. I want to be
moving." He grasped his brother's hand and added in a heavy tone:
"Well, my dear old boy, you are a rich man. I am very glad to have come
upon you this evening to tell you how pleased I am about it, how truly I
congratulate you, and how much I care for you."
Jean, tender and soft-hearted, was deeply touched.
"Thank you, my good brother—thank you!" he stammered.
And Pierre turned away with his slow step, his stick under his arm, and his
hands behind his back.
Back in the town again, he once more wondered what he should do, being
disappointed of his walk and deprived of the company of the sea by his
brother's presence. He had an inspiration. "I will go and take a glass of
liqueur with old Marowsko," and he went off toward the quarter of the town
known as Ingouville.
He had known old Marowsko—le père Marowsko, he called him—in the
hospitals in Paris. He was a Pole, an old refugee, it was said, who had gone
through terrible things out there, and who had come to ply his calling as a
chemist and druggist in France after passing a fresh examination. Nothing
was known of his early life, and all sorts of legends had been current among
the indoor and outdoor patients and afterwards among his neighbors. This
reputation as a terrible conspirator, a nihilist, a regicide, a patriot ready for
anything and everything, who had escaped death by a miracle, had
bewitched Pierre Roland's lively and bold imagination; he had made friends
with the old Pole, without, however, having ever extracted from him any
revelation as to his former career. It was owing to the young doctor that this
worthy had come to settle at Havre, counting on the large custom which the
rising practitioner would secure him. Meanwhile he lived very poorly in his

little shop, selling medicines to the small tradesmen and workmen in his
part of the town.
Pierre often went to see him and chat with him for an hour after dinner, for
he liked Marowsko's calm look and rare speech, and attributed great depth
to his long spells of silence.
A single gas-burner was alight over the counter crowded with phials. Those
in the window were not lighted, from motives of economy. Behind the
counter, sitting on a chair with his legs stretched out and crossed, an old
man, quite bald, with a large beak of a nose which, as a prolongation of his
hairless forehead, gave him a melancholy likeness to a parrot, was sleeping
soundly, his chin resting on his breast. He woke at the sound of the shop-
bell, and recognizing the doctor, came forward to meet him, holding out
both hands.
His black frock coat, streaked with stains of acids and syrups, was much too
wide for his lean little person, and looked like a shabby old cassock; and the
man spoke with a strong Polish accent which gave a childlike character to
his thin voice, the lisping note and intonations of a young thing learning to
speak.
Pierre sat down, and Marowsko asked him: "What news, dear doctor?"
"None. Everything as usual, everywhere."
"You do not look very gay this evening."
"I am not often gay."
"Come, come, you must shake that off. Will you try a glass of liqueur?"
"Yes, I do not mind."
"Then I will give you something new to try. For these two months I have
been trying to extract something from currants, of which only a syrup has
been made hitherto—well, and I have done it. I have invented a very good
liqueur—very good indeed; very good."
And quite delighted, he went to a cupboard, opened it, and picked out a
bottle which he brought forth. He moved and did everything in jerky

gestures, always incomplete; he never quite stretched out his arm, nor quite
put out his legs; nor made any broad and definite movements. His ideas
seemed to be like his actions; he suggested them, promised them, sketched
them, hinted at them, but never fully uttered them.
And indeed, his great end in life seemed to be the concoction of syrups and
liqueurs. "A good syrup or a good liqueur is enough to make a fortune," he
would often say.
He had compounded hundreds of these sweet mixtures without ever
succeeding in floating one of them. Pierre declared that Marowsko always
reminded him of Marat.
Two little glasses were fetched out of the back shop and placed on the
mixing-board. Then the two men scrutinized the color of the fluid by
holding it up to the gas.
"A fine ruby," Pierre declared.
"Isn't it?" Marowsko's old parrot-face beamed with satisfaction.
The doctor tasted, smacked his lips, meditated, tasted again, meditated
again, and spoke:
"Very good—capital; and quite new in flavor. It is a find, my dear fellow."
"Ah, really? Well, I am very glad."
Then Marowsko took counsel as to baptizing the new liqueur. He wanted to
call it "Extract of currants," or else "Fine Groseille," or "Grosélia," or again
"Groséline." Pierre did not approve of either of these names.
Then the old man had an idea:
"What you said just now would be very good, very good: 'Fine Ruby.'" But
the doctor disputed the merit of this name, though it had originated with
him. He recommended simply "Groseillette," which Marowsko thought
admirable.
Then they were silent, and sat for some minutes without a word under the
solitary gas-lamp. At last Pierre began, almost in spite of himself: "A queer

thing has happened at home this evening. A friend of my father's, who is
lately dead, has left his fortune to my brother."
The druggist did not at first seem to understand, but after thinking it over he
hoped that the doctor had half the inheritance. When the matter was clearly
explained to him he appeared surprised and vexed; and to express his
dissatisfaction at finding that his young friend had been sacrificed, he said
several times over:
"It will not look well."
Pierre, who was relapsing into nervous irritation, wanted to know what
Marowsko meant by this phrase.
Why would it not look well? What was there to look badly in the fact that
his brother had come into the money of a friend of the family?
But the cautious old man would not explain further.
"In such a case the money is left equally to the two brothers, and I tell you,
it will not look well."
And the doctor, out of all patience, went away, returned to his father's
house, and went to bed. For some time yet he could hear Jean moving softly
about the adjoining room, and then, after drinking two glasses of water, he
fell asleep.

CHAPTER III

he doctor awoke next morning firmly resolved to make his fortune.
Several times already he had come to the same determination
without following up the reality. At the outset of all his trials of
some new career the hopes of rapidly acquired riches kept up his efforts and
confidence, till the first obstacle, the first check, threw him into a fresh
path. Snug in bed between the warm sheets, he lay meditating. How many
medical men had become wealthy in quite a short time! All that was needed
was a little knowledge of the world; for in the course of his studies he had
learnt to estimate the most famous physicians, and he judged them all to be
asses. He was certainly as good as they, if not better. If by any means he

could secure a practice among the wealth and fashion of Havre, he could
easily make a hundred thousand francs a year. And he calculated with great
exactitude what his certain profits must be. He would go out in the
mornings to visit his patients; at the very moderate average of ten a day, at
twenty francs each, that would mount up to seventy-two thousand francs a
year at least, or even seventy-five thousand; for ten patients was certainly
below the mark. In the afternoon he would be at home to, say, another ten
patients, at ten francs each—thirty-six thousand francs. Here, then, in round
numbers, was an income of twenty thousand francs. Old patients, or friends
whom he would charge only ten francs for a visit, or see at home for five,
would perhaps make a slight reduction on this sum total, but consultations
with other physicians and various incidental fees would make up for that.
Nothing would be easier than to achieve this by skillful advertising remarks
in the Figaro to the effect that the scientific faculty of Paris had their eye on
him, and were interested in the cures effected by the modest young
practitioner of Havre! And he would be richer than his brother, richer and
more famous; and satisfied with himself, for he would owe his fortune
solely to his own exertions; and liberal to his old parents, who would be
justly proud of his fame. He would not marry, would not burden his life
with a wife who would be in his way, but then he might make love. He felt
so sure of success that he sprang out of bed as though to grasp it on the
spot, and he dressed to go and search through the town for rooms to suit
him.
Then, as he wandered about the streets, he reflected how slight are the
causes which determine our actions. Any time these three weeks he might
and ought to have come to this decision, which, beyond a doubt, the news
of his brother's inheritance had abruptly given rise to.
He stopped before every door where a placard proclaimed that "fine
apartments" or "handsome rooms" were to be let; announcements without
an adjective he turned from with scorn. Then he inspected them with a lofty
air, measuring the height of the rooms, sketching the plan in his note-book,
with the passages, the arrangements of the exits, explaining that he was a
medical man and had many visitors. He must have a broad and well-kept
staircase; nor could he be any higher up than the first floor.

After having written down seven or eight addresses and scribbled two
hundred notes, he got home to breakfast a quarter of an hour too late.
In the hall he heard the clatter of plates. Then they had begun without him!
Why? They were never wont to be so punctual. He was nettled and put out,
for he was somewhat thin-skinned. As he went in Roland said to him:
"Come, Pierre, make haste, devil take you! You know we have to be at the
lawyer's at two o'clock. This is not the day to be dawdling about."
Pierre sat down without replying, after kissing his mother and shaking
hands with his father and brother; and he helped himself from the deep dish
in the middle of the table to the cutlet which had been kept for him. It was
cold and dry, probably the least tempting of them all. He thought that they
might have left it on the hot plate till he came in, and not lose their heads so
completely as to have forgotten their other son, their eldest.
The conversation, which his entrance had interrupted, was taken up again at
the point where it had ceased.
"In your place," Mme. Roland was saying to Jean, "I will tell you what I
should do at once. I should settle in handsome rooms so as to attract
attention; I should rise on horseback and select one or two interesting cases
to defend and make a mark in court. I would be a sort of amateur lawyer,
and very select. Thank God you are out of all danger of want, and if you
pursue a profession, it is, after all, only that you may not lose the benefit of
your studies, and because a man ought never to sit idle."
Old Roland, who was peeling a pear, exclaimed:
"Christi! In your place I should buy a nice yacht, a cutter on the build of our
pilot-boats. I would sail as far as Senegal in such a boat as that."
Pierre, in his turn, spoke his views. After all, said he, it was not his wealth
which made the moral worth, the intellectual worth of a man. To a man of
inferior mind it was only a means of degradation, while in the hands of a
strong man it was a powerful lever. They, to be sure, were rare. If Jean were
a really superior man, now that he could never want he might prove it. But
then he must work a hundred times harder than he would have done in other
circumstances. His business now must be not to argue for or against the

widow and the orphan, and pocket his fees for every case he gained, but to
become a really eminent legal authority, a luminary of the law. And he
added in conclusion:
"If I were rich wouldn't I dissect no end of bodies!"
Father Roland shrugged his shoulders.
"That is all very fine," he said. "But the wisest way of life is to take it easy.
We are not beasts of burden, but men. If you are born poor you must work;
well, so much the worse; and you do work. But where you have dividends!
You must be a flat if you grind yourself to death."
Pierre replied haughtily:
"Our notions differ. For my part, I respect nothing on earth but learning and
intellect; everything else is beneath contempt."
Mme. Roland always tried to deaden the constant shocks between father
and son; she turned the conversation, and began talking of a murder
committed the week before at Bolbec Nointot. Their minds were
immediately full of the circumstances under which the crime had been
committed, and absorbed by the interesting horror, the attractive mystery of
crime, which, however commonplace, shameful, and disgusting, exercises a
strange and universal fascination over the curiosity of mankind. Now and
again, however, old Roland looked at his watch. "Come," said he, "it is time
to be going."
Pierre sneered.
"It is not yet one o'clock," he said. "It really was hardly worth while to
condemn me to eat a cold cutlet."
"Are you coming to the lawyer's?" his mother asked.
"I? No. What for?" he replied dryly. "My presence is quite unnecessary."
Jean sat silent, as though he had no concern in the matter. When they were
discussing the murder at Bolbec he, as a legal authority, had put forward
some opinions and uttered some reflections on crime and criminals. Now he

spoke no more; but the sparkle in his eye, the bright color in his cheeks, the
very gloss of his beard seemed to proclaim his happiness.
When the family had gone, Pierre, alone once more, resumed his
investigations in the apartments to let. After two or three hours spent in
going up and down stairs, he at last found, in the Boulevard François, a
pretty set of rooms; a spacious entresol with two doors on two different
streets, two drawing-rooms, a glass corridor, where his patients while they
waited, might walk among flowers, and a delightful dining-room with a
bow-window looking out over the sea.
When it came to taking it, the terms—three thousand francs—pulled him
up; the first quarter must be paid in advance, and he had nothing, not a
penny to call his own.
The little fortune his father had saved brought him in about eight thousand
francs a year, and Pierre had often blamed himself for having placed his
parents in difficulties by his long delay in deciding on a profession, by
forfeiting his attempts and beginning fresh courses of study. So he went
away, promising to send his answer within two days, and it occurred to him
to ask Jean to lend him the amount of this quarter's rent, or even of a half-
year, fifteen hundred francs, as soon as Jean should have come into
possession.
"It will be a loan for a few months at most," he thought. "I shall repay him,
very likely, before the end of the year. It is a simple matter, and he will be
glad to do so much for me."
As it was not yet four o'clock, and he had nothing to do, absolutely nothing,
he went to sit in the public gardens; and he remained a long time on a
bench, without an idea in his brain, his eyes fixed on the ground, crushed by
weariness amounting to distress.
And yet this was how he had been living all these days since his return
home, without suffering so acutely from the vacuity of his existence and
from inaction. How had he spent his time from rising in the morning till
bed-time?
He had loafed on the pier at high tide, loafed in the streets, loafed in the
cafés, loafed at Marowsko's, loafed everywhere. And on a sudden this life,

which he had endured till now, had become odious, intolerable. If he had
had any pocket-money he would have taken a carriage for a long drive in
the country, along by the farm-ditches shaded by beech and elm trees; but
he had to think twice of the cost of a glass of beer or a postage-stamp, and
such an indulgence was out of his ken. It suddenly struck him how hard it
was for a man of past thirty to be reduced to ask his mother, with a blush,
for a twenty-franc piece every now and then; and he muttered, as he scored
the gravel with the ferrule of his stick:
"Christi, if I only had money!"
And again the thought of his brother's legacy came into his head like the
sting of a wasp; but he drove it out indignantly, not choosing to allow
himself to slip down that descent to jealousy.
Some children were playing about in the dusty paths. They were fair little
things with long hair, and they were making little mounds of sand with the
greatest gravity and careful attention, to crush them at once by stamping on
them.
It was one of those gloomy days with Pierre when we pry into every corner
of our souls and shake out every crease.
"All our endeavors are like the labors of those babies," thought he. And then
he wondered whether the wisest thing in life were not to beget two or three
of these little creatures and watch them grow up with complacent curiosity.
A longing for marriage breathed on his soul. A man is not so lost when he is
not alone. At any rate, he hears some one stirring at his side in hours of
trouble or of uncertainty; and it is something only to be able to speak on
equal terms to a woman when one is suffering.
Then he began thinking of women. He knew very little of them, never
having had any but very transient connections as a medical student, broken
off as soon as the month's allowance was spent, and renewed or replaced by
another the following month. And yet there must be some very kind, gentle,
and comforting creatures among them. Had not his mother been the good
sense and saving grace of his own home? How glad he would be to know a
woman, a true woman.

He started up with a sudden determination to go and call on Mme.
Rosémilly. But he promptly sat down again. He did not like that woman.
Why not? She had too much vulgar and sordid common sense; besides, did
she not seem to prefer Jean? Without confessing it to himself too bluntly,
this preference had a great deal to do with his low opinion of the widow's
intellect; for, though he loved his brother, he could not help thinking him
somewhat mediocre and believing himself the superior. However, he was
not going to sit there till nightfall; and as he had done on the previous
evening, he anxiously asked himself: "What am I going to do?"
At this moment he felt in his soul the need of a melting mood, of being
embraced and comforted. Comforted—for what? He could not have put it
into words; but he was in one of those hours of weakness and exhaustion
when a woman's presence, a woman's kiss, the touch of a hand, the rustle of
a petticoat, a soft look out of black or blue eyes, seem the one thing needful,
there and then, to our heart. And the memory flashed upon him of a little
barmaid at a beer-house, whom he had walked home with one evening, and
seen again from time to time.
So once more he rose, to go and drink a bock with the girl. What should he
say to her? What would she say to him? Nothing, probably. But what did
that matter? He would hold her hand for a few seconds. She seemed to have
a fancy for him. Why, then, did he not go to see her oftener?
He found her dozing on a chair in the beer-shop, which was almost
deserted. Three men were drinking and smoking with their elbows on the
oak tables; the book-keeper in her desk was reading a novel, while the
master, in his shirt-sleeves, lay sound asleep on a bench.
As soon as she saw him the girl rose eagerly, and coming to meet him, said:
"Good-day, monsieur—how are you?"
"Pretty well; and you?"
"I—oh, very well. How scarce you make yourself."
"Yes. I have very little time to myself. I am a doctor, you know."

"Indeed! You never told me. If I had known that—I was out of sorts last
week and I would have sent for you. What will you take?"
"A bock. And you?"
"I will have a bock too since you are game to treat me."
She had addressed him with the familiar tu, and continued to use it, as if the
offer of a drink had tacitly conveyed permission. Then, sitting down
opposite each other, they talked for a while. Every now and then she took
his hand with the light familiarity of girls whose kisses are for sale, and
looking at him with inviting eyes, she said:
"Why don't you come here oftener? I like you very much, sweetheart."
He was already disgusted with her; he saw how stupid she was, and
common, smacking of low life. A woman, he told himself, should appear to
us in a dream, or such a glory as may poetize her vulgarity.
Next she asked him:
"You went by the other morning with a handsome fair man, wearing a big
beard. Is he your brother?"
"Yes, he is my brother."
"Awfully good-looking."
"Do you think so?"
"Yes, indeed; and he looks like a man who enjoys life, too."
What strange craving impelled him on a sudden to tell this tavern-wench
about Jean's legacy? Why should this thing, which he kept at arm's-length
when he was alone, which he drove from him for fear of the torment it
brought upon his soul, rise to his lips at this moment? And why did he allow
it to overflow them, as if he needed once more to empty out his heart to
some one, gorged as it was with bitterness?
He crossed his legs and said:

"He has wonderful luck, that brother of mine. He has just come into a
legacy of twenty thousand francs a year."
She opened those covetous blue eyes of hers very wide.
"Oh! and who left him that? His grandmother or his aunt?"
"No. An old friend of my parents'."
"Only a friend! Impossible! And you—did he leave you nothing?"
"No. I knew him very slightly."
She sat thinking some minutes; then, with an odd smile on her lips, she
said:
"Well, he is a lucky dog, that brother of yours, to have friends of that
pattern. My word! and no wonder he is so unlike you."
He longed to slap her, without knowing why; and he asked with pinched
lips: "And what do you mean by saying that?"
She had put on a stolid, innocent face.
"O—h, nothing. I mean he has better luck than you."
He tossed a franc piece on the table and went out.
Now he kept repeating the phrase: "No wonder he is so unlike you."
What had her thought been, what had been her meaning under those words?
There was certainly some malice, some spite, something shameful in it. Yes,
that hussy must have fancied, no doubt, that Jean was Maréchal's son. The
agitation which came over him at the notion of this suspicion cast at his
mother was so violent that he stood still, looking about him for some place
where he might sit down. In front of him was another café. He went in, took
a chair, and as the waiter came up, "A bock," he said.
He felt his heart beating, his skin was goose-flesh. And then the recollection
flashed upon him of what Marowsko had said the evening before. "It will
not look well." Had he had the same thought, the same suspicion as this
baggage? Hanging his head over the glass, he watched the white froth as the

bubbles rose and burst, asking himself: "Is it possible that such a thing
should be believed?"
But the reasons which might give rise to this horrible doubt in other men's
minds now struck him, one after another, as plain, obvious, and
exasperating. That a childless old bachelor should leave his fortune to a
friend's two sons was the most simple and natural thing in the world; but
that he should leave the whole of it to one alone—of course people would
wonder, and whisper, and end by smiling. How was it that he had not
foreseen this, that his father had not felt it? How was it that his mother had
not guessed it? No; they had been too delighted at this unhoped-for wealth
for the idea to come near them. And besides, how should these worthy souls
have ever dreamed of anything so ignominious?
But the public—their neighbors, the shopkeepers, their own tradesmen, all
who knew them—would not they repeat the abominable thing, laugh at it,
enjoy it, make game of his father and despise his mother?
And the barmaid's remark that Jean was fair and he dark, that they were not
in the least alike in face, manner, figure, or intelligence, would now strike
every eye and every mind. When any one spoke of Roland's son, the
question would be: "Which, the real or the false?"
He rose, firmly resolved to warn Jean, and put him on his guard against the
frightful danger which threatened their mother's honor.
But what could Jean do? The simplest thing, no doubt, would be to refuse
the inheritance, which would then go to the poor, and to tell all friends or
acquaintances who had heard of the bequest that the will contained clauses
and conditions impossible to subscribe to, which would have made Jean not
inheritor but merely a trustee.
As he made his way home he was thinking that he must see his brother
alone, so as not to speak of such a matter in the presence of his parents. On
reaching the door he heard a great noise of voices and laughter in the
drawing-room, and when he went in he found Captain Beausire and Mme.
Rosémilly, whom his father had brought home and engaged to dine with
them in honor of the good news. Vermouth and absinthe had been served to
whet their appetites, and every one had been at once put into good spirits.

Captain Beausire, a funny little man who had become quite round by dint of
being rolled about at sea, and whose ideas also seemed to have been worn
round, like the pebbles of a beach, while he laughed with his throat full of
r's, looked upon life as a capital thing, in which everything that might turn
up was good to take. He clinked his glass against father Roland's, while
Jean was offering two freshly filled glasses to the ladies. Mme. Rosémilly
refused, till Captain Beausire, who had known her husband, cried:
"Come, come, madame, bis repetita placent, as we say in the lingo, which is
as much as to say two glasses of vermouth never hurt any one. Look at me;
since I have left the sea, in this way I give myself an artificial roll or two
every day before dinner; I add a little pitching after my coffee, and that
keeps things lively for the rest of the evening. I never rise to a hurricane,
mind you, never, never. I am too much afraid of damage."
Roland, whose nautical mania was humored by the old mariner, laughed
heartily, his face flushed already and his eye watery from the absinthe. He
had a burly shopkeeping stomach—nothing but stomach—in which the rest
of his body seemed to have got stowed away; the flabby paunch of men
who spend their lives sitting, and who have neither thighs, nor chest, nor
arms, nor neck; the seat of their chairs having accumulated all their
substance in one spot. Beausire, on the contrary, though short and stout, was
as tight as an egg and as hard as a cannon-ball.
Mme. Roland had not emptied her glass and was gazing at her son Jean
with sparkling eyes, happiness had brought a color to her cheeks.
In him too the fullness of joy had now blazed out. It was a settled thing,
signed and sealed; he had twenty thousand francs a year. In the sound of his
laugh, in the fuller voice with which he spoke, in his way of looking at the
others, his more positive manners, his greater confidence, the assurance
given by money was at once perceptible.
Dinner was announced, and as the old man was about to offer his arm to
Mme. Rosémilly, his wife exclaimed:
"No, no, father. Everything is for Jean to-day."
Unwonted luxury graced the table. In front of Jean, who sat in his father's
place, an enormous bouquet of flowers intermingled with ribbon favors—a

bouquet for a really great occasion—stood up like a cupola dressed with
flags, and was flanked by four high dishes, one containing a pyramid of
splendid peaches; the second, a monumental cake gorged with whipped
cream and covered with pinnacles of sugar—a cathedral in confectionery;
the third, slices of pine-apple floating in clear syrup; and the fourth
unheard-of lavishness—black grapes brought from the warmer south.
"The devil!" exclaimed Pierre as he sat down. "We are celebrating the
accession of Jean the Rich."
After the soup, Madeira was passed round, and already every one was
talking at once. Beausire was giving the history of a dinner he had eaten at
San Domingo at the table of a negro general. Old Roland was listening, and
at the same time trying to get in, between the sentences, his account of
another dinner, given by a friend of his at Mendon, after which every guest
was ill for a fortnight. Mme. Rosémilly, Jean, and his mother were planning
an excursion to breakfast at Saint Jouin, from which they promised
themselves the greatest pleasure; and Pierre was only sorry that he had not
dined alone in some pot-house by the sea, so as to escape all this noise and
laughter and glee which fretted him. He was wondering how he could now
set to work to confide his fears to his brother, and induce him to renounce
the fortune he had already accepted and of which he was enjoying the
intoxicating foretaste. It would be hard on him, no doubt; but it must be
done; he could not hesitate; their mother's reputation was at stake.
The appearance of an enormous shade-fish threw Roland back on fishing
stories. Beausire told some wonderful tales of adventure on the Gaboon, at
Sainte-Marie, in Madagascar, and above all, off the coasts of China and
Japan, where the fish are as queer-looking as the natives. And he described
the appearance of these fishes—their goggle gold eyes, their blue or red
bellies, their fantastic fins like fans, their eccentric crescent-shaped tails—
with such droll gesticulation that they all laughed till they cried as they
listened.
Pierre alone seemed incredulous, muttering to himself: "True enough, the
Normans are the Gascons of the north!"
After the fish came a vol-au-vent; then a roast fowl, a salad, French beans
with a Pithiviers lark-pie. Mme. Rosémilly's maid-servant helped to wait on

them, and the fun rose with the number of glasses of wine they drank. When
the cork of the first champagne bottle was drawn with a pop, father Roland,
highly excited, imitated the noise with his tongue and then declared: "I like
that noise better than a pistol-shot."
Pierre, more and more fractious every moment, retorted with a sneer:
"And yet it is perhaps a greater danger for you."
Roland, who was on the point of drinking, set his full glass down on the
table again, and asked:
"Why?"
He had for some time been complaining of his health, of heaviness,
giddiness, frequent and unaccountable discomfort. The doctor replied:
"Because the bullet might very possibly miss you, while the glass of wine is
dead certain to hit you in the stomach."
"And what then?"
"Then it scorches your inside, upsets your nervous system, makes the
circulation sluggish, and leads the way to the apoplectic fit which always
threatens a man of your build."
The jeweler's incipient intoxication had vanished like smoke before the
wind. He looked at his son with fixed, uneasy eyes, trying to discover
whether he was making game of him.
But Beausire exclaimed:
"Oh, these confounded doctors! They all sing the same tune; eat nothing,
drink nothing, never make love or enjoy yourself; it all plays the devil with
your precious health. Well, all I can say is I have done all these things, sir,
in every quarter of the globe, wherever and as often as I have had the
chance, and I am none the worse."
Pierre answered with some asperity:
"In the first place, captain, you are a stronger man than my father; and in
the next, all free livers talk as you do till the day when—when they come

back no more to say to the cautious doctor: 'You were right.' When I see my
father doing what is worst and most dangerous for him, it is but natural that
I should warn him. I should be a bad son if I did otherwise."
Mme. Roland, much distressed, now put in her word: "Come, Pierre, what
ails you? For once it cannot hurt him? Think of what an occasion it is for
him, for all of us. You will spoil his pleasure and make us all unhappy. It is
too bad of you to do such a thing."
He muttered, as he shrugged his shoulders:
"He can do as he pleases. I have warned him."
But father Roland did not drink. He sat looking at his glass full of the clear
and luminous liquor while its light soul, its intoxicating soul, flew off in
tiny bubbles mounting from its depths in hurried succession to die on the
surface. He looked at it with the suspicious eye of a fox smelling at a dead
hen and suspecting a trap. He asked doubtfully: "Do you think it will really
do me much harm?" Pierre had a pang of remorse and blamed himself for
letting his ill-humor punish the rest:
"No," said he. "Just for once you may drink it; but do not take too much, or
get into the habit of it."
Then old Roland raised his glass, but still he could not make up his mind to
put it to his lips. He contemplated it regretfully, with longing and with fear;
then he smelt it, tasted it, drank it in sips, swallowing them slowly, his heart
full of terrors, of weakness and greediness; and then, when he had drained
the last drop, of regret.
Pierre's eye suddenly met that of Mme. Rosémilly; it rested on him clear
and blue, far-seeing and hard. And he read, he knew, the precise thought
which lurked in that look, the indignant thought of this simple and right-
minded little woman; for the look said: "You are jealous—that is what you
are. Shameful!"
He bent his head and went on with his dinner.
He was not hungry and found nothing nice. A longing to be off harassed
him, a craving to be away from these people, to hear no more of their

talking, jests, and laughter.
Father Roland meanwhile, to whose head the fumes of the wine were rising
once more, had already forgotten his son's advice and was eyeing a
champagne-bottle with a tender leer as it stood, still nearly full, by the side
of his plate. He dared not touch it for fear of being lectured again, and he
was wondering by what device or trick he could possess himself of it
without exciting Pierre's remark. A ruse occurred to him, the simplest
possible. He took up the bottle with an air of indifference, and holding it by
the neck, stretched his arm across the table to fill the doctor's glass, which
was empty; then he filled up all the other glasses, and when he came to his
own he began talking very loud, so that if he poured anything into it they
might have sworn it was done inadvertently. And in fact no one took any
notice.
Pierre, without observing it, was drinking a good deal. Nervous and fretted,
he every minute raised to his lips the tall crystal funnel where the bubbles
were dancing in the living, translucent fluid. He let the wine slip very
slowly over his tongue, that he might feel the little sugary sting of the fixed
air as it evaporated.
Gradually a pleasant warmth glowed in his frame. Starting from the
stomach as from a focus, it spread to his chest, took possession of his limbs,
and diffused itself throughout his flesh, like a warm and comforting tide,
bringing pleasure with it. He felt better now, less impatient, less annoyed,
and his determination to speak to his brother that very evening faded away;
not that he thought for a moment of giving it up, but simply not to disturb
the happy mood in which he found himself.
Beausire presently arose to propose a toast. Having bowed to the company,
he began:
"Most gracious ladies and gentlemen, we have met to do honor to a happy
event which has befallen one of our friends. It used to be said that Fortune
was blind, but I believe that she is only short-sighted or tricksy, and that she
has lately brought a good pair of glasses which enabled her to discover in
the town of Havre the son of our worthy friend Roland, skipper of the
Pearl."

Every one cried bravo and clapped their hands, and the elder Roland rose to
reply. After clearing his throat, for it felt thick and his tongue was heavy, he
stammered out:
"Thank you, captain, thank you—for myself and my son. I shall never
forget your behavior on this occasion. Here's good luck to you!"
His eyes and nose were full of tears, and he sat down, finding nothing more
to say.
Jean, who was laughing, spoke in his turn:
"It is I," said he, "who ought to thank my friends here, my excellent
friends," and he glanced at Mme. Rosémilly, "who have given me such a
touching evidence of their affection. But it is not by words that I can prove
my gratitude. I will prove it to-morrow, every hour of my life, always, for
our friendship is not one of those which fade away."
His mother, deeply moved, murmured: "Well said, my boy."
But Beausire cried out:
"Come, Mme. Rosémilly, speak on behalf of the fair sex."
She raised her glass, and in a pretty voice, slightly touched with sadness,
she said: "I will pledge you to the memory of Monsieur Maréchal."
There was a few moments' lull, a pause for decent meditation, as after
prayer. Beausire, who always had a flow of compliment, remarked:
"Only a woman ever thinks of these refinements." Then turning to father
Roland: "And who was this Maréchal, after all? You must have been very
intimate with him."
The old man, emotional with drink, began to whimper, and in a broken
voice he said:
"Like a brother, you know. Such a friend as one does not make twice—we
were always together—he dined with us every evening—and would treat us
to the play—I need say no more—no more—no more. A true friend—a real
true friend—wasn't he, Louise?"

His wife merely answered: "Yes; he was a faithful friend."
Pierre looked at his father and then at his mother, then, as the subject
changed, he drank some more wine. He scarcely remembered the remainder
of the evening. They had coffee, then liqueurs, and they laughed and joked
a great deal. At about midnight he went to bed, his mind confused and his
head heavy; and he slept like a brute till nine next morning.

CHAPTER IV

hese slumbers, lapped in champagne and chartreuse, had soothed
and calmed him, no doubt, for he awoke in a very benevolent frame
of mind. While he was dressing he appraised, weighed, and summed
up the agitations of the past day, trying to bring out quite clearly and fully
their real and occult causes, those personal to himself as well as those from
outside.
It was, in fact, possible that the girl at the beer-shop had had an evil
suspicion—a suspicion worthy of such a hussy—on hearing that only one of
the Roland brothers had been made heir to a stranger; but have not such
natures as she always similar notions, without a shadow of foundation,
about every honest woman? Do they not, whenever they speak, vilify,
calumniate, and abuse all whom they believe to be blameless? Whenever a
woman who is above imputation is mentioned in their presence, they are as
angry as if they were being insulted, and exclaim: "Ah, yes, I know your
married women; a pretty sort they are! Why, they have more lovers than we
have, only they conceal it because they are such hypocrites. Oh, yes, a
pretty sort, indeed!"
Under any other circumstances he would certainly not have understood, not
have imagined the possibility of such an insinuation against his poor
mother, who was so kind, so simple, so excellent. But his spirit seethed with
the leaven of jealousy that was fermenting within him. His own excited
mind, on the scent, as it were, in spite of himself, for all that could damage
his brother, had even perhaps attributed to the tavern barmaid an odious
intention of which she was innocent. It was possible that his imagination
had, unaided, invented this dreadful doubt—his imagination, which he
never controlled, which constantly evaded his will and went off, unfettered,
audacious, adventurous, and stealthy, into the infinite world of ideas,
bringing back now and then some which were shameless and repulsive, and
which it buried in him, in the depths of his soul, in its most fathomless
recesses, like something stolen. His heart, most certainly, his own heart had
secrets from him; and had not that wounded heart discerned in this
atrocious doubt a means of depriving his brother of the inheritance of which
he was jealous? He suspected himself now, cross-examining all the
mysteries of his mind as bigots search their consciences.

Mme. Rosémilly, though her intelligence was limited, had certainly a
woman's instinct, scent, and subtle intuitions. And this notion had never
entered her head, since she had, with perfect simplicity, drunk the blessed
memory of the deceased Maréchal. She was not the woman to have done
this if she had had the faintest suspicion. Now he doubted no longer; his
involuntary displeasure at his brother's windfall of fortune and his religious
affection for his mother had magnified his scruples—very pious and
respectable scruples, but exaggerated. As he put this conclusion into words
in his own mind he felt happy, as at the doing of a good action; and he
resolved to be nice to every one beginning with his father, whose manias,
and silly statements, and vulgar opinions, and too conspicuous mediocrity
were a constant irritation to him.
He came in not late for breakfast, and amused all the family by his fun and
good-humor.
His mother, quite delighted, said to him:
"My little Pierre, you have no notion how humorous and clever you can be
when you choose."
And he talked, putting things in a witty way, and making them laugh by
ingenious hits at their friends. Beausire was his butt, and Mme. Rosémilly a
little, but in a very judicious way, not too spiteful. And he thought as he
looked at his brother: "Stand up for her, you muff. You may be as rich as
you please, I can always eclipse you when I take the trouble."
As they drank their coffee he said to his father:
"Are you going out in the Pearl to-day?"
"No, my boy."
"May I have her with Jean Bart?"
"To be sure, as long as you like."
He bought a good cigar at the first tobacconist's and went down to the quay
with a light step. He glanced up at the sky, which was clear and luminous,
of a pale blue, freshly swept by the sea breeze.

Papagris, the boatman, commonly called Jean Bart, was dozing in the
bottom of the boat, which he was required to have in readiness every day at
noon when they had not been out fishing in the morning.
"You and I together, mate," cried Pierre. He went down the iron ladder of
the quay and leaped into the vessel.
"Which way is the wind?" he asked.
"Due east still, M'sieu Pierre. A fine breeze out at sea."
"Well, then, old man, off we go!"
They hoisted the foresail and weighed anchor; and the boat, feeling herself
free, glided slowly down toward the jetty on the still water of the harbor.
The breath of wind that came down the street caught the top of the sail so
lightly as to be imperceptible, and the Pearl seemed endowed with life—the
life of a vessel driven on by a mysterious latent power. Pierre took the tiller,
and, holding his cigar between his teeth, he stretched his legs on the bunk,
and with his eyes half-shut in the blinding sunshine, he watched the great
tarred timbers of the breakwater as they glided past.
When they reached the open sea, round the nose of the north pier which had
sheltered them, the fresher breeze puffed in the doctor's face and on his
hands, like a somewhat icy caress, filled his chest, which rose with a long
sigh to drink it in, and swelling the tawny sail, tilted the Pearl on her beam
and made her more lively. Jean Bart hastily hauled up the jib, and the
triangle of canvas, full of wind, looked like a wing; then, with two strides to
the stern, he let out the spanker, which was close-reefed against its mast.
Then, along the hull of the boat, which suddenly heeled over and was
running at top speed, there was a soft, crisp sound of water hissing and
rushing past. The prow ripped up the sea like the share of a plough gone
mad, and the yielding water it turned up curled over and fell white with
foam, as the ploughed soil, heavy and brown, rolls and falls in a ridge. At
each wave they met—and there was a short, chopping sea—the Pearl
shivered from the point of the bowsprit to the rudder, which trembled under
Pierre's hand; when the wind blew harder in gusts, the swell rose to the
gunwale as if it would overflow into the boat. A coal brig from Liverpool
was lying at anchor, waiting for the tide; they made a sweep round her stern

and went to look at each of the vessels in the roads one after another; then
they put further out to look at the unfolding line of coast.
For three hours Pierre, easy, calm, and happy, wandered to and fro over the
dancing waters, guiding the thing of wood and canvas, which came and
went at his will, under the pressure of his hand, as if it were a swift and
docile winged creature.
He was lost in day-dreams, the dreams one has on horseback or on the deck
of a boat; thinking of his future, which should be brilliant, and the joys of
living intelligently. On the morrow he would ask his brother to lend him
fifteen hundred francs for three months, that he might settle at once in the
pretty rooms on the Boulevard François, 1er.
Suddenly the sailor said: "The fog is coming up, M'sieu Pierre. We must go
in."
He looked up and saw to the northward a gray shade, filmy but dense,
blotting out the sky and covering the sea; it was sweeping down on them
like a cloud fallen from above. He tacked for the land and made for the pier,
scudding before the wind and followed by the flying fog, which gained
upon them. When it reached the Pearl, wrapping her in its intangible
density, a cold shudder ran over Pierre's limbs, and a smell of smoke and
mold, the peculiar smell of a sea fog, made him close his mouth that he
might not taste the cold, wet vapor. By the time the boat was at her usual
moorings in the harbor the whole town was buried in this fine mist, which
did not fall but yet wetted everything like rain, and glided and rolled along
the roofs and streets like the flow of a river. Pierre, with his hands and feet
frozen, made haste home and threw himself on his bed to take a nap till
dinner-time. When he made his appearance in the dining-room his mother
was saying to Jean:
"The glass corridor will be lovely. We will fill it with flowers. You will see.
I will undertake to care for them and renew them. When you give a party
the effect will be quite fairy like."
"What in the world are you talking about?" the doctor asked.
"Of a delightful apartment I have just taken for your brother. It is quite a
find; an entresol looking out on two streets. There are two drawing-rooms, a

glass passage, and a little circular dining-room, perfectly charming for a
bachelor's quarters."
Pierre turned pale.
"Where is it?" he asked.
"Boulevard François, 1er."
There was no possibility for doubt. He took his seat in such a state of
exasperation that he longed to exclaim: "This is really too much! Is there
nothing for any one but him?"
His mother, beaming, went on talking: "And only fancy, I got it for two
thousand eight hundred francs a year. They asked three thousand, but I got a
reduction of two hundred francs on taking for three, six, or nine years. Your
brother will be delightfully housed there. An elegant home is enough to
make the fortune of a lawyer. It attracts clients, charms them, holds them
fast, commands respect, and shows them that a man who lives in such good
style expects a good price for his words."
She was silent for a few seconds and then went on:
"We must look out for something suitable for you; much less pretentious,
since you have nothing, but nice and pretty all the same. I assure you it will
be to your advantage."
Pierre replied contemptuously:
"For me! Oh, I shall make my way by hard work and learning."
But his mother insisted: "Yes, but I assure you that to be well lodged will be
of use to you nevertheless."
About half-way through the meal he suddenly asked:
"How did you first come to know this man Maréchal?"
Old Roland looked up and racked his memory:
"Wait a bit; I scarcely recollect. It is such an old story now. Ah, yes, I
remember. It was your mother who made acquaintance with him in the

shop, was it not, Louise? He first came to order something, and then he
called frequently. We knew him as a customer before we knew him as a
friend."
Pierre, who was eating beans, sticking his fork into them one by one as if he
were spitting them, went on:
"And when was it that you made his acquaintance?"
Again Roland sat thinking, but he could remember no more and appealed to
his wife's better memory.
"In what year was it, Louise? You surely have not forgotten, you who
remember everything. Let me see—it was in—in—in fifty-five or fifty-six?
Try to remember. You ought to know better than I."
She did in fact think it over for some minutes, and then replied in a steady
voice and with calm decision:
"It was in fifty-eight, old man. Pierre was three years old. I am quite sure
that I am not mistaken, for it was in that year that the child had scarlet fever,
and Maréchal, whom we then knew but very little, was of the greatest
service to us."
Roland exclaimed:
"To be sure—very true; he was really invaluable. When your mother was
half-dead with fatigue and I had to attend to the shop, he would go to the
chemist's to fetch your medicine. He really had the kindest heart! And when
you were well again, you cannot think how glad he was and how he petted
you. It was from that time that we became such great friends."
And this thought rushed into Pierre's soul, as abrupt and violent as a
cannon-ball rending and piercing it: "Since he knew me first, since he was
so devoted to me, since he was so fond of me and petted me so much, since
I—I was the cause of this great intimacy with my parents, why did he leave
all his money to my brother and nothing to me?"
He asked no more questions and remained gloomy; absent-minded rather
than thoughtful, feeling in his soul a new anxiety as yet undefined, the
secret germ of a new pain.

He went out early, wandering about the streets once more. They were
shrouded in the fog which made the night heavy, opaque, and nauseous. It
was like a pestilential rock dropped on earth. It could be seen swirling past
the gas-lights, which it seemed to put out at intervals. The pavement was as
slippery as on a frosty night after a rain, and all sorts of evil smells seemed
to come up from the bowels of the houses—the stench of cellars, drains,
sewers, squalid kitchens—to mingle with the horrible savor of this
wandering fog.
Pierre, with his shoulders up and his hands in his pockets, not caring to
remain out of doors in the cold, turned into Marowsko's. The druggist was
asleep as usual under the gas-light, which kept watch. On recognizing
Pierre, for whom he had the affection of a faithful dog, he shook off his
drowsiness, went for two glasses, and brought out the Groseillette.
"Well," said the doctor, "how is the liqueur getting on?"
The Pole explained that four of the chief cafés in the town had agreed to
have it on sale, and that two papers, the Northcoast Pharos and the Havre
Semaphore, would advertise it, in return for certain chemical preparations to
be supplied to the editors.
After a long silence Marowsko asked whether Jean had come definitely into
possession of his fortune; and then he put two or three other questions
vaguely referring to the same subject. His jealous devotion to Pierre
rebelled against this preference. And Pierre felt as though he could hear him
thinking; he guessed and understood, read in his averted eyes and in the
hesitancy of his tone, the words which rose to his lips but were not spoken
—which the druggist was too timid or too prudent and cautious to utter.
At this moment, he felt sure, the old man was thinking: "You ought not to
have suffered him to accept this inheritance which will make people speak
ill of your mother."
Perhaps, indeed, Marowsko believed that Jean was Maréchal's son. Of
course he believed it! How could he help believing it when the thing must
seem so possible, so probable, self-evident? Why, he himself, Pierre, her
son—had not he been for these three days past fighting with all the subtlety
at his command to cheat his reason, fighting against this hideous suspicion?

And suddenly the need to be alone, to reflect, to discuss the matter with
himself—to face boldly, without scruple or weakness, this possible but
monstrous thing—came upon him anew, and so imperative that he rose
without even drinking his glass of Groseillette, shook hands with the
astounded druggist and plunged out into the foggy streets again.
He asked himself: "What made this Maréchal leave all his fortune to Jean?"
It was not jealousy now which made him dwell on this question, not the
rather mean but natural envy which he knew lurked within him, and with
which he had been struggling these three days, but the dread of an
overpowering horror; the dread that he himself should believe Jean, his
brother, was that man's son.
No. He did not believe it; he could not even ask himself the question which
was a crime! Meanwhile he must get rid of this faint suspicion, improbable
as it was, utterly and for ever. He craved for light, for certainty—he must
win absolute security in his heart, for he loved no one in the world but his
mother. And as he wandered alone through the darkness he would rack his
memory and his reason with a minute search that should bring out the
blazing truth. Then there would be an end to the matter; he would not think
of it again—never. He would go and sleep.
He argued thus: "Let me see: first to examine the facts; then I will recall all
I know about him, his behavior to my brother and to me. I will seek out the
causes which might have given rise to this preference. He knew Jean from
his birth? Yes, but he had known me first. If he had loved my mother
silently, unselfishly, he would surely have chosen me, since it was through
me, through my scarlet fever, that he became so intimate with my parents.
Logically, then, he ought to have preferred me, to have had a keener
affection for me—unless it were that he felt an instinctive attraction and
predilection for my brother as he watched him grow up."
Then, with desperate tension of brain and of all the powers of his intellect,
he strove to reconstitute from memory the image of this Maréchal, to see
him, to know him, to penetrate the man whom he had seen pass by him,
indifferent to his heart during all those years in Paris.

But he perceived that the slight exertion of walking somewhat disturbed his
ideas, dislocated their continuity, weakened their precision, clouded his
recollection. To enable him to look at the past and at unknown events with
so keen an eye that nothing should escape it, he must be motionless in a
vast and empty space. And he made up his mind to go and sit on the jetty as
he had done that other night. As he approached the harbor he heard, out at
sea, a lugubrious and sinister wail like the bellowing of a bull, but more
long-drawn and steady. It was the roar of a fog-horn, the cry of a ship lost in
the fog. A shiver ran through him, chilling his heart; so deeply did this cry
of distress thrill his soul and nerves that he felt as if he had uttered it
himself. Another and a similar voice answered with such another moan, but
further away; then, close by, the fog-horn on the pier gave out a fearful
sound in answer. Pierre made for the jetty with long steps, thinking no more
of anything, content to walk on into this ominous and bellowing darkness.
When he had seated himself at the end of the breakwater he closed his eyes,
that he might not see the two electric lights, now blurred by the fog, which
make the harbor accessible at night, and the red glare of the light on the
south pier, which was, however, scarcely visible. Turning half-round, he
rested his elbows on the granite and hid his face in his hands.
Though he did not pronounce the word with his lips, his mind kept
repeating: "Maréchal—Maréchal," as if to raise and challenge the shade.
And on the black background of his closed eyelids, he suddenly saw him as
he had known him: a man of about sixty, with a white beard cut in a point
and very thick eyebrows, also white. He was neither tall nor short, his
manner was pleasant, his eyes gray and soft, his movements gentle, his
whole appearance that of a good fellow, simple and kindly. He called Pierre
et Jean "my dear children," and had never seemed to prefer either, asking
them both together to dine with him. And then Pierre, with the pertinacity of
a dog seeking a lost scent, tried to recall the words, gestures, tones, looks,
of this man who had vanished from the world. By degrees he saw him quite
clearly in his rooms in the rue Tronchet, where he received his brother and
himself at dinner.
He was waited on by two maids, both old women who had been in the habit
—a very old one, no doubt—of saying "Monsieur Pierre" and "Monsieur

Jean." Maréchal would hold out both hands, the right hand to one of the
young men, the left to the other, as they happened to come in.
"How are you, my children?" he would say. "Have you any news of your
parents? As for me, they never write to me."
The talk was quiet and intimate, of commonplace matters. There was
nothing remarkable in the man's mind, but much that was winning,
charming, and gracious. He had certainly been a good friend to them, one of
those good friends of whom we think the less because we feel sure of them.
Now, reminiscences came readily to Pierre's mind. Having seen him
anxious from time to time, and suspecting his student's impecuniousness,
Maréchal had of his own accord offered and lent him money, a few hundred
francs perhaps, forgotten by both, and never repaid. Then this man must
always have been fond of him, always have taken an interest in him, since
he thought of his needs. Well then—well then—why leave his whole
fortune to Jean? No, he had never shown any more marked affection for the
younger than for the elder, had never been more interested in one than in the
other, or seemed to care more tenderly for this one or that one. Well then—
well then—he must have had some strong secret reason for leaving
everything to Jean—everything—and nothing to Pierre.
The more he thought, the more he recalled the past few years, the more
extraordinary, the more incredible was it that he should have made such a
difference between them. And an agonizing pang of unspeakable anguish
piercing his bosom made his heart beat like a fluttering rag. Its springs
seemed broken, and the blood rushed through in a flood, unchecked, tossing
it with wild surges.
Then in an undertone, as a man speaks in a nightmare, he muttered: "I must
know. My God! I must know."
He looked further back now, to an earlier time, when his parents had lived
in Paris. But the faces escaped him, and this confused his recollections. He
struggled above all to see Maréchal with light, or brown, or black hair. But
he could not; the later image, his face as an old man, blotted out all others.
However, he remembered that he had been slighter, and had a soft hand, and
that he often brought flowers. Very often—for his father would constantly

say: "What, another bouquet! But this is madness, my dear fellow; you will
ruin yourself in roses." And Maréchal would say: "No matter; I like it."
And suddenly his mother's voice and accent, his mother's as she smiled and
said: "Thank you, my kind friend," flashed on his brain, so clearly that he
could have believed he heard her. She must have spoken those words very
often that they should remain thus graven on her son's memory.
So Maréchal brought flowers; he, the gentleman, the rich man, the
customer, to the humble shop-keeper, the jeweler's wife. Had he loved her?
Why should he have made friends with these tradespeople if he had not
been in love with the wife? He was a man of education and fairly refined
tastes. How many a time had he discussed poets and poetry with Pierre. He
did not appreciate these writers from an artistic point of view, but with
sympathetic and responsive feeling. The doctor had often smiled at his
emotions which had struck him as rather silly; now he plainly saw that this
sentimental soul could never, never have been the friend of his father, who
was so matter-of-fact, so narrow, so heavy, to whom the word "Poetry"
meant idiocy.
This Maréchal then, being young, free, rich, ready for any form of
tenderness, went by chance into the shop one day, having perhaps observed
its pretty mistress. He had bought something, had come again, had chatted,
more intimately each time, paying by frequent purchases for the right of a
seat in the family, of smiling at the young wife and shaking hands with the
husband.
And what next—what next—good God—what next?
He had loved and petted the first child, the jeweler's child, till the second
was born; then, till death, he had remained impenetrable; and when his
grave was closed, his flesh dust, his name erased from the list of the living,
when he himself was quiet and forever gone, having nothing to scheme for,
to dread or to hide, he had given his whole fortune to the second child!
Why?
The man had all his wits; he must have understood and foreseen that he
might, that he almost infallibly must, give grounds for the supposition that

the child was his. He was casting obloquy on a woman. How could he have
done this if Jean were not his son?
And suddenly a clear and fearful recollection shot through his brain.
Maréchal was fair—fair like Jean. He now remembered a little miniature
portrait he had seen formerly in Paris, on the drawing-room chimney-shelf,
and which had since disappeared. Where was it? Lost, or hidden away? Oh,
if he could but have it in his hands for one minute! His mother kept it
perhaps in the unconfessed drawer where love-tokens were treasured.
His misery at this thought was so intense that he uttered a groan, one of
those brief moans wrung from the breast by a too intolerable pang. And
immediately, as if it had heard him, as if it had understood and answered
him, the fog-horn on the pier bellowed out close to him. Its voice, like that
of a fiendish monster, more resonant than thunder—a savage and appalling
roar contrived to drown the clamor of the wind and waves—spread through
the darkness, across the sea, which was invisible under its shroud of fog.
And again, through the mist, far and near, responsive cries went up to the
night. They were terrifying, these calls given forth by the great blind steam-
ships.
Then all was silent once more.
Pierre had opened his eyes and was looking about him, startled to find
himself here, roused from his nightmare.
"I am mad," thought he, "I suspect my mother." And a surge of love and
emotion, of repentance and prayer and grief, welled up in his heart. His
mother! Knowing her as he knew her, how could he ever have suspected
her? Was not the soul, was not the life of this simple-minded, chaste, and
loyal woman clearer than water? Could any one who had seen and known
her ever think of her but as above suspicion? And he, her son, had doubted
her! Oh, if he could but have taken her in his arms at that moment, how he
would have kissed and caressed her, and gone on his knees to crave pardon.
Would she have deceived his father—she?
His father!—A very worthy man no doubt, upright and honest in business,
but with a mind which had never gone beyond the horizon of his shop. How
was it that this woman, who must have been very pretty—as he knew, and it

could still be seen—gifted, too, with a delicate, tender, emotional soul, have
accepted a man so unlike herself as a suitor and a husband? Why inquire?
She had married, as young French girls do marry, the youth with a little
fortune proposed to her by their relations. They had settled at once in their
shop in the Rue Montmartre; and the young wife, ruling over the desk,
inspired by the feeling of a new home, and the subtle and sacred sense of
interests in common which fills the place of love, and even of regard, by the
domestic hearth of most of the commercial houses of Paris, had set to work
with all her superior and active intelligence, to make the fortune they hoped
for. And so her life had flowed on, uniform, peaceful and respectable, but
loveless.
Loveless?—was it possible then that a woman should not love? That a
young and pretty woman, living in Paris, reading books, applauding
actresses for dying of passion on the stage, could live from youth to old age,
without once feeling her heart touched? He would not believe it of any one
else; why should she be different from all others, though she was his
mother?
She had been young, with all the poetic weaknesses which agitate the heart
of a young creature. Shut up, imprisoned in the shop, by the side of a vulgar
husband who always talked of trade, she had dreamed of moonlight nights,
of voyages, of kisses exchanged in the shades of evening. And then, one
day a man had come in, as lovers do in books, and had talked as they talk.
She had loved him. Why not? She was his mother. What then? Must a man
be blind and stupid to the point of rejecting evidence because it concerns his
mother? And she had been frail. Why, yes, since this man had had no other
love, since he had remained faithful to her when she was far away and
growing old. Why yes, since he had left all his fortune to his son—their
son!
And Pierre started to his feet, quivering with such rage that he longed to kill
some one. With his arm outstretched, his hand wide open, he wanted to hit,
to bruise, to smash, to strangle! Whom? Everyone; his father, his brother,
the dead man, his mother!
He hurried off homeward. What was he going to do?

As he passed a turret close to the signal mast the strident howl of the fog-
horn went off in his very face. He was so startled that he nearly fell, and
shrank back as far as the granite parapet. The steamer which was the first to
reply seemed to be quite near and was already at the entrance, the tide
having risen.
Pierre turned round and could discern its red eye dim through the fog. Then,
in the broad light of the electric lanterns, a huge black shadow crept up
between the piers. Behind him the voice of the lookout man, the hoarse
voice of an old retired sea-captain, shouted:
"What ship?" And out of the fog the voice of the pilot standing on deck—
not less hoarse—replied:
"The Santa Lucia."
"Where from?"
"Italy."
"What port?"
"Naples."
And before Pierre's bewildered eyes rose as he fancied, the fiery pennon of
Vesuvius, while, at the foot of the volcano, fire-flies danced in the orange-
groves of Sorrento or Castellamare. How often had he dreamed of these
familiar names as if he knew the scenery. Oh, if he might but go away, now
at once, never mind whither, and never come back, never write, never let
any one know what had become of him! But no, he must go home—home
to his father's house, and go to bed.
He would not. Come what might he would not go in; he would stay there
till daybreak. He liked the roar of the fog-horns. He pulled himself together
and began to walk up and down like an officer on watch.
Another vessel was coming in behind the other, huge and mysterious. An
English Indiaman, homeward bound.
He saw several more come in, one after another, out of the impenetrable
vapor. Then, as the damp became quite intolerable, Pierre set out toward the

town. He was so cold that he went into a sailors' tavern to drink a glass of
grog, and when the hot and pungent liquor had scorched his mouth and
throat he felt a hope revive within him.
Perhaps he was mistaken. He knew his own vagabond unreason so well! No
doubt he was mistaken. He had piled up the evidence as a charge is drawn
up against an innocent person, whom it is always so easy to convict when
we wish to think him guilty. When he should have slept he would think
differently.
Then he went in and to bed, and by sheer force of will he at last dropped
asleep.

CHAPTER V

ut the doctor's frame lay scarcely more than an hour or two in the
torpor of troubled slumbers. When he awoke in the darkness of his
warm, closed room, he was aware, even before thought was awake in
him, of the painful oppression, the sickness of heart which the sorrow we
have slept on leaves behind it. It is as though the disaster of which the
shock merely jarred us at first, had, during sleep, stolen into our very flesh,
bruising and exhausting it like a fever. Memory returned to him like a blow,
and he sat up in bed. Then slowly, one by one, he again went through all the
arguments which had wrung his heart on the jetty while the fog-horns were
bellowing. The more he thought the less he doubted. He felt himself
dragged along by his logic to the inevitable certainty, as by a clutching,
strangling hand.
He was thirsty and hot, his heart beat wildly. He got up to open his window
and breathe the fresh air, and as he stood there a low sound fell on his ear
through the wall. Jean was sleeping peacefully, and gently snoring. He
could sleep! He had no presentiment, no suspicions! A man who had known
their mother left him all his fortune; he took the money and thought it quite
fair and natural! He was sleeping, rich and contented, not knowing that his
brother was gasping with anguish and distress. And rage boiled up in him
against this heedless and happy sleeper.

Only yesterday he would have knocked at his door, have gone in, and
sitting by the bed, would have said to Jean, scared by the sudden waking:
"Jean, you must not keep this legacy which by to-morrow may have
brought suspicion and dishonor on our mother."
But to-day he could say nothing; he could not tell Jean that he did not
believe him to be their father's son. Now he must guard, must bury the
shame he had discovered, hide from every eye the stain which he had
detected and which no one must perceive, not even his brother—especially
not his brother.
He no longer thought about the vain respect of public opinion. He would
have been glad that all the world should accuse his mother if only he, he
alone, knew her to be innocent! How could he bear to live with her every
day, believing as he looked at her that his brother was the child of a
stranger?
And how calm and serene she was, nevertheless, how sure of herself she
always seemed! Was it possible that such a woman as she, pure of soul and
upright in heart, should fall, dragged astray by passion, and yet nothing ever
appear afterward of her remorse and the stings of a troubled conscience?
Ah, but remorse must have tortured her, long ago in the earlier days, and
then have faded out, as everything fades. She had surely bewailed her sin,
and then, little by little, had almost forgotten it. Have not all women, all,
this fault of prodigious forgetfulness which enables them, after a few years,
hardly to recognize the man to whose kisses they have lent their lips? The
kiss strikes like a thunder-bolt, the love passes away like a storm, and then
life, like the sky, is calm once more, and begins again as it was before. Do
you ever remember a cloud?
Pierre could no longer endure to stay in the room! This house, his father's
house, crushed him. He felt the roof weigh on his head, and the walls
suffocate him. And as he was very thirsty he lighted his candle to go to
drink a glass of fresh water from the filter in the kitchen.
He went down the two flights of stairs; then, as he was coming up again
with the water-bottle filled, he sat down, in his nightshirt, on a step of the
stairs where there was a draught, and drank, without a tumbler, in long pulls

like a runner who is out of breath. When he ceased to move the silence of
the house touched his feelings; then, one by one, he could distinguish the
faintest sounds. First there was the ticking of the clock in the dining-room
which seemed to grow louder every second. Then he heard another snore,
an old man's snore, short, labored and hard, his father beyond doubt; and he
writhed at the idea, as if it had but this moment sprung upon him, that these
two men, sleeping under the same roof—father and son—were nothing to
each other! Not a tie, not the very slightest, bound them together, and they
did not know it! They spoke to each other affectionately, they embraced
each other, they rejoiced and lamented together over the same things, just as
if the same blood flowed in their veins. And two men born at opposite ends
of the earth could not be more alien to each other than this father and son.
They believed they loved each other, because a lie had grown up between
them. This paternal love, this filial love, were the outcome of a lie—a lie
which could not be unmasked, and which no one would ever know but he,
the true son.
But yet, but yet—if he were mistaken? How could he make sure? Oh, if
only some likeness, however slight, could be traced between his father and
Jean, one of those mysterious resemblances which run from an ancestor to
the great-great-grandson, showing that the whole race are the offspring of
the same kiss. To him, a medical man, so little would suffice to enable him
to discern this—the curve of a nostril, the space between the eyes, the
character of the teeth or hair; nay less—a gesture, a trick, a habit, an
inherited taste, any mark or token which a practiced eye might recognize as
characteristic.
He thought long, but could remember nothing; no, nothing. But he had
looked carelessly, observed badly, having no reason for spying such
imperceptible indications.
He got up to go back to his room and mounted the stairs with a slow step,
still lost in thought. As he passed the door of his brother's room he stood
stock still, his hand put out to open it. An imperative need had just come
over him to see Jean at once, to look at him at his leisure, to surprise him in
his sleep, while the calm countenance and relaxed features were at rest and
all the grimace of life put off. Thus he might catch the dormant secret of his

physiognomy, and if any appreciable likeness existed it would not escape
him.
But supposing Jean were to wake, what could he say? How could he
explain this intrusion?
He stood still, his fingers clenched on the door-handle, trying to devise a
reason, an excuse. Then he remembered that a week ago he had lent his
brother a phial of laudanum to relieve a fit of toothache. He might himself
have been in pain this night and have come to find the drug. So he went in
with a stealthy step, like a robber. Jean, his mouth open, was sunk in deep,
animal slumbers. His beard and fair hair made a golden patch on the white
linen; he did not wake, but he ceased snoring.
Pierre, leaning over him, gazed at him with hungry eagerness. No, this
youngster was not in the least like Roland; and for the second time the
recollection of the little portrait of Maréchal, which had vanished, recurred
to his mind. He must find it! When he should see it perhaps he should cease
to doubt!
His brother stirred, conscious no doubt of a presence, or disturbed by the
light of the taper on his eyelids. The doctor retired on tiptoe to the door
which he noiselessly closed; then he went back to his room, but not to bed
again.
Day was long in coming. The hours struck one after another on the dining-
room clock, and its tone was a deep and solemn one, as though the little
piece of clockwork had swallowed a cathedral bell. The sound rose through
the empty staircase, penetrating through walls and doors, and dying away in
the rooms where it fell on the torpid ears of the sleeping household. Pierre
had taken to walking to and fro between his bed and the window. What was
he going to do? He was too much upset to spend this day at home. He
wanted still to be alone, at any rate till the next day, to reflect, to compose
himself, to strengthen himself for the common every-day life which he must
take up again.
Well, he would go over to Trouville to see the swarming crowd on the
sands. That would amuse him, change the air of his thoughts, and give him
time to inure himself to the horrible thing he had discovered. As soon as

morning dawned he made his toilet and dressed. The fog had vanished and
it was fine, very fine. As the boat for Trouville did not start till nine, it
struck the doctor that he must greet his mother before starting.
He waited till the hour at which she was accustomed to get up, and then
went downstairs. His heart beat so violently as he touched her door that he
paused for breath. His hand as it lay on the lock was limp and tremulous,
almost incapable of the slight effort of turning the handle to open it. He
knocked. His mother's voice inquired:
"Who is there?"
"I—Pierre."
"What do you want?"
"Only to say good morning, because I am going to spend the day at
Trouville with some friends."
"But I am still in bed."
"Very well, do not disturb yourself. I shall see you this evening, when I
come in."
He hoped to get off without seeing her, without pressing on her cheek the
false kiss which it made his heart sick to think of. But she replied:
"No. Wait a moment. I will let you in. Wait till I get into bed again."
He heard her bare feet on the floor and the sound of the bolt drawn back.
Then she called out:
"Come in."
He went in. She was sitting up in bed, while, by her side, Roland, with a
silk handkerchief by way of nightcap and his face to the wall, still lay
sleeping. Nothing ever woke him but a shaking hard enough to pull his arm
off. On the days when he went fishing it was Joséphine, rung up by
Papagris at the hour fixed, who roused her master from his stubborn
slumbers.

Pierre as he went toward his mother, looked at her with a sudden sense of
never having seen her before. She held up her face, he kissed each cheek,
and then sat down in a low chair.
"It was last evening that you decided on this excursion?" she asked.
"Yes, last evening."
"Will you return to dinner?"
"I do not know. At any rate do not wait for me."
He looked at her with stupefied curiosity. This woman was his mother! All
those features, seen daily from childhood, from the time when his eye could
first distinguish things, that smile, that voice—so well known, so familiar,
abruptly struck him as new, different from what they had always been to
him hitherto. He understood now that, loving her, he had never looked at
her. All the same it was very really she, and he knew every little detail of
her face; still, it was the first time he clearly identified them all. His anxious
attention, scrutinizing her face which he loved, recalled a difference, a
physiognomy he had never before discerned.
He rose to go; then, suddenly yielding to the invincible longing to know
which had been gnawing at him since yesterday, he said:
"By the way, I fancy I remember that you used to have, in Paris, a little
portrait of Maréchal, in the drawing-room."
She hesitated for a second or two, or at least he fancied she hesitated; then
she said:
"To be sure."
"What has become of the portrait?"
She might have replied more readily:
"That portrait—stay; I don't exactly know—perhaps it is in my desk."
"It would be kind of you to find it."
"Yes, I will look for it. What do you want it for?"

"Oh, it was not for myself. I thought it would be a natural thing to give it to
Jean, and that he would be pleased to have it."
"Yes, you are right; that is a good idea. I will look for it, as soon as I am
up."
And he went out.
It was a blue day, without a breath of wind. The folks in the streets seemed
in good spirits, the merchants going to business, the clerks going to their
office, the girls going to their shop. Some sang as they went, exhilarated by
the bright weather.
The passengers were already going on board the Trouville boat; Pierre took
a seat aft on a wooden bench.
He asked himself:
"Now was she uneasy at my asking for the portrait or only surprised? Has
she mislaid it, or has she hidden it? Does she know where it is, or does she
not? If she has hidden it—why?"
And his mind, still following up the same line of thought from one
deduction to another, came to this conclusion:
That portrait—of a friend, of a lover, had remained in the drawing-room in
a conspicuous place, till one day when the wife and mother perceived, first
of all and before any one else, that it bore a likeness to her son. Without
doubt she had for a long time been on the watch for this resemblance; then,
having detected it, having noticed its beginnings, and understanding that
any one might, any day, observe it too, she had one evening removed the
perilous little picture and had hidden it, not daring to destroy it.
Pierre recollected quite clearly now that it was long, long before they left
Paris that the miniature had vanished. It had disappeared, he thought, about
the time when Jean's beard was beginning to grow, which had made him
suddenly and wonderfully like the fair young man who smiled from the
picture frame.
The motion of the boat as it put off disturbed and dissipated his meditations.
He stood up and looked at the sea. The little steamer, once outside the piers,

turned to the left, and puffing and snorting and quivering, made for a distant
point visible through the morning haze. The red sail of a heavy fishing-bark,
lying motionless on the level waters, looked like a large rock standing up
out of the sea. And the Seine, rolling down from Rouen, seemed a wide
inlet dividing two neighboring lands. They reached the harbor of Trouville
in less than an hour, and as it was the time of day when the world was
bathing, Pierre went to the shore.
From a distance it looked like a garden full of gaudy flowers. All along the
stretch of yellow sand, from the pier as far as the Roches Noires, sunshades
of every hue, hats of every shape, dresses of every color, in groups outside
the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin of the waves, or scattered here
and there, really looked like immense bouquets on a vast meadow. And the
Babel of sounds—voices near and far ringing thin in the light atmosphere,
shouts and cries of children being bathed, clear laughter of women—all
made a pleasant, continuous din, mingling with the unheeding breeze, and
breathed with the air itself.
Pierre walked on among all this throng, more lost, more remote from them,
more isolated, more drowned in his torturing thoughts, than if he had been
flung overboard from the deck of a ship a hundred miles from shore. He
passed by them and heard a few sentences without listening; and he saw,
without looking, how the men spoke to the women, and the women smiled
at the men. Then, suddenly, as if he had awoke, he perceived them all; and
hatred of them all surged up in his soul, for they seemed happy and content.
Now, as he went, he studied the groups, wandering round them full of a
fresh set of ideas. All these many-hued dresses which covered the sands like
nosegays, these pretty stuffs, those showy parasols, the fictitious grace of
tightened waists, all the ingenious devices of fashion from the smart little
shoe to the extravagant hat, the insinuating charm of gesture, voice and
smile, all the coquettish airs in short displayed on this sea-shore, suddenly
struck him as stupendous efflorescences of female depravity. All these
bedizened women aimed at pleasing, bewitching, and deluding some man.
They had dressed themselves out for men—for all men—all excepting the
husband whom they no longer needed to conquer. They had dressed
themselves out for the lover of yesterday and the lover of to-morrow, for the
stranger they might meet and notice or were perhaps on the lookout for.

And these men sitting close to them, eye to eye and mouth to mouth, invited
them, hunted them like game, coy and furtive notwithstanding that it
seemed so near and so easy to capture. This wide shore was, then, no more
than a love-market—some drove a hard bargain for their kisses while others
only promised them. And he reflected that it was everywhere the same, all
the world over.
His mother had done what others did—that was all. Others? No. For there
were exceptions—many, very many. These women he saw about him, rich,
giddy, love-seeking, belonged on the whole to the class of fashionable and
showy women of the world, some indeed to the less respectable sisterhood,
for on these sands, trampled by the legion of idlers, the tribe of virtuous,
home-keeping women were not to be seen.
The tide was rising, driving the foremost rank of visitors gradually
landward. He saw the various groups jump up and fly, carrying their chairs
with them, before the yellow waves as they rolled up edged with a lacelike
frill of foam. The bathing-machines too were being pulled up by horses, and
along the planked way which formed the promenade running along the
shore from end to end, there was now an increasing flow, slow and dense,
of well-dressed people in two opposite streams elbowing and mingling.
Pierre, made nervous and exasperated by this bustle, made his escape into
the town, and went to get his breakfast at a modest tavern on the skirts of
the fields.
When he had finished with coffee, he stretched his legs on a couple of
chairs under a lime tree in front of the house, and as he had hardly slept the
night before, he presently fell into a doze. After resting for some hours he
shook himself, and finding that it was time to go on board again he set out,
tormented by a sudden stiffness which had come upon him during his long
nap. Now he was eager to be at home again; to know whether his mother
had found the portrait of Maréchal. Would she be the first to speak of it, or
would he be obliged to ask for it again? If she waited to be questioned
further it must be because she had some secret reason for not showing the
miniature.
But when he was at home again, and in his room, he hesitated about going
down to dinner. He was too wretched. His revolted soul had not yet had

time to calm down. However, he made up his mind to it, and appeared in
the dining-room just as they were sitting down.
All their faces were beaming.
"Well," said Roland, "are you getting on with your purchases? I do not want
to see anything till it is all in its place."
And his wife replied: "Oh, yes. We are getting on. But it takes much
consideration to avoid buying things that do not match. The furniture
question is an absorbing one."
She had spent the day in going with Jean to cabinet-makers and
upholsterers. Her fancy was for rich materials, rather splendid, to strike the
eye at once. Her son, on the contrary, wished for something simple and
elegant. So in front of everything put before them they had each repeated
their arguments. She declared that a client, a defendant, must be impressed;
that as soon as he is shown into his counsel's waiting-room he should have a
sense of wealth.
Jean, on the other hand, wishing to attract only an elegant and opulent class,
was anxious to captivate persons of refinement by his quiet and perfect
taste.
And this discussion, which had gone on all day, began again with the soup.
Roland had no opinion. He repeated: "I do not want to hear anything about
it. I will go and see it when it is all finished."
Mme. Roland appealed to the judgment of her elder son.
"And you, Pierre, what do you think of the matter?"
His nerves were in a state of such intense excitement that he would have
liked to reply with an oath. However, he only answered in a dry tone
quivering with annoyance:
"Oh, I am quite of Jean's mind. I like nothing so well as simplicity, which,
in matters of taste, is equivalent to rectitude in matters of conduct."
His mother went on:

"You must remember that we live in a city of commercial men, where good
taste is not to be met with at every turn."
Pierre replied:
"What does that matter? Is that a reason for living as fools do? If my
fellow-townsmen are stupid and ill-bred, need I follow their example? A
woman does not misconduct herself because her neighbor has a lover."
Jean began to laugh.
"You argue by comparisons which seem to have been borrowed from the
maxims of a moralist."
Pierre made no reply. His mother and his brother reverted to the question of
stuffs and armchairs.
He sat looking at them, as he had looked at his mother in the morning
before starting for Trouville; looking at them as a stranger who would study
them, and he felt as though he had really suddenly come into a family of
which he knew nothing.
His father, above all, amazed his eye and his mind. That flabby, burly man,
happy and besotted, was his own father! No, no; Jean was not in the least
like him.
His family!
Within these two days an unknown and malignant hand, the hand of a dead
man, had torn asunder and broken, one by one, all the ties which had held
these four human beings together. It was all over, all ruined. He had now no
mother—for he could no longer love her now that he could not revere her
with that perfect, tender, and pious respect which a son's love demands; no
brother—since his brother was the child of a stranger; nothing was left him
but his father, that coarse man whom he could not love in spite of himself.
And he suddenly broke out:
"I say, mother, have you found that portrait?"
She opened her eyes in surprise.

"What portrait?"
"The portrait of Maréchal."
"No—that is to say—yes—I have not found it, but I think I know where it
is."
"What is that?" asked Roland. And Pierre answered:
"A little likeness of Maréchal which used to be in the drawing-room in
Paris. I thought that Jean might be glad to have it."
Roland exclaimed:
"Why, yes, to be sure; I remember it perfectly. I saw it again last week. Your
mother found it in her desk when she was tidying the papers. It was on
Thursday or Friday. Do you remember, Louise? I was shaving myself when
you took it out and laid it on a chair by your side with a pile of letters of
which you burnt half. Strange, isn't it, that you should have come across
that portrait only two or three days before Jean heard of his legacy? If I
believed in presentiments I should think that this was one."
Mme. Roland calmly replied:
"Yes, I know where it is. I will fetch it presently."
Then she had lied! When she had said that very morning to her son, who
had asked her what had become of the miniature: "I don't exactly know—
perhaps it is in my desk"—it was a lie! She had seen it, touched it, handled
it, gazed at it but a few days since; and then she had hidden it away again in
the secret drawer with those letters—his letters.
Pierre looked at the mother who had lied to him; looked at her with the
concentrated fury of a son who had been cheated, robbed of his most sacred
affection, and with the jealous wrath of a man who, after long being blind,
at last discovers a disgraceful betrayal. If he had been that woman's husband
—and not her child—he would have gripped her by the wrists, seized her
by the shoulders or the hair, have flung her on the ground, have hit her, hurt
her, crushed her! And he might say nothing, do nothing, show nothing,
reveal nothing. He was her son; he had no vengeance to take. And he had
not been deceived.

Nay, but she had deceived his tenderness, his pious respect. She owed to
him to be without reproach, as all mothers owe it to their children. If the
fury that boiled within him verged on hatred it was that he felt her to be
even more guilty toward him than toward his father.
The love of man and wife is a voluntary compact in which the one who
proves weak is guilty only of perfidy; but when the wife is a mother her
duty is a higher one, since nature has intrusted her with a race. If she fails
then she is cowardly, worthless, infamous.
"I do not care," said Roland suddenly, stretching out his legs under the
table, as he did every evening while he sipped his glass of black-currant
brandy, "You may do worse than live idle when you have a snug little
income. I hope Jean will have us to dinner in style now. Hang it all! if I
have an indigestion now and then I cannot help it."
Then turning to his wife he added:
"Go and fetch that portrait, little woman, as you have done your dinner. I
should like to see it again myself."
She rose, took a taper, and went. Then, after an absence which Pierre
thought long, though she was not away more than three minutes, Mme.
Roland returned smiling, and holding an old-fashioned gilt frame by the
ring.
"Here it is," said she, "I found it at once."
The doctor was the first to put forth his hand; he took the picture, and
holding it a little away from him, he examined it. Then, fully aware that his
mother was looking at him, he slowly raised his eyes and fixed them on his
brother to compare the faces. He could hardly refrain, in his violence, from
saying: "Dear me! How like Jean!" And though he dared not utter the
terrible words, he betrayed his thought by his manner of comparing the
living face with the painted one.
They had, no doubt, details in common; the same beard, the same brow; but
nothing sufficiently marked to justify the assertion: "This is the father and
that the son." It was rather a family likeness, a relationship of
physiognomies in which the same blood courses. But what to Pierre was far

more decisive than the common aspect of the faces, was that his mother had
risen, had turned her back, and was pretending, too deliberately, to be
putting the sugar basin and the liqueur bottle away in a cupboard. She
understood that he knew, or at any rate had his suspicions.
"Hand it on to me," said Roland.
Pierre held out the miniature and his father drew the candle toward him to
see it better; then he murmured in a pathetic tone:
"Poor fellow! To think that he was like that when we first knew him! Cristi!
How time flies! He was a good-looking man, too, in those days, and with
such a pleasant manner—was not he, Louise?"
As his wife made no answer he went on:
"And what an even temper! I never saw him put out. And now it is all at an
end—nothing left of him—but what he bequeathed to Jean. Well, at any rate
you may take your oath that that man was a good and faithful friend to the
last. Even on his deathbed he did not forget us."
Jean, in his turn, held out his hand for the picture. He gazed at it for a few
minutes and then said regretfully:
"I do not recognize it at all. I only remember him with white hair."
He returned the miniature to his mother. She cast a hasty glance at it,
looking away again as if she were frightened; then in her usual voice, she
said:
"It belongs to you now, my little Jean, as you are his heir. We will take it to
your new rooms." And when they went into the drawing-room she placed
the picture on the chimney-shelf by the clock, where it had formerly stood.
Roland filled his pipe; Pierre and Jean lighted cigarettes. They commonly
smoked them, Pierre while he paced the room, Jean, sunk in a deep
armchair, with his legs crossed. Their father always sat astride on a chair
and spit from afar into the fireplace.
Mme. Roland, on a low seat by a little table on which the lamp stood,
embroidered, or knitted, or marked linen.

This evening she was beginning a piece of worsted work, intended for
Jean's lodgings. It was a difficult and complicated pattern, and required all
her attention. Still, now and again, her eye, which was counting the stitches,
glanced up swiftly and furtively at the little portrait of the dead as it leaned
against the clock. And the doctor, who was striding to and fro across the
little room in four or five steps, met his mother's look at each turn.
It was as though they were spying on each other; and acute uneasiness,
intolerable to be borne, clutched at Pierre's heart. He was saying to himself
—at once tortured and glad:
"She must be in misery at this moment if she knows that I guess!" And each
time he reached the fireplace he stopped for a few seconds to look at
Maréchal's fair hair, and show quite plainly that he was haunted by a fixed
idea. So that this little portrait, smaller than an opened palm, was like a
living being, malignant and threatening, suddenly brought into this house
and this family.
Presently the street-door bell rang. Mme. Roland, always so self-possessed,
started violently, betraying to her doctor son the anguish of her nerves. Then
she said: "It must be Mme. Rosémilly"; and her eye again anxiously turned
to the mantelshelf.
Pierre understood, or thought he understood, her fears and misery. A
woman's eye is keen, a woman's wit is nimble, and her instincts suspicious.
When this woman who was coming in should see the miniature of a man
she did not know, she might perhaps at the first glance discover the likeness
between this face and Jean. Then she would know and understand
everything.
He was seized with a dread, a sudden and horrible dread of this shame
being unveiled, and, turning about just as the door opened, he took the little
painting and slipped it under the clock without being seen by his father and
brother.
When he met his mother's eyes again they seemed to him altered, dim, and
haggard.
"Good evening," said Mme. Rosémilly. "I have come to ask you for a cup of
tea."

But while they were bustling about her and asking after her health, Pierre
made off, the door having been left open.
When his absence was perceived they were all surprised. Jean, annoyed for
the young widow, who, he thought, would be hurt, muttered: "What a bear!"
Mme. Roland replied: "You must not be vexed with him; he is not very well
to-day and tired with his excursion to Trouville."
"Never mind," said Roland, "that is no reason for taking himself off like a
savage."
Mme. Rosémilly tried to smooth matters by saying:
"Not at all, not at all. He has gone away in the English fashion; people
always disappear in that way in fashionable circles if they want to leave
early."
"Oh, in fashionable circles, I dare say," replied Jean. "But a man does not
treat his family à l'Anglaise, and my brother has done nothing else for some
time past."

CHAPTER VI

or a week or two nothing occurred at the Rolands'. The father went
fishing; Jean, with his mother's help, was furnishing and settling
himself; Pierre, very gloomy, never was seen excepting at mealtimes.
His father having asked him one evening:
"Why the deuce do you always come in with a face as cheerful as a funeral?
This is not the first time I have remarked it"—the doctor replied:
"The fact is I am terribly conscious of the burden of life."
The old man had not a notion what he meant, and with an aggrieved look he
went on: "It really is too bad. Ever since we had the good luck to come into
this legacy, every one seems unhappy. It is as though some accident had
befallen us, as if we were in mourning for some one."
"I am in mourning for some one," said Pierre.

"You are? For whom?"
"For some one you never knew, and of whom I was too fond."
Roland imagined that his son alluded to some girl with whom he had had
some love passages, and he said:
"A woman, I suppose."
"Yes, a woman."
"Dead?"
"No. Worse. Ruined!"
"Ah!"
Though he was startled by this unexpected confidence, in his wife's
presence too, and by his son's strange tone about it, the old man made no
further inquiries, for in his opinion such affairs did not concern a third
person.
Mme. Roland affected not to hear; she seemed ill and was very pale.
Several times already her husband, surprised to see her sit down as if she
were dropping into her chair, and to hear her gasp as if she could not draw
her breath, had said:
"Really, Louise, you look very ill; you tire yourself too much with helping
Jean. Give yourself a little rest. Sacristi! The rascal is in no hurry, as he is a
rich man."
She shook her head without a word.
But to-day her pallor was so great that Roland remarked on it again.
"Come, come," said he, "this will not do at all, my dear old woman. You
must take care of yourself." Then, addressing his son, "You surely must see
that your mother is ill. Have you questioned her, at any rate?"
Pierre replied: "No; I had not noticed that there was anything the matter
with her."

At this Roland was angry.
"But it stares you in the face, confound you! What on earth is the good of
your being a doctor if you cannot even see that your mother is out of sorts?
Why, look at her, just look at her. Really, a man might die under his very
eyes and this doctor would never think there was anything the matter!"
Mme. Roland was panting for breath, and so white that her husband
exclaimed:
"She is going to faint."
"No, no, it is nothing—I shall get better directly—it is nothing."
Pierre had gone up to her and was looking at her steadily.
"What ails you?" he said. And she repeated in an undertone:
"Nothing, nothing—I assure you, nothing."
Roland had gone to fetch some vinegar; he now returned and handing the
bottle to his son he said:
"Here—do something to ease her. Have you felt her heart?"
As Pierre bent over to feel her pulse she pulled away her hand so
vehemently that she struck it against a chair which was standing by.
"Come," said he in icy tones, "let me see what I can do for you, as you are
ill."
Then she raised her arm and held it out to him. Her skin was burning, the
blood throbbing in short irregular leaps.
"You are certainly ill," he murmured. "You must take something to quiet
you. I will write you a prescription." And as he wrote, stooping over the
paper, a low sound of choked sighs, smothered, quick breathing and
suppressed sobs made him suddenly look round at her. She was weeping,
her hands covering her face.
Roland, quite distracted, asked her:

"Louise, Louise, what is the matter with you? What on earth ails you?"
She did not answer, but seemed racked by some deep and dreadful grief.
Her husband tried to take her hands from her face, but she resisted him,
repeating:
"No, no, no."
He appealed to his son.
"But what is the matter with her? I never saw her like this."
"It is nothing," said Pierre, "she is a little hysterical."
And he felt as if it were a comfort to him to see her suffering thus, as if this
anguish mitigated his resentment and diminished his mother's load of
opprobrium. He looked at her as a judge satisfied with his day's work.
Suddenly she rose, rushed to the door with such a swift impulse that it was
impossible to forestall or to stop her, and ran off to lock herself into her
room.
Roland and the doctor were left face to face.
"Can you make head or tail of it?" said the father.
"Oh, yes," said the other. "It is a little nervous disturbance, not alarming or
surprising; such attacks may very likely recur from time to time."
They did in fact recur, almost every day; and Pierre seemed to bring them
on with a word, as if he had the clue to her strange and new disorder. He
would discern in her face a lucid interval of peace and with the willingness
of a torturer would, with a word, revive the anguish that had been lulled for
a moment.
But he, too, was suffering, as cruelly as she. It was dreadful pain to him that
he could no longer love her nor respect her, that he must put her on the rack.
When he had laid bare the bleeding wound which he had opened in her
woman's, her mother's heart, when he felt how wretched and desperate she
was, he would go out alone, wander about the town, so torn by remorse, so
broken by pity, so grieved to have thus hammered her with his scorn as her

son, that he longed to fling himself into the sea and put an end to it all by
drowning himself.
Ah! How gladly, now, would he have forgiven her. But he could not, for he
was incapable of forgetting. If only he could have desisted from making her
suffer; but this again he could not, suffering as he did himself. He went
home to his meals, full of relenting resolutions; then, as soon as he saw her,
as soon as he met her eye—formerly so clear and frank, now so evasive,
frightened, and bewildered—he struck at her in spite of himself, unable to
suppress the treacherous words which would rise to his lips.
The disgraceful secret, known to them alone, goaded him up against her. It
was as a poison flowing in his veins and giving him an impulse to bite like
a mad dog.
And there was no one in the way now to hinder his reading her; Jean lived
almost entirely in his new apartments, and only came home to dinner and to
sleep every night at his father's.
He frequently observed his brother's bitterness and violence, and attributed
them to jealousy. He promised himself that some day he would teach him
his place and give him a lesson, for life at home was becoming very painful
as a result of these constant scenes. But as he now lived apart he suffered
less from this brutal conduct, and his love of peace prompted him to
patience. His good fortune, too, had turned his head, and he scarcely paused
to think of anything which had no direct interest for himself. He would
come in full of fresh little anxieties, full of the cut of a morning-coat, of the
shape of a felt hat, of the proper size for his visiting-cards. And he talked
incessantly of all the details of his house—the shelves fixed in his bedroom
cupboard to keep linen on, the pegs to be put up in the entrance hall, the
electric bells contrived to prevent illicit visitors to his lodgings.
It had been settled that on the day when he should take up his abode there
they should make an excursion to Saint Jouin, and return after dining there,
to drink tea in his rooms. Roland wanted to go by water, but the distance
and the uncertainty of reaching it in a sailing-boat if there should be a head-
wind, made them reject his plan, and a break was hired for the day.

They started by ten to get there to breakfast. The dusty high road lay across
the plain of Normandy, which, by its gentle undulations, dotted with farms
embowered in trees, wears the aspect of an endless park. In the vehicle, as it
jogged on at the slow trot of a pair of heavy horses, sat the four Rolands,
Mme. Rosémilly, and Captain Beausire, all silent, deafened by the rumble
of the wheels, and with their eyes shut to keep out the clouds of dust.
It was harvest-time. Alternating with the dark hue of clover and the raw
green of beetroot, the yellow corn lighted up the landscape with gleams of
pale gold; the fields looked as if they had drunk in the sunshine which
poured down on them. Here and there the reapers were at work, and in the
plots where the scythe had been put in the men might be seen see-sawing as
they swept the level soil with the broad, wing-shaped blade.
After a two-hours' drive the break turned off to the left, past a windmill at
work—a melancholy, gray wreck, half rotten and doomed, the last survivor
of its ancient race; then it went into a pretty inn yard, and drew up at the
door of a smart little house, a hostelry famous in those parts.
The mistress, well known as "La belle Alphonsine," came smiling to the
threshold, and held out her hand to the two ladies who hesitated to take the
high step.
Some strangers were already at breakfast under a tent by a grass plot shaded
by apple trees—Parisians, who had come from Etretat; and from the house
came sounds of voices, laughter, and the clatter of plates and pans.
They were eating in a room, as the outer dining halls were all full. Roland
suddenly caught sight of some shrimping nets hanging against the wall.
"Ah! ha!" cried he, "you catch prawns here?"
"Yes," replied Beausire. "Indeed it is the place on all the coast where most
are taken."
"First rate! Suppose we try to catch some after breakfast."
As it happened it would be low tide at three o'clock, so it was settled that
they should all spend the afternoon among the rocks, hunting prawns.

They made a light breakfast, as a precaution against the tendency of blood
to the head when they should have their feet in the water. They also wished
to reserve an appetite for dinner, which had been ordered on a grand scale
and to be ready at six o'clock, when they came in.
Roland could not sit still for impatience. He wanted to buy the nets
specially constructed for fishing prawns, not unlike those used for catching
butterflies in the country. Their name on the French coast is lanets; they are
netted bags on a circular wooden frame, at the end of a long pole.
Alphonsine, still smiling, was happy to lend them. Then she helped the two
ladies to make an impromptu change of toilet, so as not to spoil their
dresses. She offered them skirts, coarse worsted stockings and hemp shoes.
The men took off their socks and went to the shoemaker's to buy wooden
shoes instead.
Then they set out, the nets over their shoulders and creels on their backs.
Mme. Rosémilly was quite sweet in this costume, with an unexpected
charm of countrified audacity. The skirt which Alphonsine had lent her,
coquettishly tucked up and firmly stitched so as to allow of her running and
jumping fearlessly on the rocks, displayed her ankle and lower calf—the
firm calf of a strong and agile little woman. Her dress was loose to give
freedom to her movements, and to cover her head she had found an
enormous garden hat of coarse yellow straw with an extravagantly broad
brim; and to this, a bunch of tamarisk pinned in to cock it on one side, gave
a very dashing and military effect.
Jean, since he had come into his fortune, had asked himself every day
whether or no he should marry her. Each time he saw her he made up his
mind to ask her to be his wife, and then, as soon as he was alone again, he
considered that by waiting he would have time to reflect. She was now less
rich than he, for she had but twelve thousand francs a year; but it was in real
estate, in farms and lands near the docks in Havre; and this by-and-by might
be worth a great deal. Their fortunes were thus approximately equal, and
certainly the young widow attracted him greatly.
As he watched her walking in front of him that day he said to himself:
"I must really decide; I cannot do better, I am sure."

They went down a little ravine, sloping from the village to the cliff, and the
cliff, at the end of this comb, rose about eighty meters above the sea.
Framed between the green slopes to the right and left, a great triangle of
silvery blue water could be seen in the distance, and a sail, scarcely visible,
looked like an insect out there. The sky, pale with light, was so merged into
one with the water that it was impossible to see where one ended and the
other began; and the two women, walking in front of the men, stood out
against this bright background, their shapes clearly defined in their closely-
fitting dresses.
Jean, with a sparkle in his eye, watched the smart ankle, the neat leg, the
supple waist, and the coquettish broad hat of Mme. Rosémilly as they fled
away before him. And this flight fired his ardor, urging him on to the
sudden determination which comes to hesitating and timid natures. The
warm air, fragrant with seacoast odors—gorse, clover and thyme, mingling
with the salt smell of the rocks at low tide—excited him still more,
mounting to his brain; and every moment he felt a little more determined, at
every step, at every glance he cast at the alert figure; he made up his mind
to delay no longer, to tell her that he loved her and hoped to marry her. The
prawn-fishing would favor him by affording him an opportunity; and it
would be a pretty scene too, a pretty spot for love-making—their feet in a
pool of limpid water while they watched the long feelers of the shrimps
lurking under the wrack.
When they had reached the end of the comb and the edge of cliff, they saw
a little footpath slanting down the face of it; and below them, about half-
way between the sea and the foot of the precipice, an amazing chaos of
enormous boulders tumbled over and piled one above the other on a sort of
grassy and undulating plain which extended as far as they could see to the
southward, formed by an ancient landslip. On this long shelf of brushwood
and grass, disrupted, as it seemed, by the shocks of a volcano, the fallen
rocks seemed the wreck of a great ruined city which had once looked out on
the ocean, sheltered by the long white wall of the overhanging cliff.
"That is fine!" exclaimed Mme. Rosémilly, standing still. Jean had come up
with her, and with a beating heart offered his hand to help her down the
narrow steps cut in the rock.

They went on in front, while Beausire, squaring himself on his little legs,
gave his arm to Mme. Roland, who felt giddy at the gulf before her.
The two young people who led the way, went fast till on a sudden they saw,
by the side of a wooden bench which afforded a resting place about half-
way down the slope, a thread of clear water, springing from a crevice in the
cliff. It fell into a hollow as large as a washing basin which it had worn in
the stone; then, falling in a cascade, hardly two feet high, it trickled across
the footpath, which it had carpeted with cresses, and was lost among the
briars and grass on the raised shelf where the boulders were piled.
"Oh, I am so thirsty!" cried Mme. Rosémilly.
But how could she drink? She tried to catch the water in her hand, but it
slipped away between her fingers. Jean had an idea; he placed a stone on
the path and on this she knelt down to put her lips to the spring itself, which
was thus on the same level.
When she raised her head, covered with myriads of tiny drops, sprinkled all
over her face, her hair, her eyelashes, and her dress, Jean bent over her and
murmured: "How pretty you look!"
She answered in the tone in which she might have scolded a child:
"Will you be quiet!"
These were the first words of flirtation they had ever exchanged.
"Come," said Jean, much agitated. "Let us go on before they come up with
us."
For in fact they could see quite near them now, Captain Beausire's back as
he came down, stern foremost, so as to give both hands to Mme. Roland;
and further up, further off, Roland still letting himself slip, lowering himself
on his hams and clinging on with both his hand and elbows at the speed of a
tortoise, Pierre keeping in front of him to watch his movements.
The path, now less steep, was here almost a road, zigzagging between the
huge rocks which had at some former time rolled from the hilltop. Mme.
Rosémilly and Jean set off at a run and they were soon on the beach. They
crossed it and reached the rocks, which stretched in a long and flat expanse

covered with seaweed, and broken by endless gleaming pools. The ebbed
waters lay beyond, very far away, across this plain of slimy weed, of a black
and shining olive-green.
Jean rolled up his trousers above his calf, and his sleeves to his elbows, that
he might get wet without caring; then saying: "Forward!" he leaped boldly
into the first tidepool they came to.
The lady, more cautious, though fully intending to go in too, presently,
made her way round the little pond, stepping timidly, for she slipped on the
grassy weed.
"Do you see anything?" she asked.
"Yes, I see your face reflected in the water."
"If that is all you see, you will not have good fishing."
He murmured tenderly in reply:
"Of all fishing it is that I should like best to succeed in."
She laughed: "Try; you will see how it will slip through your net."
"But yet—if you will?"
"I will see you catch prawns—and nothing else—for the moment."
"You are cruel—let us go a little further; there are none here."
He gave her his hand to steady her on the slippery rocks. She leaned on him
rather timidly, and he suddenly felt himself overpowered by love and
insurgent with passion, as if the fever that had been incubating in him had
waited till to-day to declare its presence.
They soon came to a deeper rift, in which long slender weeds, fantastically
tinted, like floating green and rose-colored hair, were swaying under the
quivering water as it trickled off to the distant sea through some invisible
crevice.
Mme. Rosémilly cried out: "Look, look, I see one, a big one. A very big
one, just there!" He saw it too, and stepped boldly into the pool though he

got wet up to the waist. But the creature, waving its long whiskers, gently
retired in front of the net. Jean drove it toward the seaweed, making sure of
his prey. When it found itself blockaded it rose with a dart over the net, shot
across the mere, and was gone. The young woman, who was watching the
chase in great excitement, could not help exclaiming: "Oh! Clumsy!"
He was vexed, and without a moment's thought dragged his net over a hole
full of weed. As he brought it to the surface again he saw in it three large
transparent prawns, caught blindfold in their hiding place.
He offered them in triumph to Mme. Rosémilly, who was afraid to touch
them, for fear of the sharp, serrated crest which arms their heads. However,
she made up her mind to it, and taking them up by the tips of their long
whiskers she dropped them one by one into her creel, with a little seaweed
to keep them alive. Then, having found a shallower pool of water, she
stepped in with some hesitation, for the cold plunge of her feet took her
breath away, and began to fish on her own account. She was dextrous and
artful, with the light hand and the hunter's instinct, which are indispensable.
At almost every dip she caught up some prawns, beguiled and surprised by
her ingeniously gentle pursuit.
Jean now caught nothing; but he followed her, step by step, touched her
now and again, bent over her, pretended great distress at his own
awkwardness, and besought her to teach him.
"Show me," he kept saying. "Show me how."
And then, as their two faces were reflected side by side in water so clear
that the black weeds at the bottom made a mirror, Jean smiled at the face
which looked up at him from the depth, and now and then from his finger
tips blew it a kiss which seemed to light upon it.
"Oh! how tiresome you are!" she exclaimed. "My dear fellow, you should
never do two things at once."
He replied: "I am only doing one—loving you."
She drew herself up and said gravely:
"What has come over you these ten minutes; have you lost your wits?"

"No, I have not lost my wits. I love you, and at last I dare to tell you so."
They were at this moment both standing in the salt pool wet half-way up to
their knees and with dripping hands, holding their nets. They looked into
each other's eyes.
She went on in a tone of amused annoyance.
"How very ill-advised to tell me so here and now. Could you not wait till
another day instead of spoiling my fishing?"
"Forgive me," he murmured, "but I could not longer hold my peace. I have
loved you a long time. To-day you have intoxicated me and I lost my
reason."
Then suddenly she seemed to have resigned herself to talk business and
think no more of pleasure.
"Let us sit down on that stone," said she, "we can talk more comfortably."
They scrambled up a rather high boulder, and when they had settled
themselves side by side in the bright sunshine, she began again:
"My good friend, you are no longer a child, and I am not a young girl. We
both know perfectly well what we are about and we can weigh the
consequences of our actions. If you have made up your mind to make love
to me to-day I must naturally infer that you wish to marry me."
He was not prepared for this matter-of-fact statement of the case, and he
answered blandly:
"Why, yes."
"Have you mentioned it to your father and mother?"
"No; I wanted to know first whether you would accept me."
She held out her hand, which was still wet, and as he eagerly clasped it:
"I am ready and willing," she said. "I believe you to be kind and true-
hearted. But remember, I should not like to displease your parents."

"Oh, do you think that my mother has never foreseen it, or that she would
be as fond of you as she is if she did not hope that you and I should marry?"
"That is true. I am a little disturbed."
They said no more. He, for his part, was amazed at her being so little
disturbed, so rational. He had expected pretty little flirting ways, refusals
which meant yes, a whole coquettish comedy of love chequered by prawn-
fishing in the splashing water. And it was all over; he was pledged, married
with twenty words. They had no more to say about it since they were
agreed, and they now sat, both somewhat embarrassed by what had so
swiftly passed between them; a little perplexed, indeed, not daring to speak,
not daring to fish, not knowing what to do.
Roland's voice rescued them.
"This way, this way, children. Come and watch Beausire. The fellow is
positively clearing out the sea!"
The captain had, in fact, had a wonderful haul. Wet above his hips, he
waded from pool to pool, recognizing the likeliest spots at a glance, and
searching all the hollows hidden under seaweed, with a steady slow sweep
of his net. And the beautiful transparent, sandy-gray prawns skipped in his
palm as he picked them out of the net with a dry jerk and put them into his
creel. Mme. Rosémilly, surprised and delighted, remained at his side,
almost forgetful of her promise to Jean, who followed them in a dream,
giving herself up entirely to the childish enjoyment of pulling the creatures
out from among the waving seagrasses.
Roland suddenly exclaimed:
"Ah, here comes Mme. Roland to join us."
She had remained at first on the beach with Pierre, for they had neither of
them any wish to play at running about among the rocks and paddling in the
tide-pools; and yet they had felt doubtful about staying together. She was
afraid of him, and her son was afraid of her and of himself; afraid of his
own cruelty, which he could not control. But they sat down side by side on
the stones. And both of them, under the heat of the sun, mitigated by the sea
breeze, gazing at the wide, fair horizon of blue water streaked and shot with

silver, thought as if in unison: "How delightful this would have been—
once."
She did not venture to speak to Pierre, knowing that he would return some
hard answer; and he dared not address his mother, knowing that in spite of
himself he should speak violently. He sat twitching the water-worn pebbles
with the end of his cane, switching them and turning them over. She, with a
vague look in her eyes, had picked up three or four little stones and was
slowly and mechanically dropping them from one hand into the other. Then
her unsettled gaze, wandering over the scene before her, discerned, among
the weedy rocks, her son Jean fishing with Mme. Rosémilly. She looked at
them, watching their movements, dimly understanding, with motherly
instinct, that they were talking as they did not talk every day. She saw them
leaning over side by side when they looked into the water, standing face to
face when they questioned their hearts, then scrambled up the rock and
seated themselves to come to an understanding. Their figures stood out very
sharply, looking as if they were alone in the middle of the wide horizon, and
assuming a sort of symbolic dignity in that vast expanse of sky and sea and
cliff.
Pierre, too, was looking at them, and a harsh laugh suddenly broke from his
lips. Without turning to him Mme. Roland said:
"What is it?"
He spoke with a sneer.
"I am learning. Learning how a man lays himself out to be cozened by his
wife."
She flushed with rage, exasperated by the insinuation she believed was
intended.
"In whose name do you say that?"
"In Jean's, by heaven! It is immensely funny to see those two."
She murmured in a low voice, tremulous with feeling: "O Pierre, how cruel
you are. That woman is honesty itself. Your brother could not find a better."
He laughed aloud, a hard, satirical laugh:

"Ha! hah! hah! Honesty itself! All wives are honesty itself,—and all
husbands are—betrayed." And he shouted with laughter.
She made no reply, but rose, hastily went down the sloping beach, and at
the risk of tumbling into one of the rifts hidden by the seaweed, of breaking
a leg or an arm, she hastened, almost running, plunging through the pools
without looking, straight to her other son.
Seeing her approach, Jean called out:
"Well, mother? So you have made the effort?"
Without a word she seized him by the arm, as if to say: "Save me, protect
me!"
He saw her agitation, and greatly surprised he said:
"How pale you are; what is the matter?"
She stammered out:
"I was nearly falling; I was frightened at the rocks."
So then Jean guided her, supported her, explained the sport to her that she
might take an interest in it. But as she scarcely heeded him, and as he was
bursting with the desire to confide in some one, he led her away and in a
low voice said to her:
"Guess what I have done!"
"But—what—I don't know."
"Guess."
"I cannot. I don't know."
"Well, I have told Mme. Rosémilly that I wish to marry her."
She did not answer, for her brain was buzzing, her mind in such distress that
she could scarcely take it in. She echoed: "Marry her?"
"Yes. Have I done well? She is charming, do not you think?"

"Yes, charming. You have done very well."
"Then you approve?"
"Yes, I approve."
"But how strangely you say so. I could fancy that—that you were not glad."
"Yes, indeed, I am—very glad."
"Really and truly?"
"Really and truly."
And to prove it she threw her arms round him and kissed him heartily with
warm motherly kisses. Then, when she had wiped her eyes, which were full
of tears, she observed upon the beach a man lying flat at full length like a
dead body, his face hidden against the stones; it was the other one, Pierre,
sunk in thought and desperation.
At this she led her little Jean further away, quite to the edge of the waves,
and there they talked for a long time of this marriage on which he had set
his heart.
The rising tide drove them back to rejoin the fishers, and then they all made
their way to the shore. They roused Pierre, who pretended to be sleeping;
and then came a long dinner washed down with many kinds of wine.

CHAPTER VII

n the break, on their way home, all the men dozed excepting Jean.
Beausire and Roland dropped every five minutes on to a neighbor's
shoulder which repelled them with a shove. Then they sat up, ceased to
snore, opened their eyes, muttered "a lovely evening!" and almost
immediately fell over on the other side.
By the time they reached Havre their drowsiness was so heavy that they had
great difficulty in shaking it off, and Beausire even refused to go to Jean's
rooms where tea was waiting for them. He had to be set down at his own
door.

The young lawyer was to sleep in his new abode for the first time; and he
was full of rather puerile glee which had suddenly come over him, at being
able, that very evening to show his betrothed the rooms she was so soon to
inhabit.
The maid had gone to bed, Mme. Roland having declared that she herself
would boil the water and make the tea, for she did not like the servants to be
kept up for fear of fire.
No one had yet been into the lodgings but herself, Jean, and the workmen,
that the surprise might be the greater at their being so pretty.
Jean begged them all to wait a moment in the ante-room. He wanted to light
the lamps and candles, and he left Mme. Rosémilly in the dark with his
father and brother; then he cried! "Come in!" opening the double door to its
full width.
The glass gallery, lighted by a chandelier and little colored lamps hidden
among palms, india-rubber plants and flowers, was first seen like a scene on
the stage. There was a spasm of surprise. Roland, dazzled by such luxury,
muttered an oath, and felt inclined to clap his hands as if it were a
pantomime scene. They then went into the first drawing-room, a small room
hung with dead gold and furnished to match. The larger drawing-room—the
lawyer's consulting-room, very simple, hung with light salmon-color, was
dignified in style.
Jean sat down in his armchair in front of his writing-table loaded with
books, and in a solemn, rather stilted tone, he began:
"Yes, madame, the letter of the law is explicit, and, assuming the consent I
promised you, it affords me absolute certainty that the matter we discussed
will come to a happy conclusion within three months."
He looked at Mme. Rosémilly, who began to smile and glanced at Mme.
Roland. Madame Roland took her hand and pressed it. Jean, in high spirits,
cut a caper like a schoolboy, exclaiming: "Hah! How well the voice carries
in this room; it would be capital for speaking in."
And he declaimed:

"If humanity alone, if the instinct of natural benevolence which we feel
toward all who suffer, were the motive of the acquittal we expect of you, I
should appeal to your compassion, gentlemen of the jury, to your hearts as
fathers and as men; but we have law on our side, and it is the point of law
only which we shall submit to your judgment."
Pierre was looking at this home which might have been his, and he was
restive under his brother's frolics, thinking him really too silly and witless.
Mme. Roland opened a door on the right.
"This is the bedroom," said she.
She had devoted herself to its decoration with all her mother's love. The
hangings were of Rouen cretonne imitating old Normandy chintz, and the
Louis XV design—a shepherdess, in a medallion held in the beaks of a pair
of doves—gave the walls, curtains, bed, and armchairs a festive, rustic style
that was extremely pretty!
"Oh, how charming!" Mme. Rosémilly exclaimed, becoming a little serious
as they entered the room.
"Do you like it?" asked Jean.
"Immensely."
"You cannot imagine how glad I am."
They looked at each other for a second, with confiding tenderness in the
depths of their eyes.
She had felt a little awkward, however, a little abashed, in this room which
was to be hers. She noticed as she went in that the bed was a large one,
quite a family bed, chosen by Mme. Roland, who had no doubt foreseen
and hoped that her son should soon marry; and this motherly foresight
pleased her, for it seemed to tell her that she was expected in the family.
When they had returned to the drawing-room Jean abruptly threw open the
door to the left, showing the circular dining-room with three windows, and
decorated to imitate a Chinese lantern. Mother and son had here lavished all
the fancy of which they were capable, and the room, with its bamboo

furniture, its mandarins, jars, silk hangings glistening with gold, transparent
blinds threaded with beads looking like drops of water, fans nailed to the
wall to drape the hangings on, screens, swords, masks, cranes made of real
feathers, and a myriad trifles in china, wood, paper, ivory, mother of pearl,
and bronze, had the pretentious and extravagant aspect which unpracticed
hands and uneducated eyes inevitably stamp on things which need the
utmost tact, taste, and artistic education. Nevertheless it was the most
admired; only Pierre made some observations with rather bitter irony which
hurt his brother's feelings.
Pyramids of fruit stood on the table and monuments of cakes. No one was
hungry; they picked at the fruit and nibbled at the cakes rather than ate
them. Then, at the end of about an hour, Mme. Rosémilly begged to take
leave. It was decided that old Roland should accompany her home and set
out with her forthwith; while Madame Roland, in the maid's absence,
should cast a maternal eye over the house and see that her son had all he
needed.
"Shall I come back for you?" asked Roland.
She hesitated a moment and then said: "No, dear old man; go to bed. Pierre
will see me home."
As soon as they were gone she blew out the candles, locked up the cakes,
the sugar, and liqueurs in a cupboard of which she gave the key to Jean;
then she went into the bedroom, turned down the bed, saw that there was
fresh water in the water-bottle, and that the window was properly closed.
Pierre and Jean had remained in the little outer drawing-room; the younger
still sore under the criticism passed on his taste, and the elder chafing more
and more at seeing his brother in this abode. They both sat smoking without
a word. Pierre suddenly started to his feet.
"Cristi!" he exclaimed. "The widow looked very jaded this evening. Long
excursions do not improve her."
Jean felt his spirit rising with one of those sudden and furious rages which
boil up in easy-going natures when they are wounded to the quick. He could
hardly find breath to speak, so fierce was his excitement, and he stammered
out:

"I forbid you ever again to say 'the widow' when you speak of Mme.
Rosémilly."
Pierre turned on him haughtily:
"You are giving me an order, I believe. Are you gone mad by any chance?"
Jean had pulled himself up.
"I am not gone mad, but I have had enough of your manners to me."
Pierre sneered: "To you? And are you any part of Mme. Rosémilly?"
"You are to know that Mme. Rosémilly is about to become my wife."
Pierre laughed the louder.
"Ah! ha! Very good. I understand now why I should no longer speak of her
as 'the widow.' But you have taken a strange way of announcing your
engagement."
"I forbid any jesting about it. Do you hear? I forbid it."
Jean had come close up to him, pale, and his voice quivering with
exasperation at this irony leveled at the woman he loved and had chosen.
But on a sudden Pierre turned equally furious. All the accumulation of
impotent rage, of suppressed malignity, of rebellion choked down for so
long past, all his unspoken despair mounted to his brain, bewildering it like
a fit.
"How dare you? How dare you? I order you to hold your tongue—do you
hear? I order you."
Jean, startled by his violence, was silent for a few seconds, trying in the
confusion of mind which comes of rage to hit on the thing, the phrase, the
word, which might stab his brother to the heart. He went on, with an effort
to control himself that he might aim true, and to speak slowly that the words
might hit more keenly:
"I have known for a long time that you were jealous of me, ever since the
day when you first began to talk of 'the widow' because you knew it

annoyed me."
Pierre broke into one of those strident and scornful laughs which were
common with him:
"Ah! ah! Good Heavens! Jealous of you? I? I? And of what? Good God! Of
your person or your mind?"
But Jean knew full well that he had touched the wound in his soul.
"Yes, jealous of me—jealous from your childhood up. And it became fury
when you saw that this woman liked me best and would have nothing to say
to you."
Pierre, stung to the quick by this assumption, stuttered out:
"I? I? Jealous of you? And for the sake of that goose, that gaby, that
simpleton?"
Jean, seeing that he was aiming true, went on:
"And how about the day when you tried to pull me round in the Pearl? And
all you said in her presence to show off? Why you are bursting with
jealousy? And when this money was left to me you were maddened, you
hated me, you showed it in every possible way, and made every one suffer
for it; not an hour passes that you do not spit out the bile that is choking
you."
Pierre clenched his fist in his fury with an almost irresistible impulse to fly
at his brother and seize him by the throat.
"Hold your tongue," he cried. "At least say nothing about that money."
Jean went on:
"Why your jealousy oozes out at every pore. You never say a word to my
father, my mother, or me that does not declare it plainly. You pretend to
despise me because you are jealous. You try to pick a quarrel with every
one because you are jealous. And now that I am rich you can no longer
contain yourself; you have become venomous, you torture our poor mother
as if she were to blame!"

Pierre had retired step by step as far as the fireplace, his mouth half open,
his eyes glaring, a prey to one of those mad fits of passion in which crime is
committed.
He said again in a lower tone, gasping for breath: "Hold your tongue—for
God's sake hold your tongue!"
"No! For a long time I have been wanting to give you my whole mind! you
have given me an opening—so much the worse for you. I love the woman;
you know it, and laugh her to scorn in my presence—so much the worse for
you. But I will break your viper's fangs, I tell you. I will make you treat me
with respect."
"With respect—you?"
"Yes—me."
"Respect you? You who have brought shame on us all by your greed."
"You say—? Say it again—again."
"I say that it does not do to accept one man's fortune when another is
reputed to be your father."
Jean stood rigid, not understanding, dazed by the insinuation he scented.
"What? Repeat that once more."
"I say—what everybody is muttering, what every gossip is blabbing—that
you are the son of the man who left you his fortune. Well, then—a decent
man does not take money which brings dishonor on his mother."
"Pierre! Pierre! Pierre! Think what you are saying. You? It is you who give
utterance to this infamous thing?"
"Yes, I. It is I. Have you not seen me crushed with woe this month past,
spending my nights without sleep and my days in lurking out of sight like
an animal? I hardly know what I am doing or what will become of me, so
miserable am I, so crazed with shame and grief; for first I guessed—and
now I know it."

"Pierre! Be silent. Mother is in the next room. Remember she may hear—
she must hear."
But Pierre felt that he must unburden his heart. He told Jean all his
suspicions, his arguments, his struggles, his assurance, and the history of
the portrait—which had again disappeared. He spoke in short broken
sentences almost without coherence—the language of a sleep-walker.
He seemed to have quite forgotten Jean, and his mother in the adjoining
room. He talked as if no one were listening, because he must talk, because
he had suffered too much and smothered and closed the wound too tightly.
It had festered like an abscess and the abscess had burst, splashing every
one. He was pacing the room in the way he almost always did, his eyes
fixed on vacancy, gesticulating in a frenzy of despair, his voice choked with
tearless sobs and revulsions of self-loathing; he spoke as if he were making
a confession of his own misery and that of his nearest kin, as though he
were casting his woes to the deaf, invisible winds which bore away his
words.
Jean, distracted and almost convinced on a sudden by his brother's blind
vehemence, was leaning against the door behind which, as he guessed, their
mother had heard them.
She could not get out, she must come through this room. She had not come;
then it was because she dared not.
Suddenly Pierre stamped his foot:
"I am a brute," he cried, "to have told you this."
And he fled, bare-headed, down the stairs.
The noise of the front-door closing with a slam roused Jean from the deep
stupor into which he had fallen. Some seconds had elapsed, longer than
hours, and his spirit had sunk into the numb torpor of idiocy. He was
conscious, indeed, that he must presently think and act, but he would wait,
refusing to understand, to know, to remember, out of fear, weakness,
cowardice. He was one of those procrastinators who put everything off till
the morrow; and when he was compelled to come to a decision then and
there, still he instinctively tried to gain a few minutes.

But the perfect silence which now reigned, after Pierre's vociferations, the
sudden stillness of walls and furniture, with the bright light of six wax
candles and two lamps, terrified him so greatly that he suddenly longed to
make his escape too.
Then he roused his brain, roused his heart, and tried to reflect.
Never in his life had he had to face a difficulty. There are men who let
themselves glide onward like running water. He had been duteous over his
tasks for fear of punishment, and had got through his legal studies with
credit because his existence was tranquil. Everything in the world seemed
to him quite natural and never aroused his particular attention. He loved
order, steadiness, and peace, by temperament, his nature having no
complications; and face to face with this catastrophe, he found himself like
a man who has fallen into the water and cannot swim.
At first he tried to be incredulous. His brother had told a lie, out of hatred
and jealousy. But yet, how could he have been so vile as to say such a thing
of their mother if he had not himself been distraught by despair? Besides,
stamped on Jean's ear, on his sight, on his nerves, on the inmost fibers of his
flesh, were certain words, certain tones of anguish, certain gestures of
Pierre's, so full of suffering that they were irresistibly convincing; as
incontrovertible as certainty itself.
He was too much crushed to stir or even to will. His distress became
unbearable; and he knew that behind the door was his mother who had
heard everything and was waiting.
What was she doing? Not a movement, not a shudder, not a breath, not a
sigh revealed the presence of a living creature behind that panel. Could she
have run away? But how? If she had run away—she must have jumped out
of the window into the street. A shock of terror roused him—so violent and
imperious that he drove the door in rather than opened it, and flung himself
into the bedroom.
It was apparently empty, lighted by a single candle standing on the chest of
drawers.
Jean flew to the window, it was shut and the shutters bolted. He looked
about him, peering into the dark corners with anxious eyes, and he then

noticed that the bed-curtains were drawn. He ran forward and opened them.
His mother was lying on the bed, her face buried in the pillow which she
had pulled up over her ears that she might hear no more.
At first he thought she had smothered herself. Then taking her by the
shoulders, he turned her over without her leaving go of the pillow, which
covered her face, and in which she had set her teeth to keep herself from
crying out.
But the mere touch of this rigid form, of those arms so convulsively
clenched, communicated to him the shock of her unspeakable torture. The
strength and determination with which she clutched the linen case full of
feathers with her hands and teeth, over her mouth and eyes and ears, that he
might neither see her nor speak to her, gave him an idea, by the turmoil it
roused in him, of the pitch suffering may rise to, and his heart, his simple
heart, was torn with pity. He was no judge, not he; not even a merciful
judge; he was a man full of weakness and a son full of love. He
remembered nothing of what his brother had told him; he neither reasoned
nor argued, he merely laid his two hands on his mother's inert body, and not
being able to pull the pillow away, he exclaimed, kissing her dress:
"Mother, mother, my poor mother, look at me."
She would have seemed to be dead but that an almost imperceptible
shudder ran through all her limbs, the vibration of a strained cord. And he
repeated:
"Mother, mother, listen to me. It is not true. I know that it is not true."
A spasm seemed to come over her, a fit of suffocation; then she suddenly
began to sob into the pillow. Her sinews relaxed, her rigid muscles yielded,
her fingers gave way and left go of the linen; and he uncovered her face.
She was pale, quite colorless; and from under her closed lids tears were
stealing. He threw his arms round her neck and kissed her eyes, slowly,
with long heart-broken kisses, wet with her tears; and he said again and
again:
"Mother, my dear mother, I know it is not true. Do not cry; I know it. It is
not true."

She raised herself, she sat up, looked in his face, and with an effort of
courage such as it must cost in some cases to kill one's self, she said:
"No, my child; it is true."
And they remained speechless, each in the presence of the other. For some
minutes she seemed again to be suffocating, craning her throat and throwing
back her head to get breath; then she once more mastered herself and went
on:
"It is true, my child. Why lie about it? It is true. You would not believe me
if I denied it."
She looked like a crazy creature. Overcome by alarm, he fell on his knees
by the bedside murmuring:
"Hush, mother, be silent." She stood up with terrible determination and
energy.
"I have nothing more to say, my child. Good-by." And she went toward the
door.
He threw his arms about her exclaiming:
"What are you doing, mother; where are you going?"
"I do not know. How should I know—There is nothing left for me to do,
now that I am alone."
She struggled to be released. Holding her firmly, he could find only words
to say again and again:
"Mother, mother, mother!" And through all her efforts to free herself she
was saying:
"No, no. I am not your mother now. I am nothing to you, to anybody—
nothing, nothing. You have neither father nor mother now, poor boy—good-
by."
It struck him clearly that if he let her go now he should never see her again;
lifting her up in his arms he carried her to an armchair, forced her into it,
and kneeling down in front of her barred her in with his arms.

"You shall not quit this spot, mother. I love you and I will keep you! I will
keep you always—I love you and you are mine."
She murmured in a dejected tone:
"No, my poor boy, it is impossible. You weep to-night, but to-morrow you
would turn me out of the house. You, even you, could not forgive me."
He replied: "I? I? How little you know me!" with such a burst of genuine
affection that with a cry, she seized his head by the hair with both hands,
and dragging him violently to her kissed him distractedly all over the face.
Then she sat still, her cheek against his, feeling the warmth of his skin
through his beard, and she whispered in his ear: "No, my little Jean, you
would not forgive me to-morrow. You think so, but you deceive yourself.
You have forgiven me this evening, and that forgiveness has saved my life;
but you must never see me again."
And he repeated, clasping her in his arms:
"Mother, do not say that."
"Yes, my child, I must go away. I do not know where, nor how I shall set
about it, nor what I shall do; but it must be done. I could never look at you,
nor kiss you, do you understand?"
Then he in his turn spoke into her ear:
"My little mother, you are to stay, because I insist, because I want you. And
you must pledge your word to obey me, now at once."
"No, my child."
"Yes, mother, you must; do you hear? You must."
"No, my child, it is impossible. It would be condemning us all to the
tortures of hell. I know what that torment is; I have known it this month
past. Your feelings are touched now, but when that is over, when you look
on me as Pierre does, when you remember what I have told you—oh, my
Jean, think—think—I am your mother!"
"I will not let you leave me, mother. I have no one but you."

"But think, my son, we can never see each other again without both of us
blushing, without my feeling that I must die of shame, without my eyes
falling before yours."
"But it is not so mother."
"Yes, yes, yes, it is so! Oh, I have understood all your poor brother's
struggles, believe me! All—from the very first day. Now when I hear his
step in the house my heart beats as if it would burst, when I hear his voice I
am ready to faint. I still had you; now I have you no longer. Oh, my little
Jean! Do you think I could live between you two?"
"Yes, I should love you so much that you would cease to think of it."
"As if that were possible!"
"But it is possible!"
"How do you suppose that I could cease to think of it, with your brother and
you on each hand? Would you cease to think of it, I ask you?"
"I? I swear I should."
"Why you would think of it at every hour of the day."
"No, I swear it. Besides, listen, if you go away I will enlist and get killed."
This boyish threat quite overcame her; she clasped Jean in a passionate and
tender embrace. He went on:
"I love you more than you think—ah much more, much more. Come, be
reasonable. Try to stay for only one week. Will you promise me one week?
You cannot refuse me that?"
She laid her two hands on Jean's shoulders, and holding him at arm's length
she said:
"My child, let us try and be calm and not give way to emotions. First, listen
to me. If I were ever to hear from your lips what I have heard for this month
past from your brother, if I were once to see in your eyes what I read in his,
if I could fancy from a word or a look that I was as odious to you as I am to

him—within one hour, mark me—within one hour I should be gone
forever."
"Mother, I swear to you—"
"Let me speak. For a month past I have suffered all that any creature can
suffer. From the moment when I perceived that your brother, my other son,
suspected me, that as the minutes went by, he guessed the truth, every
moment of my life has been a martyrdom which no words could tell you."
Her voice was so full of woe that the contagion of her misery brought the
tears to Jean's eyes.
He tried to kiss her, but she held him off.
"Leave me—listen; I still have so much to say to make you understand. But
you never can understand. You see, if I stayed—I must—no, no. I cannot."
"Speak on, mother, speak."
"Yes, indeed, for at least I shall not have deceived you. You want me to stay
with you? For what—for us to be able to see each other, speak to each
other, meet at any hour of the day at home, for I no longer dare open a door
for fear of finding your brother behind it. If we are to do that, you must not
forgive me—nothing is so wounding as forgiveness—but you must owe me
no grudge for what I have done. You must feel yourself strong enough, and
so far unlike the rest of the world, as to be able to say to yourself that you
are not Roland's son without blushing for the fact or despising me. I have
suffered enough—I have suffered too much; I can bear no more, no indeed,
no more! And it is not a thing of yesterday, mind you, but of long, long
years. But you could never understand that, how should you! If you and I
are to live together and kiss each other, my little Jean, you must believe that
though I was your father's mistress I was yet more truly his wife, his real
wife; that at the bottom of my heart, I cannot be ashamed of it; that I have
no regrets; that I love him still even in death; that I shall always love him
and never loved any other man; that he was my life, my joy, my hope, my
comfort, everything—everything in the world to me for so long! Listen, my
boy, before God, who hears me, I should never have had a joy in my
existence if I had not met him; never anything—not a touch of tenderness or
kindness, not one of those hours which make us regret growing old,—

nothing. I owe everything to him! I had but him in the world, and you two
boys, your brother and you. But for you, all would have been empty, dark,
and void as the night. I should never have loved, or known, or cared for
anything—I should not even have wept—for I have wept, my little Jean; oh
yes, and bitter tears, since we came to Havre. I was his wholly and forever;
for ten years I was as much his wife as he was my husband before God who
created us for each other. And then I began to see that he loved me less. He
was always kind and courteous, but I was not what I had been to him. It was
all over! Oh, how I have cried! How dreadful and delusive life is! Nothing
lasts. Then we came here—I never saw him again; he never came. He
promised it in every letter. I was always expecting him, and I never saw him
again—and now he is dead! But he still cared for us since he remembered
you. I shall love him to my latest breath, and I never will deny him, and I
love you because you are his child, and I could never be ashamed of him
before you. Do you understand? I could not. So if you wish me to remain
you must accept the situation as his son, and we will talk of him sometimes;
and you must love him a little and we must think of him when we look at
each other. If you will not do this—if you cannot—then good-by, my child;
it is impossible that we should live together. Now, I will act by your
decision."
Jean replied gently:
"Stay, mother."
She clasped him in her arms, and her tears flowed again; then, with her face
against his, she went on:
"Well, but Pierre. What can we do about Pierre?"
Jean murmured:
"We will find some plan! You cannot live with him any longer."
At the thought of her elder son she was convulsed with terror.
"No, I cannot; no, no!" And throwing herself on Jean's breast she cried in
distress of mind:

"Save me from him, you my little one. Save me; do something—I don't
know what. Think of something. Save me."
"Yes, mother, I will think of something."
"And at once. You must, this minute. Do not leave me. I am so afraid of him
—so afraid."
"Yes, yes; I will hit on some plan. I promise you I will."
"But at once; quick, quick! You cannot imagine what I feel when I see him."
Then she murmured softly in his ear: "Keep me here, with you."
He paused, reflected, and with his blunt good-sense saw at once the dangers
of such an arrangement. But he had to argue for a long time, combatting her
scared, terror-stricken insistence.
"Only for to-night," she said. "Only for to-night. And to-morrow morning
you can send word to Roland that I was taken ill."
"That is out of the question, as Pierre left you here. Come take courage. I
will arrange everything, I promise you, to-morrow; I will be with you by
nine o'clock. Come, put on your bonnet. I will take you home."
"I will do just what you desire," she said with a childlike impulse of
timidity and gratitude.
She tried to rise, but the shock had been too much for her, she could not
stand.
He made her drink some sugared water and smell at some salts, while he
bathed her temples with vinegar. She let him do what he would, exhausted
but comforted, as after the pains of child-birth. At last she could walk and
she took his arm. The town hall clock struck three as they went past.
Outside their own door Jean kissed her, saying:
"Good-night, mother, keep up your courage."
She stealthily crept up the silent stairs, and into her room, undressed
quickly, and slipped into bed with a long-forgotten sense of guilt. Roland

was snoring. In all the house Pierre alone was awake, and had heard her
come in.

CHAPTER VIII

hen he got back to his lodgings Jean dropped on a sofa; for the
sorrows and anxieties which made his brother long to be moving,
and to flee like a hunted prey, acted differently on his torpid nature
and broke the strength of his arms and legs. He felt too limp to stir a finger,
even to get to bed; limp body and soul, crushed and heart-broken. He had
not been hit, as Pierre had been, in the purity of filial love, in the secret
dignity which is the refuge of a proud heart; he was overwhelmed by the
stroke of fate which, at the same time threatened his own nearest interests.
When at last his spirit was calmer, when his thoughts had settled like water
that has been stirred and lashed, he could contemplate the situation which
had come before him. If he had learned the secret of his birth through any
other channel he would assuredly have been very wroth and very deeply
pained, but after his quarrel with his brother, after the violent and brutal
betrayal which had shaken his nerves, the agonizing emotion of his mother's
confession had so bereft him of energy that he could not rebel. The shock to
his feelings had been so great as to sweep away in an irresistible tide of
pathos, all prejudice, and all the sacred delicacy of natural morality.
Besides, he was not a man made for resistance. He did not like contending
against any one, least of all against himself, so he resigned himself at once;
and by instinctive tendency, a congenital love of peace, and of easy and
tranquil life, he began to anticipate the agitations which must surge up
around him and at once be his ruin. He foresaw that they were inevitable,
and to avert them he made up his mind to superhuman efforts of energy and
activity. The knot must be cut immediately, this very day; for even he had
fits of that imperious demand for a swift solution which is the only strength
of weak natures, incapable of a prolonged effort of will. His lawyer's mind,
accustomed as it was to disentangling and studying complicated situations
and questions of domestic difficulties in families that had got out of gear, at
once foresaw the more immediate consequences of his brother's state of
mind. In spite of himself, he looked at the issue from an almost professional
point of view, as though he had to legislate for the future relations of certain

clients after a moral disaster. Constant friction against Pierre had certainly
become unendurable. He could easily evade it, no doubt, by living in his
own lodgings; but even then it was not possible that their mother should
live under the same roof with her elder son. For a long time he sat
meditating, motionless, on the cushions, devising and rejecting various
possibilities, and finding nothing that satisfied him.
But suddenly an idea took him by storm. This fortune which had come to
him. Would an honest man keep it?
"No," was the first immediate answer, and he made up his mind that it must
go to the poor. It was hard, but it could not be helped. He would sell his
furniture and work like any other man, like any other beginner. This manful
and painful resolution spurred his courage; he rose and went to the window,
leaning his forehead against the pane. He had been poor; he could become
poor again. After all, he should not die of it. His eyes were fixed on the gas
lamp burning at the opposite side of the street. A woman, much belated,
happened to pass; suddenly he thought of Mme. Rosémilly with the pang at
his heart, the shock of deep feeling which comes of a cruel suggestion. All
the dire results of his decision rose up before him together. He would have
to renounce his marriage, renounce happiness, renounce everything. Could
he do such a thing after having pledged himself to her? She had accepted
him knowing him to be rich. She would take him still if he were poor; but
had he any right to demand such a sacrifice? Would it not be better to keep
this money in trust, to be restored to the poor at some future date?
And in his soul, where selfishness put on a guise of honesty, all these
specious interests were struggling and contending. His first scruples yielded
to ingenious reasoning, then came to the top again, and again disappeared.
He sat down again, seeking some decisive motive, some all-sufficient
pretext to solve his hesitancy and convince his natural rectitude. Twenty
times over had he asked himself this question: "Since I am this man's son,
since I know and acknowledge it, is it not natural that I should also accept
the inheritance?"
But even this argument could not suppress the "No" murmured by his
inmost conscience.

Then came the thought: "Since I am not the son of the man I always
believed to be my father, I can take nothing from him, neither during his
lifetime nor after his death. It would be neither dignified nor equitable. It
would be robbing my brother."
This new view of the matter having relieved him and quieted his
conscience, he went to the window again.
"Yes," he said to himself, "I must give up my share of the family
inheritance. I must let Pierre have the whole of it, since I am not his father's
son. That is but just. Then is it not just that I should keep my father's
money?"
Having discerned that he could take nothing of Roland's savings, having
decided on giving up the whole of this money, he agreed; he resigned
himself to keeping Maréchal's; for if he rejected both he would find himself
reduced to beggary.
This delicate question being thus disposed of, he came back to that of
Pierre's presence in the family. How was he to be got rid of? He was giving
up his search for any practical solution when the whistle of a steam-vessel
coming into port seemed to blow him an answer by suggesting a scheme.
Then he threw himself on his bed without undressing, and dozed and
dreamed until daybreak.
At a little before nine he went out to ascertain whether his plans were
feasible. Then, after making sundry inquiries and calls, he went to his old
home. His mother was waiting for him in her room.
"If you had not come," she said, "I should never have dared to go down."
In a minute Roland's voice was heard on the stairs: "Are we to have nothing
to eat to-day, hang it all!"
There was no answer, and he roared out, with a thundering oath this time:
"Joséphine, what the devil are you about?"
The girl's voice came up from the depths of the basement:
"Yes, m'sieu—what is it?"

"Where is your Miss'es?"
"Madame is upstairs with M'sieu Jean."
Then he shouted, looking up at the higher floor: "Louise!"
Mme. Roland half opened her door and answered:
"What is it, my dear?"
"Are we to have nothing to eat to-day, hang it all!"
"Yes, my dear, I am coming."
And she went down, followed by Jean.
Roland, as soon as he saw him, exclaimed:
"Hallo! There you are! Sick of your home already?"
"No, father, but I had something to talk over with mother this morning."
Jean went forward holding out his hand, and when he felt his fingers in the
old man's fatherly clasp, a strange, unforeseen emotion thrilled through him,
and a sense as of parting and farewell without return.
Mme. Roland asked:
"Pierre is not come down?"
Her husband shrugged his shoulders:
"No, but never mind him; he is always behind hand. We will begin without
him."
She turned to Jean:
"You had better go to call him, my child; it hurts his feelings if we do not
wait for him."
"Yes, mother. I will go."
And the young man went. He mounted the stairs with the fevered
determination of a man who is about to fight a duel and who is in a fright.

When he knocked at the door Pierre said:
"Come in."
He went in. The elder was writing, leaning over his table.
"Good morning," said Jean.
Pierre rose.
"Good morning," and they shook hands as if nothing had occurred.
"Are you not coming down to breakfast?"
"Well—you see—I have a good deal to do." The elder brother's voice was
tremulous, and his anxious eye asked his younger brother what he meant to
do.
"They are waiting for you."
"Oh! There is—is my mother down?"
"Yes, it was she who sent me to fetch you."
"Ah, very well; then I will come."
At the door of the dining-room he paused, doubtful about going in first;
then he abruptly opened the door and saw his father and mother seated at
the table opposite each other.
He went straight up to her without looking at her or saying a word, and
bending over her offered his forehead for her to kiss, as he had done for
some time past, instead of kissing her on both cheeks as of old. He
supposed that she put her lips near, but he did not feel them on his brow,
and he straightened himself with a throbbing heart after this feint of a
caress. And he wondered:
"What did they say to each other after I had left?"
Jean constantly addressed her tenderly as "mother," or "dear mother," took
care of her, waited on her, and poured out her wine.

Then Pierre understood that they had wept together, but he could not read
their minds. Did Jean believe in his mother's guilt, or think his brother a
base wretch?
And all his self-reproach for having uttered the horrible thing came upon
him again, choking his throat and his tongue, and preventing his either
eating or speaking.
He was now a prey to an intolerable desire to fly, to leave the house which
was his home no longer, and these persons who were bound to him by such
imperceptible ties. He would gladly have been off that moment, no matter
whither, feeling that everything was over, that he could not endure to stay
with them, that his presence was torture to them, and that they would bring
on him incessant suffering too great to endure. Jean was talking, chatting
with Roland. Pierre, as he did not listen, did not hear. But he presently was
aware of a pointed tone in his brother's voice and paid more attention to his
words. Jean was saying:
"She will be the finest ship in their fleet. They say she is of 6,500 tons. She
is to make her first trip next month."
Roland was amazed.
"So soon? I thought she was not to be ready for sea this summer."
"Yes. The work has been pushed forward very vigorously, to get her
through her first voyage before the autumn. I looked in at the Company's
office this morning, and was talking with one of the directors."
"Indeed! Which of them?"
"M. Marchand, who is a great friend of the Chairman of the Board."
"Oh! Do you know him?"
"Yes. And I wanted to ask him a favor."
"Then you will get me leave to go over every part of the Lorraine as soon
as she comes into port?"
"To be sure, nothing can be easier."

Then Jean seemed to hesitate, to be weighing his words, and to want to lead
up to a difficult subject. He went on:
"On the whole, life is very endurable on board those great Transatlantic
liners. More than half the time is spent on shore in two splendid cities—
New York and Havre; and the remainder at sea with delightful company. In
fact, very pleasant acquaintances are sometimes made among the
passengers, and very useful in after-life—yes, really very useful. Only
think, the captain, with his perquisites on coal, can make as much as
twenty-five thousand francs a year or more."
Roland muttered an oath followed by a whistle, which testified to his deep
respect both for the sum and the captain.
Jean went on:
"The purser makes as much as ten thousand, and the doctor has a fixed
salary of five thousand, with lodgings, keep, light, firing, service, and
everything, which makes it up to ten thousand at least. That is very good
pay."
Pierre, raising his eyes, met his brother's and understood.
Then, after some hesitation, he asked:
"Is it very hard to get a place as medical man on board a Transatlantic
liner?"
"Yes—and no. It all depends on circumstances and recommendation."
There was a long pause; then the doctor began again.
"Next month, you say, the Lorraine is to sail?"
"Yes. On the 7th."
And they said no more.
Pierre was considering. It certainly would be a way out of many difficulties
if he could embark as medical officer on board the steamship. By-and-by he
could see; he might perhaps give it up. Meanwhile he would be gaining a
living, and asking for nothing from his parents. Only two days since he had

been forced to sell his watch, for he would no longer hold out his hand to
beg of his mother. So he had no other resource left, no opening to enable
him to eat the bread of any house but this which had become uninhabitable,
or sleep in any other bed, or under any other roof. He presently said with
some little hesitation:
"If I could, I would very gladly sail in her."
Jean asked:
"What should hinder you?"
"I know no one in the Transatlantic Shipping Company."
Roland was astounded:
"And what has become of all your fine schemes for getting on?"
Pierre replied in a low voice:
"There are times when we must bring ourselves to sacrifice everything and
renounce our fondest hopes. And after all it is only to make a beginning, a
way of saving a few thousand francs to start fair with afterward."
His father was promptly convinced.
"That is very true. In a couple of years you can put by six or seven thousand
francs, and that well laid out, will go a long way. What do you think of the
matter, Louise?"
She replied in a voice so low as to be scarcely audible:
"I think Pierre is right."
Roland exclaimed:
"I will go and talk it over with M. Poulin; I know him very well. He is
assessor of the Chamber of Commerce and takes an interest in the affairs of
the Company. There is M. Lenient, too, the ship-owner, who is intimate
with one of the vice-chairmen."
Jean asked his brother:

"Would you like me to feel my way with M. Marchand at once?"
"Yes, I should be very glad."
After thinking a few minutes, Pierre added:
"The best thing I can do, perhaps, will be to write to my professors at the
College of Medicine who had a great regard for me. Very inferior men are
sometimes shipped on board those vessels. Letters of strong
recommendation from such professors as Mas-Roussel, Rémusot, Flache,
and Borriquel would do more for me in an hour than all the doubtful
introductions in the world. It would be enough if your friend M. Marchand
would lay them before the board."
Jean approved heartily.
"Your idea is really capital." And he smiled, quite reassured, almost happy,
sure of success and incapable of allowing himself to be unhappy for long.
"You will write to-day?" he said.
"Directly. Now; at once. I will go and do so. I do not care for any coffee this
morning; I am too nervous."
He rose and left the room.
Then Jean turned to his mother:
"And you, mother, what are you going to do?"
"Nothing. I do not know."
"Will you come with me to call on Mme. Rosémilly?"
"Why, yes—yes."
"You know I must positively go to see her to-day."
"Yes, yes. To be sure."
"Why must you positively?" asked Roland, whose habit it was never to
understand what was said in his presence.

"Because I promised her I would."
"Oh, very well. That alters the case." And he began to fill his pipe, while the
mother and son went upstairs to make ready.
When they were in the street Jean said:
"Will you take my arm, mother?"
He was never accustomed to offer it, for they were in the habit of walking
side by side. She accepted, and leaned on him.
For some time they did not speak; then he said:
"You see that Pierre is quite ready and willing to go away."
She murmured:
"Poor boy."
"But why 'poor boy'? He will not be in the least unhappy on board the
Lorraine!"
"No—I know. But I was thinking of so many things."
And she thought for a long time, her head bent, accommodating her step to
her son's; then, in the peculiar voice in which we sometimes give utterance
to the conclusion of long and secret meditations, she exclaimed:
"How horrible life is! If by any chance we come across any sweetness in it,
we sin in letting ourselves be happy, and pay dearly for it afterward."
He said in a whisper:
"Do not speak of that any more, mother."
"Is that possible? I think of nothing else."
"You will forget it."
Again she was silent; then with deep regret she said:
"How happy I might have been, married to another man."

She was visiting it on Roland now, throwing all the responsibility of her sin
on his ugliness, his stupidity, his clumsiness, the heaviness of his intellect,
and the vulgarity of his person. It was to this that it was owing that she had
betrayed him, had driven one son to desperation, and had been forced to
utter to the other the most agonizing confession that can make a mother's
heart bleed. She muttered: "It is so frightful for a young girl to have to
marry such a husband as mine."
Jean made no reply. He was thinking of the man he had hitherto believed to
be his father; and possibly the vague notion he had long since conceived, of
that father's inferiority, with his brother's constant irony, the scornful
indifference of others, and the very maid-servant's contempt for Roland,
had somewhat prepared his mind for his mother's terrible avowal. It had all
made it less dreadful to him to find that he was another man's son; and if,
after the great shock and agitation of the previous evening, he had not
suffered the reaction of rage, indignation, and rebellion which Mme. Roland
had feared, it was because he had long been unconsciously chafing under
the sense of being the child of this well-meaning lout.
They had now reached the dwelling of Mme. Rosémilly.
She lived on the road to Sainte-Adresse, on the second floor of a large
tenement which she owned. The windows commanded a view of the whole
roadstead.
On seeing Mme. Roland, who entered first, instead of merely holding out
her hands as usual, she put her arms round her and kissed her, for she
divined the purpose of her visit.
The furniture of this drawing-room, all in stamped velvet, was always
shrouded in chair-covers. The walls, hung with flowered paper, were graced
by four engravings, the purchase of her late husband, the captain. They
represented sentimental scenes of seafaring life. In the first, a fisherman's
wife was seen, waving a handkerchief on shore, while the vessel which bore
away her husband vanished on the horizon. In the second, the same woman
on her knees on the same shore, under a sky shot with lightning, wrung her
arms as she gazed into the distance at her husband's boat, which was going
to the bottom amid impossible waves.

The others represented similar scenes in a higher rank of society. A young
lady with fair hair, resting her elbows on the edge of a large steamship
quitting the shore, gazed at the already distant coast with eyes full of tears
and regret. Whom is she leaving behind?
Then the same young lady sitting by an open window with a view of the
sea, had fainted in an armchair; a letter she had dropped lay at her feet. So
he is dead! What despair!
Visitors were generally much moved and charmed by the commonplace
pathos of these obvious and sentimental works. They were at once
intelligible without question or explanation, and the poor women were to be
pitied, though the nature of the grief of the more elegant of the two was not
precisely known. But this very doubt contributed to the sentiment. She had,
no doubt, lost her lover. On entering the room the eye was immediately
attracted to these four pictures, and riveted as if fascinated. If it wandered it
was only to return and contemplate the four expressions on the faces of the
two women, who were as like each other as two sisters. And the very style
of these works, in their shining frames, crisp, sharp, and highly finished,
with the elegance of a fashion plate, suggested a sense of cleanliness and
propriety which was confirmed by the rest of the fittings. The seats were
always in precisely the same order, some against the wall and some round
the circular center-table. The immaculately white curtains hung in such
straight and regular pleats that one longed to crumple them a little; and
never did a grain of dust rest on the shade under which the gilt clock, in the
taste of the first empire—a terrestrial globe supported by Atlas on his knees
—looked like a melon left there to ripen.
The two women as they sat down somewhat altered the normal position of
their chairs.
"You have not been out this morning?" asked Mme. Roland.
"No. I must own to being rather tired."
And she spoke as if in gratitude to Jean and his mother, of all the pleasure
she had derived from the expedition and the prawn-fishing.
"I ate my prawns this morning," she added, "and they were excellent. If you
felt inclined we might go again one of these days."

The young man interrupted her:
"Before we start on a second fishing excursion, suppose we complete the
first?"
"Complete it? It seems to me quite finished."
"Nay, madame, I, for my part, caught something on the rocks of Saint Jouin
which I am anxious to carry home with me."
She put on an innocent and knowing look.
"You? What can it be? What can you have found?"
"A wife. And my mother and I have come to ask you whether she has
changed her mind this morning."
She smiled: "No, monsieur. I never change my mind."
And then he held out his hand, wide open, and she put hers into it with a
quick, determined movement. Then he said: "As soon as possible, I hope."
"As soon as you like."
"In six weeks?"
"I have no opinion. What does my future mother-in-law say?"
Mme. Roland replied with a rather melancholy smile:
"I? Oh, I can say nothing. I can only thank you for having accepted Jean,
for you will make him very happy."
"We will do our best, mamma."
Somewhat overcome, for the first time, Mme. Rosémilly rose, and throwing
her arms round Mme. Roland, kissed her a long time as a child of her own
might have done; and under this new embrace the poor woman's sick heart
swelled with deep emotion. She could not have expressed the feeling; it was
at once sad and sweet. She had lost her son, her big boy, but in return she
had found a daughter, a grown-up daughter.

When they faced each other again, and were seated, they took hands and
remained so, looking at each other and smiling, while they seemed to have
forgotten Jean.
Then they discussed a number of things which had to be thought of in view
of an early marriage, and when everything was settled and decided Mme.
Rosémilly seemed suddenly to remember a further detail and asked: "You
have consulted M. Roland, I suppose?"
A flush of color mounted at the same instant to the face of both mother and
son. It was the mother who replied:
"Oh, no, it is quite unnecessary!" Then she hesitated, feeling that some
explanation was needed, and added: "We do everything without saying
anything to him. It is enough to tell him what we have decided on."
Mme. Rosémilly, not in the least surprised, only smiled, taking it as a matter
of course, for the good man counted for so little.
When Mme. Roland was in the street again with her son she said:
"Suppose we go to your rooms for a little while. I should be glad to rest."
She felt herself homeless, shelterless, her own house being a terror to her.
They went into Jean's apartments.
As soon as the door was closed upon her she heaved a deep sigh, as if that
bolt had placed her in safety, but then, instead of resting as she had said, she
began to open the cupboards, to count the piles of linen, the pocket
handkerchiefs, and socks. She changed the arrangement to place them in
more harmonious order, more pleasing to her housekeeper's eye; and when
she had put everything to her mind, laying out the towels, the shirts, and the
drawers on their several shelves and dividing all the linen into three
principal classes, body-linen, household linen, and table-linen, she drew
back and contemplated the results, and called out:
"Come here, Jean, and see how nice it looks."
He went and admired it to please her.

On a sudden, when he had sat down again, she came softly up behind his
armchair, and putting her right arm round his neck she kissed him, while
she laid on the chimney shelf a small packet wrapped in white paper which
she held in the other hand.
"What is that?" he asked. Then, as she made no reply, he understood,
recognizing the shape of the frame.
"Give it to me!" he said.
She pretended not to hear him, and went back to the linen cupboards. He
got up hastily, took the melancholy relic, and going across the room, put it
in the drawer of his writing table which he locked and doubled locked. She
wiped away a tear with the tip of her finger, and said in a rather quavering
voice: "Now I am going to see whether your new servant keeps the kitchen
in good order. As she is out I can look into everything and make sure."

CHAPTER IX

etters of recommendation from Professors Mas-Roussel, Rémusot,
Flache, and Borriquel, written in the most flattering terms with regard
to Doctor Pierre Roland, their pupil, had been submitted by Monsieur
Marchand to the directors of the Transatlantic Shipping Company, seconded
by M. Poulin, judge of the Chamber of Commerce, M. Lenient, a great
ship-owner, and M. Marival, deputy to the Mayor of Havre, and a particular
friend of Captain Beausire's. It proved that no medical officer had yet been
appointed to the Lorraine, and Pierre was lucky enough to be nominated
within a few days.
The letter announcing it was handed to him one morning by Joséphine, just
as he was dressed. His first feeling was that of a man condemned to death
who is told that his sentence is commuted; he had an immediate sense of
relief at the thought of his early departure and of the peaceful life on board,
cradled by the rolling waves, always wandering, always moving. His life
under his father's roof was now that of a stranger, silent and reserved. Ever
since the evening when he allowed the shameful secret he had discovered to
escape him in his brother's presence, he had felt that the last ties to his
kindred were broken. He was harassed by remorse for having told this thing
to Jean. He felt that it was odious, indecent, and brutal, and yet it was a
relief to him to have uttered it.
He never met the eyes either of his mother or his brother; to avoid his gaze
theirs had become surprisingly alert, with the cunning of foes who fear to
cross each other. He was always wondering: "What can she have said to
Jean? Did she confess or deny it? What does my brother believe? What
does he think of her—what does he think of me?" He could not guess, and it
drove him to frenzy. And he scarcely ever spoke to them, excepting when
Roland was by, to avoid his questioning.
As soon as he received the letter announcing his appointment he showed it
at once to his family. His father, who was prone to rejoicing over
everything, clapped his hands. Jean spoke seriously, though his heart was
full of gladness: "I congratulate you with all my heart, for I know there
were several other candidates. You certainly owe it to your professors'
letters."
His mother bent her head and murmured:

"I am very glad you have been successful."
After breakfast he went to the Company's offices to obtain information on
various particulars, and he asked the name of the doctor on board the
Picardie, which was to sail next day, to inquire of him as to the details of
his new life and any details he might think useful.
Doctor Pirette having gone on board, Pierre went to the ship, where he was
received in a little stateroom by a young man with a fair beard, not unlike
his brother. They talked together a long time.
In the hollow depths of the huge ship they could hear a confused and
continuous commotion; the noise of bales and cases pitched down into the
hold mingling with footsteps, voices, the creaking of the machinery
lowering the freight, the boatswain's whistle, and the clatter of chains
dragged or wound onto capstans by the snorting and panting engine which
sent a slight vibration from end to end of the great vessel.
But when Pierre had left his colleague and found himself in the street once
more, a new form of melancholy came down on him, enveloping him like
the fogs which roll over the sea, coming up from the ends of the world and
holding in their intangible density something mysteriously impure, as it
were the pestilential breath of a far-away, unhealthy land.
In his hours of greatest suffering he had never felt himself so sunk in a foul
pit of misery. It was as though he had given the last wrench; there was no
fiber of attachment left. In tearing up the roots of every affection he had not
hitherto had the distressful feeling which now came over him, like that of a
lost dog. It was no longer a torturing mortal pain, but the frenzy of a forlorn
and homeless animal, the physical anguish of a vagabond creature without a
roof for shelter, lashed by the rain, the wind, the storm, all the brutal forces
of the universe. As he set foot on the vessel, as he went into the cabin
rocked by the waves, the very flesh of the man, who had always slept in a
motionless and steady bed, had risen up against the insecurity henceforth of
all his morrows. Till now that flesh had been protected by a solid wall built
into the earth which held it, by the certainty of resting in the same spot,
under a roof which could resist the gale. Now all that, which it was a
pleasure to defy in the warmth of home, must become a peril and a constant
discomfort. No earth under foot, only the greedy, heaving, complaining sea;

no space around for walking, running, losing the way, only a few yards of
planks to pace like a convict among other prisoners; no trees, no gardens,
no streets, no houses; nothing but water and clouds. And the ceaseless
motion of the ship beneath his feet. On stormy days he must lean against the
wainscot, hold on to the doors, cling to the edge of the narrow berth to save
himself from rolling out. On calm days he would hear the snorting throb of
the screw, and feel the swift flight of the ship, bearing him on in its
unpausing, regular, exasperating race.
And he was a prey to this vagabond convict's life solely because his mother
had sinned.
He walked on, his heart sinking with the despairing sorrow of those who are
doomed to exile. He no longer felt a haughty disdain and scornful hatred of
the strangers he met, but a woeful impulse to speak to them, to tell them all
that he had to quit France, to be listened to and comforted. There was in the
very depths of his heart the shamefaced need of a beggar who would fain
hold out his hand—a timid but urgent need to feel that some one would
grieve at his departing.
He thought of Marowsko. The old Pole was the only person who loved him
well enough to feel true and keen emotion, and the doctor at once
determined to go and see him.
When he entered the shop, the druggist, who was pounding powders in a
marble mortar, started and left his work:
"You are never to be seen nowadays," said he.
Pierre explained that he had had a great many serious matters to attend to,
but without giving the reason, and he took a seat, asking:
"Well, and how is business doing?"
Business was not doing at all. Competition was fearful, and rich folks rare
in that workman's quarter. Nothing would sell but cheap drugs, and the
doctors did not prescribe the costlier and more complicated remedies on
which a profit is made of five hundred per cent. The old fellow ended by
saying: "If this goes on for three months I shall shut up shop. If I did not

count on you, dear good doctor, I should have turned shoeblack by this
time."
Pierre felt a pang, and made up his mind to deal the blow at once, since it
must be done.
"I—oh, I cannot be of any use to you. I am leaving Havre early next
month."
Marowsko took off his spectacles, so great was his agitation.
"You! You! What are you saying?"
"I say that I am going away, my poor friend."
The old man was stricken, feeling his last hope slipping from under him,
and he suddenly turned against this man, whom he had followed, whom he
loved, whom he had so implicitly trusted, and who forsook him thus.
He stammered out:
"You are surely not going to play me false—you?"
Pierre was so deeply touched that he felt inclined to embrace the old fellow.
"I am not playing you false. I have not found anything to do here, and I am
going as medical officer on board a transatlantic passenger boat."
"O Monsieur Pierre! And you always promised you would help me to make
a living!"
"What can I do? I must make my own living. I have not a farthing in the
world."
Marowsko said: "It is wrong; what you are doing is very wrong. There is
nothing for me but to die of hunger. At my age this is the end of all things.
It is wrong. You are forsaking a poor old man who came here to be with
you. It is wrong."
Pierre tried to explain, to protest, to give reasons, to prove that he could not
have done otherwise; the Pole, enraged by his desertion, would not listen to
him, and he ended by saying, with an allusion no doubt to political events:

"You French—you never keep your word!"
At this Pierre rose, offended on his part, and taking rather a high tone he
said:
"You are unjust, père Marowsko; a man must have very strong motives to
act as I have done, and you ought to understand that. Au revoir—I hope I
may find you more reasonable." And he went away.
"Well, well," he thought, "not a soul will feel a sincere regret for me."
His mind sought through all the people he knew or had known, and among
the faces which crossed his memory he saw that of the girl at the tavern
who led him to doubt his mother.
He hesitated, having still an instinctive grudge against her, then suddenly
reflected on the other hand: "After all, she was right." And he looked about
him to find the turning.
The beer-shop, as it happened, was full of people, and also full of smoke.
The customers, tradesmen, and laborers, for it was a holiday, were shouting,
calling, laughing, and the master himself was waiting on them, running
from table to table, carrying away empty glasses and returning them
crowned with froth.
When Pierre had found a seat not far from the desk he waited, hoping that
the girl would see him and recognize him. But she passed him again and
again as she went to and fro, pattering her feet under her skirts with a smart
little strut. At last he rapped a coin on the table, and she hurried up.
"What will you take, sir?"
She did not look at him; her mind was absorbed in calculations of the liquor
she had served.
"Well," said he, "this is a pretty way of greeting a friend."
She fixed her eyes on his face: "Ah!" said she hurriedly. "Is it you? You are
pretty well? But I have not a minute to-day. A bock did you wish for?"
"Yes, a bock!"

When she brought it he said:
"I have come to say good-by. I am going away."
And she replied indifferently:
"Indeed. Where are you going?"
"To America."
"A very fine country, they say."
And that was all!
Really he was very ill-advised to address her on such a busy day; there were
too many people in the café.
Pierre went down to the sea. As he reached the jetty he descried the Pearl;
his father and Beausire were coming in. Papagris was pulling, and the two
men, seated in the stern, smoked their pipes with a look of perfect
happiness. As they went past, the doctor said to himself: "Blessed are the
simple-minded!" And he sat down on one of the benches on the breakwater,
to try to lull himself in animal drowsiness.
When he went home in the evening his mother said, without daring to lift
her eyes to his face:
"You will want a heap of things to take with you. I have ordered your
underlinen, and I went into the tailor shop about cloth clothes; but is there
nothing else you need—things which I, perhaps, know nothing about?"
His lips parted to say, "No, nothing." But he reflected that he must accept
the means of getting a decent outfit, and he replied in a very calm voice: "I
hardly know myself, yet. I will make inquiries at the office."
He inquired, and they gave him a list of indispensable necessaries. His
mother, as she took it from his hand, looked up at him for the first time for
very long, and in the depths of her eyes there was the humble expression,
gentle, sad, and beseeching, of a dog that has been beaten and begs
forgiveness.

On the 1st of October the Lorraine from Saint-Nazaire, came into the
harbor of Havre to sail on the 7th, bound for New York, and Pierre Roland
was to take possession of the little floating cabin in which henceforth his
life was to be confined.
Next day as he was going out, he met his mother on the stairs waiting for
him, to murmur in an almost inaudible voice:
"You would not like me to help you to put things to rights on board?"
"No, thank you. Everything is done."
Then she said:
"I should have liked to see your cabin."
"There is nothing to see. It is very small and very ugly."
And he went downstairs, leaving her stricken, leaning against the wall with
a wan face.
Now Roland, who had gone over the Lorraine that very day, could talk of
nothing all dinner time but this splendid vessel, and wondered that his wife
should not care to see it as their son was to sail on board.
Pierre had scarcely any intercourse with his family during the days which
followed. He was nervous, irritable, hard, and his rough speech seemed to
lash every one indiscriminately. But the day before he left he was suddenly
quite changed, and much softened. As he embraced his parents before going
to sleep on board for the first time he said:
"You will come to say good-by to me on board, will you not?"
Roland exclaimed:
"Why, yes, of course—of course, Louise?"
"Certainly, certainly," she said in a low voice.
Pierre went on: "We sail at eleven precisely. You must be there by half-past
nine at the latest."

"Hah!" cried his father. "A good idea! As soon as we have bid you good-
bye, we will make haste on board the Pearl, and look out for you beyond
the jetty, so as to see you once more. What do you say, Louise?"
"Certainly."
Roland went on: "And in that way you will not lose sight of us among the
crowd which throngs the breakwater when the great liners sail. It is
impossible to distinguish your own friends in the mob. Does that meet your
views?"
"Yes, to be sure; that is settled."
An hour later he was lying in his berth—a little crib as long and narrow as a
coffin. There he remained with his eyes wide open for a long time, thinking
over all that had happened during the last two months of his life, especially
in his own soul. By dint of suffering and making others suffer, his
aggressive and revengeful anguish had lost its edge, like a blunted sword.
He scarcely had the heart left in him to owe any one or anything a grudge;
he let his rebellious wrath float away down stream, as his life must. He was
so weary of wrestling, weary of fighting, weary of hating, weary of
everything, that he was quite worn out; and tried to stupefy his heart with
forgetfulness as he dropped asleep. He heard vaguely, all about him, the
unwonted noises of the ship, slight noises, and scarcely audible on this calm
night in port; and he felt no more of the dreadful wound which had tortured
him hitherto but the discomfort and strain of its healing.
He had been sleeping soundly when the stir of the crew roused him. It was
day; the tidal train had come down to the pier bringing the passengers from
Paris. Then he wandered about the vessel among all these busy, bustling
folks inquiring for their cabins, questioning and answering each other at
random, in the scare and fuss of a voyage already begun. After greeting the
captain and shaking hands with his comrade the purser, he went into the
saloon where some Englishmen were already asleep in the corners. The
large low room, with its white marble panels framed in gilt beading, was
furnished with looking-glasses, which prolonged, in endless perspective, the
long tables flanked by pivot-seats covered with red velvet. It was fit,
indeed, to be the vast floating cosmopolitan dining hall, where the rich
natives of two continents might eat in common. Its magnificent luxury was

that of great hotels, and theaters, and public rooms; the imposing and
commonplace luxury which appeals to the eye of the millionaire.
The doctor was on the point of turning into the second-class saloon, when
he remembered that a large cargo of emigrants had come on board the night
before, and he went down to the lower deck. There, in a sort of basement,
low and dark, like a gallery in a mine, Pierre could discern some hundreds
of men, women, and children, stretched on shelves fixed one above another,
or lying on the floor in heaps. He could not see their faces, but could dimly
make out this squalid, ragged crowd of wretches, beaten in the struggle for
life, worn out and crushed, setting forth, each with a starving wife and
weakly children, for an unknown land where they hoped, perhaps, not to die
of hunger. And as he thought of their past labor—wasted labor, and barren
effort—of the mortal struggle taken up afresh and in vain each day, of the
energy expended by this tattered crew who were going to begin again, not
knowing where, this life of hideous misery, he longed to cry out to them:
"Tumble yourselves overboard, rather, with your women and your little
ones." And his heart ached so with pity that he went away unable to endure
the sight.
He found his father, his mother, Jean, and Mme. Rosémilly waiting for him
in his cabin.
"So early!" he exclaimed.
"Yes," said Mme. Roland in a trembling voice. "We wanted to have a little
time to see you."
He looked at her. She was dressed all in black as if she were in mourning,
and he noticed that her hair, which only a month ago had been gray, was
now almost white. It was very difficult to find space for four persons to sit
down in the little room, and he himself got onto his bed. The door was left
open, and they could see a great crowd hurrying by, as if it were a street on
a holiday, for all the friends of the passengers and a host of inquisitive
visitors had invaded the huge vessel. They pervaded the passages, the
saloons, every corner of the ship; and heads peered in at the doorway while
a voice murmured outside: "That is the doctor's cabin."

Then Pierre shut the door; but no sooner was he shut in with his own party
than he longed to open it again, for the bustle outside covered their agitation
and want of words.
Mme. Rosémilly at last felt she must speak.
"Very little air comes in through those little windows."
"Portholes," said Pierre. He showed her how thick the glass was, to enable it
to resist the most violent shocks, and took a long time explaining the
fastening. Roland presently asked: "And you have your doctor's shop here?"
The doctor opened a cupboard and displayed an array of phials ticketed
with Latin names on white paper labels. He took one out and enumerated
the properties of its contents; then a second and a third, a perfect lecture on
therapeutics, to which they all listened with great attention. Roland, shaking
his head, said again and again: "How very interesting." There was a tap at
the door.
"Come in," said Pierre, and Captain Beausire appeared.
"I am late," he said as he shook hands, "I did not want to be in the way." He
too sat down on the bed and silence fell once more.
Suddenly the captain pricked his ears. He could hear orders being given,
and he said:
"It is time for us to be off if we mean to get on board the Pearl to see you
once more outside, and bid you good-by out on the open sea."
Old Roland was very eager about this, to impress the voyagers on board the
Lorraine, no doubt, and he rose in haste.
"Good-by, my boy." He kissed Pierre on the whiskers and then opened the
door.
Mme. Roland had not stirred, but sat with downcast eyes, very pale. Her
husband touched her arm:
"Come," he said, "we must make haste, we have not a minute to spare."

She pulled herself up, went to her son and offered him first one and then
another cheek of white wax which he kissed without saying a word. Then
he shook hands with Mme. Rosémilly and his brother, asking:
"And when is the wedding to be?"
"I do not know yet exactly. We will make it fit in with one of your return
voyages."
At last they were all out of the cabin, and up on deck among the crowd of
visitors, porters and sailors. The steam was snorting in the huge belly of the
vessel which seemed to quiver with impatience.
"Good-by," said Roland in a great bustle.
"Good-by," replied Pierre, standing on one of the landing-planks lying
between the deck of the Lorraine and the quay. He shook hands all round
once more, and they were gone.
"Make haste, jump into the carriage," cried the father.
A fly was waiting for them and took them to the outer harbor, where
Papagris had the Pearl in readiness to put out to sea.
There was not a breath of air; it was one of those crisp, still autumn days,
when the sheeny sea looks as cold and hard as polished steel.
Jean took one oar, the sailor seized the other and they pulled off. On the
breakwater, on the piers, even on the granite parapets, a crowd stood
packed, hustling and noisy, to see the Lorraine come out. The Pearl glided
down between these two waves of humanity and was soon outside the mole.
Captain Beausire, seated between the two women, held the tiller, and he
said:
"You will see, we shall be close in her way —— close."
And the two oarsmen pulled with all their might to get out as far as
possible. Suddenly Roland cried out:
"Here she comes! I see her masts and her two funnels! She is coming out of
the inner harbor."

"Cheerily, lads!" cried Beausire.
Mme. Roland took out her handkerchief and held it to her eyes.
Roland stood up, clinging to the mast, and answered:
"At this minute she is working round in the outer harbor. She is standing
still—now she moves again! She was taking the tow-rope on board, no
doubt. There she goes. Bravo! She is between the piers! Do you hear the
crowd shouting? Bravo! The Neptune has her in tow. Now I see her bows—
here she comes—here she is! Gracious heavens, what a ship! Look! look!"
Mme. Rosémilly and Beausire looked up behind them, the oarsmen ceased
pulling; only Mme. Roland did not stir.
The immense steamship, towed by a powerful tug, which, in front of her,
looked like a caterpillar, came slowly and majestically out of the harbor.
And the good people of Havre, who crowded the piers, the beach, and the
windows, carried away by a burst of patriotic enthusiasm, cried: "Vive la
Lorraine!" with acclamations and applause for this magnificent beginning,
this birth of the beautiful daughter given to the sea by the great maritime
town.
She, as soon as she had passed beyond the narrow channel between the two
granite walls, feeling herself free at last, cast off the tow-ropes and went off
alone, like a monstrous creature walking on the waters.
"Here she is—here she comes, straight down on us!" Roland kept shouting;
and Beausire, beaming, exclaimed: "What did I promise you! Heh! Do I
know the way?"
Jean in a low tone said to his mother: "Look, mother, she is close upon us!"
And Mme. Roland uncovered her eyes, blinded by tears.
The Lorraine came on, still under the impetus of her swift exit from the
harbor, in the brilliant, calm weather. Beausire, with his glass to his eye,
called out:
"Look out! M. Pierre is at the stern, all alone, plainly to be seen! Look out!"

The ship was almost touching the Pearl now, as tall as a mountain and as
swift as a train. Mme. Roland, distraught and desperate, held out her arms
toward it; and she saw her son, her Pierre, with his officer's cap on,
throwing kisses to her with both hands.
But he was going away, flying, vanishing, a tiny speck already, no more
than an imperceptible spot on the enormous vessel. She tried still to
distinguish him, but she could not.
Jean took her hand:
"You saw?" he said.
"Yes, I saw. How good he is!"
And they turned to go home.
"Cristi! How fast she goes!" exclaimed Roland with enthusiastic conviction.
The steamer, in fact, was shrinking every second, as though she were
melting away in the ocean. Mme. Roland, turning back to look at her,
watched her disappearing on the horizon, on her way to an unknown land at
the other side of the world.
In that vessel which nothing could stay, that vessel which she soon would
see no more, was her son, her poor son. And she felt as though half her
heart had gone with him; she felt, too, as if her life were ended; yes, and she
felt as though she would never see the child again.
"Why are you crying?" asked her husband, "when you know he will be back
again within a month."
She stammered out: "I don't know, I cry because I am hurt."
When they had landed, Beausire at once took leave of them to go to
breakfast with a friend. Then Jean led the way with Mme. Rosémilly, and
Roland said to his wife:
"A very fine fellow, all the same, is our Jean."
"Yes," replied the mother.

And her mind being too much bewildered to think of what she was saying,
she went on:
"I am very glad that he is to marry Mme. Rosémilly."
The worthy man was astounded.
"Heh? What? He is to marry Mme. Rosémilly?"
"Yes, we meant to ask your opinion about it this very day."
"Bless me. And has this engagement been long in the wind?"
"Oh, no, only a very few days. Jean wished to make sure that she would
accept him before consulting you."
Roland rubbed his hands.
"Very good. Very good. It is capital. I entirely approve."
As they were about to turn off from the quay down the Boulevard François
1er, his wife once more looked back to cast a last look at the high seas, but
she could see nothing now but a puff of gray smoke, so far away, so faint
that it looked like a film of haze.

DREAMS
t was after a dinner of friends, of old friends. There were five of them, a
writer, a doctor, and three rich bachelors without any profession.
They had talked about everything, and a feeling of lassitude came on, that
feeling of lassitude which precedes and leads to the departure of guests after
festive gatherings. One of those present, who had for the last five minutes
been gazing silently at the surging boulevard starred with gas-lamps, and
rattling with vehicles, said suddenly:
"When you've nothing to do from morning till night, the days are long."
"And the nights, too," assented the guest who sat next to him. "I sleep very
little; pleasures fatigue me; conversation is monotonous. Never do I come
across a new idea, and I feel, before talking to anyone, a violent longing to
say nothing and listen to nothing. I don't know what to do with my
evenings."
And the third idler remarked:
"I would pay a great deal for anything that would enable me to pass merely
two pleasant hours every day."
Then the writer, who had just thrown his overcoat across his arm, turned
round to them and said:
"The man who could discover a new vice, and introduce it among his
fellow-creatures, even though it were to shorten their lives, would render a
greater service to humanity than the man who found the means of securing
to them eternal salvation and eternal youth."
The doctor burst out laughing, and, while he chewed his cigar, he said:
"Yes, but 'tis not so easy as that to discover it. Men have, however crudely,
been seeking for and working for the object you refer to since the beginning

of the world. The men who came first reached perfection at once in this
way. We are hardly equal to them."
One of the three idlers murmured:
"'Tis a pity!"
Then, after a minute's pause, he added:
"If we could only sleep, sleep well without feeling hot or cold, sleep with
that perfect unconsciousness we experience on nights when we are
thoroughly fatigued, sleep without dreams."
"Why without dreams?" asked the guest sitting next to him.
The other replied:
"Because dreams are not always pleasant, and they are always fantastic,
improbable, disconnected, and because when we are asleep we cannot have
the sort of dreams we like. We require to be awake when we dream."
"And what's to prevent you from being so?" asked the writer.
The doctor flung away the end of his cigar.
"My dear fellow, in order to dream when you are awake you need great
power and great exercise of will, and when you try to do it, great weariness
is the result. Now, real dreaming, that journey of our thoughts through
delightful visions, is assuredly the sweetest experience in the world; but it
must come naturally, it must not be provoked in a painful manner, and must
be accompanied by absolute bodily comfort. This power of dreaming I can
give you provided you promise that you will not abuse it."
The writer shrugged his shoulders:
"Ah! yes, I know—haschich, opium, green tea—artificial paradises. I have
read Baudelaire, and I even tasted the famous drug, which made me very
sick."
But the doctor, without stirring from his seat, said:

"No: ether, nothing but ether, and I would suggest that you literary men
ought to use it sometimes."
The three rich men drew closer to the doctor.
One of them said:
"Explain to us the effects of it."
And the doctor replied:
"Let us put aside big words, shall we not? I am not talking of medicine or
morality; I am talking of pleasure. You give yourselves up every day to
excesses which consume your lives. I want to indicate to you a new
sensation, only possible to intelligent men, let us say even very intelligent
men, dangerous, like everything that overexcites our organs, but exquisite. I
might add that you would require a certain preparation, that is to say, a
practice, to feel in all their completeness the singular effects of ether.
"They are different from the effects of haschich, from the effects of opium
and morphia, and they cease as soon as the absorption of the drug is
interrupted, while the other generators of day dreams continue their action
for hours.
"I am now going to try to analyze as clearly as possible the way one feels.
But the thing is not easy, so facile, so delicate, so almost imperceptible, are
these sensations.
"It was when I was attacked by violent neuralgia that I made use of this
remedy, which perhaps I have since slightly abused.
"I had in my head and in my neck acute pains, and an intolerable heat of the
skin, a feverish restlessness. I took up a large flagon of ether, and lying
down, I began to inhale it slowly.
"At the end of some minutes, I thought I heard a vague murmur, which ere
long became a sort of humming, and it seemed to me that all the interior of
my body had become light, light as air, that it was dissolving into vapor.
"Then came a sort of torpor of the soul, a somnolent sense of comfort in
spite of the pains which still continued, but which, however, had ceased to

make themselves felt. It was one of those sensations which we are willing
to endure and not any of those frightful wrenches against which our tortured
body protests.
"Soon, the strange and delightful sense of emptiness which I felt in my
chest extended to my limbs, which, in their turn, became light, as light as if
the flesh and the bones had been melted and the skin only were left, the skin
necessary to enable me to realize the sweetness of living, of bathing in this
well-being. Then I perceived that I was no longer suffering. The pain had
gone, melted also, evaporated. And I heard voices, four voices, two
dialogues, without understanding what was said. At one time, there were
only indistinct sounds, at another time a word reached my ear. But I
recognized that this was only the humming I had heard before, accentuated.
I was not asleep; I was not awake; I comprehended, I felt, I reasoned with
the utmost clearness and depth, with extraordinary energy and intellectual
pleasure, with a singular intoxication arising from this separation of my
mental faculties.
"It was not like the dreams caused by haschich or the somewhat sickly
visions that come from opium; it was an amazing acuteness of reasoning, a
new way of seeing, judging, and appreciating the things of life, and with the
certainty, the absolute consciousness that this was the true way.
"And the old image of the Scriptures suddenly came back to my mind. It
seemed to me that I had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, that all the
mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find myself under the sway of a
new, strange, and irrefutable logic. And arguments, reasonings, proofs, rose
up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately displaced by some
stronger proof, reasoning, argument. My head had in fact, become a battle-
ground of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with invincible intelligence,
and I experienced a huge delight at the manifestation of my power.
"It lasted a long, long time. I still kept inhaling the ether from the opening
of my flagon. Suddenly I perceived that it was empty."
The four men exclaimed at the same time:
"Doctor, a prescription at once for a liter of ether!"
But the doctor, putting on his hat, replied:

"As for that, certainly not; go and get poisoned by others!"
And he left them.
Ladies and gentlemen, what is your idea on the subject?

MOONLIGHT
adame Julie Roubere was awaiting her elder sister, Madame
Henriette Letore, who had just returned after a trip to Switzerland.
The Letore household had left nearly five weeks ago. Madame Henriette
had allowed her husband to return alone to their estate in Calvados, where
some matters of business required his attention, and come to spend a few
days in Paris with her sister. Night came on. In the quiet parlor, darkened by
twilight shadows, Madame Roubere was reading, in an absent-minded
fashion, raising her eyes whenever she heard a sound.
At last, she heard a ring at the door, and presently her sister appeared,
wrapped in a traveling cloak. And immediately without any formal greeting,
they clasped each other ardently, only desisting for a moment to begin
embracing each other over again. Then they talked, asking questions about
each other's health, about their respective families, and a thousand other
things, gossiping, jerking out hurried, broken sentences and rushing about
while Madame Henriette was removing her hat and veil.
It was now quite dark. Madame Roubere rang for a lamp, and as soon as it
was brought in, she scanned her sister's face, and was on the point of
embracing her once more. But she held back, scared and astonished at the
other's appearance. Around her temples, Madame Letore had two long locks
of white hair. All the rest of her hair was of a glossy, raven-black hue; but
there alone, at each side of her head, ran as it were, two silvery streams
which were immediately lost in the black mass surrounding them. She was
nevertheless only twenty-four years old, and this change had come on
suddenly since her departure for Switzerland.
Without moving, Madame Roubere gazed at her in amazement, tears rising
to her eyes, as she thought that some mysterious and terrible calamity must
have fallen on her sister. She asked:
"What is the matter with you, Henriette?"

Smiling with a sad face, the smile of one who is heartsick, the other replied:
"Why nothing I assure you. Were you noticing my white hair?"
But Madame Roubere impetuously seized her by the shoulders, and with a
searching glance at her repeated:
"What is the matter with you? Tell me what is the matter with you. And if
you tell me a falsehood, I'll soon find it out."
They remained face to face, and Madame Henriette, who became so pale
that she was near fainting, had two pearly tears at each corner of her
drooping eyes.
Her sister went on asking:
"What has happened to you? What is the matter with you? Answer me!"
Then, in a subdued voice, the other murmured:
"I have—I have a lover."
And, hiding her forehead on the shoulder of her younger sister, she sobbed.
Then, when she had grown a little calmer, when the heaving of her breast
had subsided, she commenced to unbosom herself, as if to cast forth this
secret from herself, to empty this sorrow of hers into a sympathetic heart.
Thereupon, holding each other's hands tightly grasped, the two women went
over to a sofa in a dark corner of the room, into which they sank, and the
younger sister, passing her arm over the elder one's neck, and drawing her
close to her heart, listened.

"Oh! I recognize that there was no excuse for one; I do not understand
myself, and since that day I feel as if I were mad. Be careful my child,
about yourself—be careful! If you only knew how weak we are, how
quickly we yield, we fall. All it needs is a nothing, so little, so little, a
moment of tenderness, one of those sudden fits of melancholy which steal

into your soul, one of those longings to open your arms, to love, to
embrace, which we all have at certain moments.
"You know my husband, and you know how fond of him I am; but he is
mature and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations of a
woman's heart. He is always, always the same, always good, always
smiling, always kind, always perfect. Oh! how I sometimes have wished
that he would roughly clasp me in his arms, that he would embrace me with
those slow, sweet kisses which make two beings intermingle, which are like
mute confidences! How I wished that he was self-abandoned and even
weak, so that he should have need of me, of my caress, of my tears!
"This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that. How can we
help it?
"And yet the thought of deceiving never came near me. To-day, it has
happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply because
the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.
"During the month when we were traveling together, my husband, with his
calm indifference, paralyzed my enthusiasm, extinguished my poetic ardor.
When we were descending the mountain paths at sun-rise, when as the four
horses galloped along with the diligence, we saw, in the transparent
morning haze, valleys, woods, streams, and villages, I clasped my hands
with delight, and said to him: 'What a beautiful scene, darling! Kiss me
now!' He only answered with a smile of chilling kindliness: 'There is no
reason why we should kiss each other because you like the landscape.'
"And his words froze me to the heart. It seems to me that when people love
each other, they ought to feel more moved by love than ever in the presence
of beautiful scenes.
"Indeed he prevented the effervescent poetry that bubbled up within me
from gushing out. How can I express it? I was almost like a boiler, filled
with steam and hermetically sealed.
"One evening (we had been for four days staying in the Hotel de Fluelen),
Robert, having got one of his sick headaches, went to bed immediately after
dinner, and I went to take a walk all alone along the edge of the lake.

"It was a night such as one might read of in a fairy tale. The full moon
showed itself in the middle of the sky; the tall mountains, with their snowy
crests seemed to wear silver crowns; the waters of the lake glittered with
tiny rippling motions. The air was mild, with that kind of penetrating
freshness which softens us till we seem to be swooning, to be deeply
affected without any apparent cause. But how sensitive, how vibrating, the
heart is at such moments! How quickly it leaps up, and how intense are its
emotions!
"I sat down on the grass, and gazed at that vast lake so melancholy and so
fascinating, and a strange thing passed into me; I became possessed with an
insatiable need of love, a revolt against the gloomy dullness of my life.
What! Would it never be my fate to be clasped in the arms of a man whom I
loved on a bank like this under the glowing moonlight? Was I never then, to
feel on my lips those kisses so deep, delicious, and intoxicating which
lovers exchange on nights that seem to have been made by God for
passionate embraces? Was I never to know such ardent, feverish love in the
moonlit shadows of a summer's night?
"And I burst out weeping like a woman who has lost her reason. I heard
some person stirring behind me. A man was intently gazing at me. When I
turned my head round, he recognized me, and, advancing, said:
"'You are weeping, Madame?'
"It was a young barrister who was traveling with his mother, and whom we
had often met. His eyes had frequently followed me.
"I was so much confused that I did not know what answer to give or what to
think of the situation. I told him I felt ill.
"He walked on by my side in a natural and respectable fashion, and began
talking to me about what we had seen during our trip. All that I had felt he
translated into words; everything that made me thrill he understood
perfectly, better than I did myself. And all of a sudden he recited some
verses of Alfred de Musset. I felt myself choking, seized with indescribable
emotion. It seemed to me that the mountains themselves, the lake, the
moonlight, were singing to me about things ineffably sweet.

"And it happened, I don't know how, I don't know why, in a sort of
hallucination.
"As for him I did not see him again till the morning of his departure.
"He gave me his card!"

And, sinking into her sister's arms, Madame Letore, broke into groans—
almost into shrieks.
Then, Madame Roubere, with a self-contained and serious air, said very
gently:
"You see, sister, very often it is not a man that we love, but love. And your
real lover that night was the moonlight."

THE CORSICAN BANDIT
he road with a gentle winding reached the middle of the forest. The
huge pine-trees spread above our heads a mournful-looking vault,
and gave forth a kind of long, sad wail, while at either side their
straight slender trunks formed, as it were, an army of organ-pipes, from
which seemed to issue that monotonous music of the wind through the tree-
tops.
After three hours' walking there was an opening in this row of tangled
branches. Here and there an enormous pine-parasol, separated from the
others, opening like an immense umbrella, displayed its dome of dark
green; then, all of a sudden, we gained the boundary of the forest, some
hundreds of meters below the defile which leads into the wild valley of
Niolo.
On the two projecting heights which commanded a view of this pass, some
old trees grotesquely twisted, seemed to have mounted with painful efforts,
like scouts who had started in advance of the multitude heaped together in
the rear. When we turned round, we saw the entire forest stretched beneath
our feet, like a gigantic basin of verdure, whose edges, which seemed to
reach the sky, were composed of bare rocks shutting in on every side.
We resumed our walk, and, ten minutes later, we found ourselves in the
defile.
Then I beheld an astonishing landscape. Beyond another forest, a valley, but
a valley such as I had never seen before, a solitude of stone ten leagues
long, hollowed out between two high mountains, without a field or a tree to
be seen. This was the Niolo valley, the fatherland of Corsican liberty, the
inaccessible citadel, from which the invaders had never been able to drive
out the mountaineers.
My companion said to me: "Is it here, too, that all our bandits have taken
refuge?"

Ere long we were at the further end of this chasm so wild, so inconceivably
beautiful.
Not a blade of grass, not a plant—nothing but granite. As far as our eyes
could reach, we saw in front of us a desert of glittering stone, heated like an
oven by a burning sun, which seemed to hang for that very purpose right
above the gorge. When we raised our eyes towards the crests, we stood
dazzled and stupefied by what we saw. They looked red and notched like
festoons of coral, for all the summits are made of porphyry; and the sky
overhead seemed violet, lilac, discolored by the vicinity of these strange
mountains. Lower down the granite was of scintillating gray, and under our
feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we were walking over shining powder. At
our right, along a long and irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran with a
continuous roar. And we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this
burning, arid, desolate valley cut by this ravine of turbulent water which
seemed to be ever hurrying onward, without being able to fertilize these
rocks, lost in this furnace which greedily drank it up without being
penetrated or refreshed by it.
But suddenly there was visible at our right a little wooden cross sunk in a
little heap of stones. A man had been killed there; and I said to my
companion:
"Tell me about your bandits."
He replied:
"I knew the most celebrated of them, the terrible St. Lucia. I will tell you
his history.
"His father was killed in a quarrel by a young man of the same district, it is
said; and St. Lucia was left alone with his sister. He was a weak and timid
youth, small, often ill, without any energy. He did not proclaim the vendetta
against the assassin of his father. All his relatives came to see him, and
implored of him to take vengeance; he remained deaf to their menaces and
their supplications.
"Then, following the old Corsican custom, his sister, in her indignation,
carried away his black clothes, in order that he might not wear mourning for
a dead man who had not been avenged. He was insensible to even this

outrage, and rather than take down from the rack his father's gun, which
was still loaded, he shut himself up, not daring to brave the looks of the
young men of the district.
"He seemed to have even forgotten the crime and he lived with his sister in
the obscurity of their dwelling.
"But, one day, the man who was suspected of having committed the murder,
was about to get married. St. Lucia did not appear to be moved by this
news, but, no doubt, out of sheer bravado, the bridegroom, on his way to the
church, passed before the two orphans' house.
"The brother and the sister, at their window, were eating little fried cakes
when the young man saw the bridal procession moving past the house.
Suddenly he began to tremble, rose up without uttering a word, made the
sign of the cross, took the gun which was hanging over the fireplace, and he
went out.
"When he spoke of this later on, he said: 'I don't know what was the matter
with me; it was like fire in my blood; I felt that I should do it, that in spite
of everything I could not resist, and I concealed the gun in a cave on the
road to Corte.'
"An hour later, he came back, with nothing in his hand, and with his
habitual air of sad weariness. His sister believed that there was nothing
further in his thoughts.
"But when night fell he disappeared.
"His enemy had, the same evening, to repair to Corte on foot, accompanied
by his two bridesmen.
"He was pursuing his way, singing as he went, when St. Lucia stood before
him, and looking straight in the murderer's face, exclaimed: 'Now is the
time!' and shot him point-blank in the chest.
"One of the bridesmen fled; the other stared at the young man saying:
"'What have you done, St. Lucia?'

"Then he was going to hasten to Corte for help, but St. Lucia said in stern
tone:
"'If you move another step, I'll shoot you through the legs.'
"The other, aware that till now he had always appeared timid, said to him:
'You would not dare to do it!' and he was hurrying off when he fell
instantaneously, his thigh shattered by a bullet.
"And St. Lucia, coming over to where he lay, said:
"'I am going to look at your wound; if it is not serious, I'll leave you there;
if it is mortal I'll finish you off.'
"He inspected the wound, considered it mortal, and slowly re-loading his
gun, told the wounded man to say a prayer, and shot him through the head.
"Next day he was in the mountains.
"And do you know what this St. Lucia did after this?
"All his family were arrested by the gendarmes. His uncle, the curé, who
was suspected of having incited him to this deed of vengeance, was himself
put into prison, and accused by the dead man's relatives. But he escaped,
took a gun in his turn, and went to join his nephew in the cave.
"Next, St. Lucia killed, one after the other, his uncle's accusers, and tore out
their eyes to teach the others never to state what they had seen with their
eyes.
"He killed all the relatives, all the connections of his enemy's family. He
massacred during his life fourteen gendarmes, burned down the houses of
his adversaries, and was up to the day of his death the most terrible of the
bandits, whose memory we have preserved."

The sun disappeared behind Monte Cinto and the tall shadow of the granite
mountain went to sleep on the granite of the valley. We quickened our pace
in order to reach before night the little village of Albertaccio, nothing better

than a heap of stones welded beside the stone flanks of a wild gorge. And I
said as I thought of the bandit:
"What a terrible custom your vendetta is!"
My companion answered with an air of resignation:
"What, would you have? A man must do his duty!"

A DEAD WOMAN'S SECRET
he had died painlessly, tranquilly, like a woman whose life was
irreproachable, and she now lay on her back in bed, with closed eyes,
calm features, her long white hair carefully arranged as if she had
again made her toilet ten minutes before her death, all her pale
physiognomy so composed, now that she had passed away, so resigned that
one felt sure a sweet soul had dwelt in that body, that this serene
grandmother had spent an untroubled existence, that this virtuous woman
had ended her life without any shock, without any remorse.
On his knees, beside the bed, her son, a magistrate of inflexible principles,
and her daughter Marguerite, in religion, Sister Eulalie, were weeping
distractedly. She had from the time of their infancy armed them with an
inflexible code of morality, teaching them a religion without weakness and
a sense of duty without any compromise. He, the son, had become a
magistrate, and, wielding the weapon of the law, he struck down without
pity the feeble and the erring. She, the daughter, quite penetrated with the
virtue that had bathed her in this austere family, had become the spouse of
God through disgust with men.
They had scarcely known their father; all they knew was that he had made
their mother unhappy without learning any further details. The nun
passionately kissed one hand of her dead mother, which hung down, a hand
of ivory like that of Christ in the large crucifix which lay on the bed. At the
opposite side of the prostrate body, the other hand seemed still to grasp the
rumpled sheet with that wandering movement which is called the fold of the
dying, and the lines had retained little wavy creases as a memento of those
last motions which precede the eternal motionlessness. A few light taps at
the door caused the two sobbing heads to rise up, and the priest who had
just dined, entered the apartment. He was flushed, a little puffed, from the
effects of the process of digestion which had just commenced; for he had
put a good dash of brandy into his coffee in order to counteract the fatigue
caused by the last nights he had remained up and that which he anticipated
from the night that was still in store for him. He had put on a look of

sadness, that simulated sadness of the priest to whom death is a means of
livelihood. He made the sign of the cross, and coming over to them with his
professional gesture said:
"Well, my poor children, I have come to help you to pass these mournful
hours."
But Sister Eulalie suddenly rose up.
"Thanks, father, but my brother and I would like to be left alone with her.
These are the last moments that we now have for seeing her; so we want to
feel ourselves once more, the three of us, just as we were years ago when
we—we—we were only children, and our poor—poor mother—"
She was unable to finish with the flood of tears that gushed from her eyes,
and the sobs that were choking her.
But the priest bowed, with a more serene look on his face, for he was
thinking of his bed. "Just as you please, my children."
Then, he knelt down, again crossed himself, prayed, rose up, and softly
stole away murmuring as he went: "She was a saint."
They were left alone, the dead woman and her children. A hidden timepiece
kept regularly ticking in its dark corner, and through the open window the
soft odors of hay and of woods penetrated with faint gleams of moonlight.
No sound in the fields outside, save the wandering notes of toads and now
and then the humming of some nocturnal insect darting into like a ball, and
knocking itself against the wall.
An infinite peace, a divine melancholy, a silent serenity surrounded this
dead woman, seemed to emanate from her, to evaporate from her into the
atmosphere outside and to calm Nature itself.
Then the magistrate, still on his knees, his head pressed against the bed-
clothes, in a far-off, heart-broken voice that pierced through the sheets and
the coverlet, exclaimed:
"Mamma, mamma, mamma!" And the sister, sinking down on the floor,
striking the wood with her forehead fanatically, twisting herself about and

quivering like a person in an epileptic fit, groaned: "Jesus, Jesus—mamma
—Jesus!"
And both of them shaken by a hurricane of grief panted with a rattling in
their throats.
Then the fit gradually subsided, and they now wept in a less violent fashion,
like the rainy calm that follows a squall on a storm-beaten sea. Then, after
some time, they rose, and fixed their glances on the beloved corpse. And
memories, those memories of the past, so sweet, so torturing to-day, came
back to their minds with all those little forgotten details, those little details
so intimate and familiar, which make the being who is no more live over
again. They recalled circumstances, words, smiles, certain intonations of
voice which belonged to one whom they should hear speaking to them
again. They saw her once more happy and calm, and phrases she used in
ordinary conversation rose to their lips. They even remembered a little
movement of the hand peculiar to her, as if she were keeping time when she
was saying something of importance.
And they loved her as they had never before loved her. And by the depth of
their despair they realized how strongly they had been attached to her, and
how desolate they would find themselves now.
She had been their mainstay, their guide, the best part of their youth, of that
happy portion of their lives which had vanished; she had been the bond that
united them to existence, the mother, the mamma, the creative flesh, the tie
that bound them to their ancestors. They would henceforth be solitary,
isolated; they would have nothing on earth to look back upon.
The nun said to her brother:
"You know how mamma used always to read over her old letters. They are
all there in her drawer. Suppose we read them in our turn, and so revive all
her life this night by her side? It would be like a kind of road of the cross,
like making the acquaintance of her mother, of grandparents whom we
never knew, whose letters are there, and of whom she has so often talked to
us, you remember?"

And they drew forth from the drawer a dozen little packets of yellow paper,
carefully tied up and placed close to one another. They flung these relics on
the bed, and selecting one of them on which the word "Father" was written,
they opened and read what was in it.
It consisted of those very old letters which are to be found in old family
writing-desks, those letters which have the flavor of another century. The
first said, "My darling," another "My beautiful little girl," then others "My
dear child," and then again "My dear daughter." And suddenly the nun
began reading aloud, reading for the dead her own history, all her tender
souvenirs. And the magistrate listened, while he leaned on the bed, with his
eyes on his mother's face. And the motionless corpse seemed happy.
Sister Eulalie, interrupting herself, said: "We ought to put them into the
grave with her, to make a winding-sheet of them, and bury them with her."
And then she took up another packet, on which the descriptive word did not
appear.
And in a loud tone she began: "My adored one, I love you to distraction.
Since yesterday I have been suffering like a damned soul burned by the
recollection of you. I feel your lips on mine, your eyes under my eyes, your
flesh under my flesh. I love you! I love you! You have made me mad! My
arms open! I pant with an immense desire to possess you again. My whole
body calls out to you, wants you. I have kept in my mouth the taste of your
kisses."
The magistrate rose up; the nun stopped reading. He snatched the letter
from her, and sought for the signature. There was none, save under the
words, "He who adores you," the name "Henry." Their father's name was
René. So then he was not the man.
Then, the son, with rapid fingers, fumbled in the packet of letters took
another of them, and read: "I can do without your caresses no longer."
And, standing up, with the severity of a judge passing sentence, he gazed at
the impassive face of the dead woman.
The nun, straight as a statue, with teardrops standing at each corner of her
eyes, looked at her brother, waiting to see what he meant to do. Then he

crossed the room, slowly reached the window, and looked out thoughtfully
into the night.
When he turned back, Sister Eulalie, her eyes now quite dry, still remained
standing near the bed, with a downcast look.
He went over to the drawer and flung in the letters which he had picked up
from the floor. Then he drew the curtains round the bed.
And when the dawn made the candles on the table look pale, the son rose
from his armchair, and without even a parting glance at the mother whom
he had separated from them and condemned, he said slowly:
"Now, my sister, let us leave the room."

THE CAKE
et us say that her name was Madame Anserre so as not to reveal her
real name.
She was one of those Parisian comets which leave, as it were, a trail of fire
behind them. She wrote verses and novels; she had a poetic heart, and was
ravishingly beautiful. She opened her doors to very few—only to
exceptional people, those who are commonly described as princes of
something or other.
To be a visitor at her house constituted a claim, a genuine claim of intellect:
at least this was the estimate set on her invitations.
Her husband played the part of an obscure satellite. To be the husband of a
star is not an easy thing. This husband had, however, an original idea, that
of creating a State within a State, of possessing a merit of his own, a merit
of the second order; it is true; but he did, in fact, in this fashion, on the days
when his wife held receptions, hold receptions also on his own account. He
had his special set who appreciated him, listened to him, and bestowed on
him more attention than they did on his brilliant partner.
He had devoted himself to agriculture—to agriculture in the Chamber.
There are in the same way generals in the Chamber—those who are born,
who live, and who die, on the round leather chairs of the War Office, are all
of this sort, are they not? Sailors in the Chambers—viz., in the Admiralty—
Colonizers in the Chamber, etc., etc. So he had studied agriculture, indeed
he had studied it deeply, in its relations with the other sciences, with
political economy, with the Fine Arts—we dress up the Fine Arts with every
kind of science, since we even call the horrible railway bridges "works of
art." At length he reached the point when it was said of him: "He is a man of
ability." He was quoted in the Technical Reviews; his wife had succeeded in
getting him appointed a member of a committee at the Ministry of
Agriculture.
This latest glory was quite sufficient for him.

Under the pretext of diminishing the expenses, he sent out invitations to his
friends for the day when his wife received hers, so that they associated
together, or rather they did not—they formed two groups. Madame, with
her escort of artists, academicians, and Ministers, occupied a kind of
gallery, furnished and decorated in the style of the Empire. Monsieur
generally withdrew with his agriculturists into a smaller portion of the
house used as a smoking-room and ironically described by Madame
Anserre as the Salon of Agriculture.
The two camps were clearly separated. Monsieur, without jealousy,
moreover, sometimes penetrated into the Academy, and cordial
handshakings were exchanged, but the Academy entertained infinite
contempt for the Salon of Agriculture, and it was rarely that one of the
princes of science, of thought, or of anything else mingled with the
agriculturists.
These receptions occasioned little expense—a cup of tea, a cake, that was
all. Monsieur, at an earlier period, had claimed two cakes, one for the
academy, and one for the agriculturists, but Madame having rightly
suggested that this way of acting seemed to indicate two camps, two
receptions, two parties, Monsieur did not press the matter, so that they used
only one cake, of which Madame Anserre did the honors at the Academy,
and which then passed into the Salon de Agriculture.
Now, this cake was soon, for the Academy, a subject of observation well
calculated to arouse curiosity. Madame Anserre never cut it herself. That
function always fell to the lot of one or other of the illustrious guests. The
particular duty, which was supposed to carry with it honorable distinction,
was performed by each person for a pretty long period, in one case for three
months, scarcely ever for more; and it was noticed that the privilege of
"cutting the cake" carried with it a heap of other marks of superiority—a
sort of royalty, or rather very accentuated vice-royalty.
The reigning cutter spoke in a haughty tone, with an air of marked
command; and all the favors of the mistress of the house were for him
alone.
These happy individuals were in moments of intimacy described in hushed
tones behind doors as the "favorites of the cake," and every change of

favorite introduced into the Academy a sort of revolution. The knife was a
scepter, the pastry an emblem; the chosen ones were congratulated. The
agriculturists never cut the cake. Monsieur himself was always excluded,
although he ate his share.
The cake was cut in succession by poets, by painters, and by novelists. A
great musician had the privilege of measuring the portions of the cake for
some time; an ambassador succeeded him. Sometimes a man less well-
known, but elegant and sought after, one of those who are called according
to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or
something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each
of them, during his ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration
towards the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed
on the knife towards the other and mingled once more with the crowd of
followers and admirers of the "beautiful Madame Anserre."
This state of things lasted a long time, but comets do not always shine with
the same brilliance. Everything gets worn out in society. One would have
said that gradually the eagerness of the cutters grew feebler; they seemed to
hesitate at times when the tray was held out to them; this office, once so
much coveted, became less and less desired. It was retained for a shorter
time; they appeared to be less proud of it.
Madame Anserre was prodigal of smiles and civilities. Alas! no one was
found any longer to cut it voluntarily. The new comers seemed to decline
the honor. The "old favorites" reappeared one by one like dethroned princes
who have been replaced for a brief spell in power. Then, the chosen ones
became few, very few. For a month (O, prodigy!) M. Anserre cut open the
cake; then he looked as if he were getting tired of it; and one evening
Madame Anserre, the beautiful Madame Anserre, was seen cutting it
herself. But this appeared to be very wearisome to her, and, next day, she
urged one of her guests so strongly to do it that he did not dare to refuse.
The symbol was too well-known, however; the guests stared at one another
with scared anxious faces. To cut the cake was nothing, but the privileges to
which this favor had always given a claim now frightened people; therefore,
the moment the dish made its appearance the academicians rushed pell-mell
into the Salon of Agriculture, as if to shelter themselves behind the

husband, who was perpetually smiling. And when Madame Anserre, in a
state of anxiety, presented herself at the door with a cake in one hand and
the knife in the other, they all seemed to form a circle around her husband
as if to appeal to him for protection.
Some years more passed. Nobody cut the cake now; but yielding to an old
inveterate habit, the lady who had always been gallantly called "the
beautiful Madame Anserre" looked out each evening for some devotee to
take the knife, and each time the same movement took place around her, a
general flight, skillfully arranged, and full of combined maneuvers that
showed great cleverness, in order to avoid the offer that was rising to her
lips.
But, one evening, a young man presented himself at her reception—an
innocent, unsophisticated youth. He knew nothing about the mystery of the
cake; accordingly, when it appeared, and when all the rest ran away, when
Madame Anserre took from the man-servant's hands the dish and the pastry,
he remained quietly by her side.
She thought that perhaps he knew about the matter; she smiled, and in a
tone which showed some emotion, said:
"Will you be kind enough, dear Monsieur, to cut this cake?"
He displayed the utmost readiness, and took off his gloves, flattered at such
an honor being conferred on him.
"Oh, to be sure Madame, with the greatest pleasure."
Some distance away in the corner of the gallery, in the frame of the door
which led into the Salon of the Agriculturists, faces which expressed utter
amazement were staring at him. Then, when the spectators saw the new
comer cutting without any hesitation, they quickly came forward.
An old poet jocosely slapped the neophyte on the shoulder.
"Bravo, young man!" he whispered in his ear.
The others gazed at him with curiosity. Even the husband appeared to be
surprised. As for the young man, he was astonished at the consideration
which they suddenly seemed to show towards him; above all, he failed to

comprehend the marked attentions, the manifest favor, and the species of
mute gratitude which the mistress of the house bestowed on him.
It appears, however, that he eventually found out.
At what moment, in what place, was the revelation made to him? Nobody
could tell; but, when he again presented himself at the reception, he had a
preoccupied air, almost a shamefaced look, and he cast around him a glance
of uneasiness.
The bell rang for tea. The man-servant appeared. Madame Anserre, with a
smile, seized the dish, casting a look about her for her young friend; but he
had fled so precipitately that no trace of him could be seen any longer.
Then, she went looking everywhere for him, and ere long she discovered
him in the Salon of the Agriculturists. With his arm locked in that of the
husband, he was consulting that gentleman as to the means employed for
destroying phylloxera.
"My dear Monsieur," she said to him, "will you be so kind as to cut this
cake for me?"
He reddened to the roots of his hair, and hanging down his head, stammered
out some excuses. Thereupon M. Anserre took pity on him, and turning
towards his wife, said:
"My dear, you might have the goodness not to disturb us. We are talking
about agriculture. So get your cake cut by Baptiste."
And since that day nobody has ever cut Madame Anserre's cake.

A LIVELY FRIEND
hey had been constantly in each other's society for a whole winter in
Paris. After having lost sight of each other, as generally happens in
such cases, after leaving college, the two friends met again one
night, long years after, already old and white-haired, the one a bachelor, the
other married.
M. de Meroul lived six months in Paris and six months in his little chateau
of Tourbeville. Having married the daughter of a gentleman in the district,
he had lived a peaceful, happy life with the indolence of a man who has
nothing to do. With a calm temperament and a sedate mind, without any
intellectual audacity or tendency towards revolutionary independence of
thought, he passed his time in mildly regretting the past, in deploring the
morals and the institutions of to-day, and in repeating every moment to his
wife, who raised her eyes to Heaven, and sometimes her hands also, in
token of energetic assent:
"Under what a government do we live, great God!"
Madame de Meroul mentally resembled her husband, just as if they had
been brother and sister. She knew by tradition that one ought, first of all, to
reverence the Pope and the King!
And she loved them and respected them from the bottom of her heart,
without knowing them, with a poetic exaltation, with a hereditary devotion,
with all the sensibility of a well-born woman. She was kindly in every fold
of her soul. She had no child, and was incessantly regretting it.
When M. de Meroul came across his old school fellow Joseph Mouradour
at a ball, he experienced from this meeting a profound and genuine delight,
for they had been very fond of one another in their youth.
After exclamations of astonishment over the changes caused by age in their
bodies and their faces, they had asked one another a number of questions as
to their respective careers.

Joseph Mouradour, a native of the South of France, had become a Councilor
General in his own neighborhood. Frank in his manners, he spoke briskly
and without any circumspection telling all his thoughts with sheer
indifference to prudential considerations. He was a Republican, of that race
of good-natured Republicans who make their own ease the law of their
existence, and who carry freedom of speech to the verge of brutality.
He called at his friend's address in Paris, and was immediately a favorite, on
account of his easy cordiality, in spite of his advanced opinions. Madame de
Meroul exclaimed:
"What a pity! such a charming man!"
M. de Meroul said to his friend, in a sincere and confidential tone: "You
cannot imagine what a wrong you do to our country." He was attached to
his friend nevertheless, for no bonds are more solid than those of childhood
renewed in later life. Joseph Mouradour chaffed the husband and wife,
called them "my loving turtles," and occasionally gave vent to loud
declarations against people who were behind the age, against all sorts of
prejudices and traditions.
When he thus directed the flood of his democratic eloquence, the married
pair, feeling ill at ease, kept silent through a sense of propriety and good-
breeding; then the husband tried to turn off the conversation, in order to
avoid any friction. Joseph Mouradour did not want to know anyone unless
he was free to say what he liked.
Summer came round. The Merouls knew no greater pleasure than to receive
their old friends in their country house at Tourbeville. It was an intimate and
healthy pleasure, the pleasure of homely gentlefolk who had spent most of
their lives in the country. They used to go to the nearest railway station to
meet some of their guests, and drove them to the house in their carriage,
watching for compliments on their district, on the rapid vegetation, on the
condition of the roads in the department, on the cleanliness of the peasants'
houses, on the bigness of the cattle they saw in the fields, on everything that
met the eye as far as the edge of the horizon.
They liked to have it noticed that their horse trotted in a wonderful manner
for an animal employed a part of the year in field-work; and they awaited,

with anxiety the newcomer's opinion on their family estate, sensitive to the
slightest word, grateful for the slightest gracious attention.
Joseph Mouradour was invited, and he announced his arrival.
The wife and the husband came to meet the train, delighted to have the
opportunity of doing the honors of their house.
As soon as he perceived them, Joseph Mouradour jumped out of his
carriage with a vivacity which increased their satisfaction. He grasped their
hands warmly, congratulated them, and intoxicated them with compliments.
He was quite charming in his manner as they drove along the road to the
house; he expressed astonishment at the height of the trees, the excellence
of the crops, and the quickness of the horse.
When he placed his foot on the steps in front of the chateau, M. de Meroul
said to him with a certain friendly solemnity:
"Now you are at home."
Joseph Mouradour answered: "Thanks old fellow; I counted on that. For my
part, besides, I never put myself out with my friends. That's the only
hospitality I understand."
Then, he went up to his own room, where he put on the costume of a
peasant, as he was pleased to describe it, and he came down again not very
long after, attired in blue linen, with yellow boots, in the careless rig-out of
a Parisian out for a holiday. He seemed, too to have become more common,
more jolly, more familiar, having assumed along with his would-be rustic
garb a free and easy swagger which he thought suited the style of dress. His
new apparel somewhat shocked M. and Madame de Meroul who even at
home on their estate always remained serious and respectable, as the
particle "de" before their name exacted a certain amount of ceremonial even
with their intimate friends.
After lunch, they went to visit the farms; and the Parisian stupefied the
respectable peasants by talking to them as if he were a comrade of theirs.
In the evening, the curé dined at the house—a fat old priest, wearing his
Sunday suit, who had been specially asked that day in order to meet the

newcomer.
When Joseph saw him he made a grimace, then he stared at the priest in
astonishment as if he belonged to some peculiar race of beings, the like of
which he had never seen before at such close quarters. He told a few smutty
stories allowable enough with a friend after dinner, but apparently
somewhat out of place in the presence of an ecclesiastic. He did not say,
"Monsieur l'Abbe," but merely "Monsieur"; and he embarrassed the priest
with philosophical views as to the various superstitions that prevailed on the
surface of the globe.
He remarked:
"Your God, monsieur, is one of those persons whom we must respect, but
also one of those who must be discussed. Mine is called Reason; he has
from time immemorial been the enemy of yours."
The Merouls, greatly put out, attempted to divert his thoughts.
The curé left very early.
Then the husband gently remarked:
"You went a little too far with that priest."
But Joseph immediately replied:
"That's a very good joke, too! Am I to bother my brains about a devil-
dodger? At any rate, do me the favor of not ever again having such an old
fogy to dinner. Curses on his impudence!"
"But, my friend, remember his sacred character."
Joseph Mouradour interrupted him:
"Yes, I know. We must treat them like girls, who get roses for being well
behaved! That's all right, my boy! When these people respect my
convictions, I will respect theirs!"
This was all that happened that day.

Next morning, Madame de Meroul, on entering her drawing-room, saw
lying on the table three newspapers which made her draw back in horror.
"Le Voltaire," "Le Republique Francaise," and "La Justice."
Presently, Joseph Mouradour, still in his blue blouse, appeared on the
threshold, reading "L'Intransigeant" attentively. He exclaimed:
"There is a splendid article by Rochefort. This fellow is marvelous."
He read the article in a loud voice, laying so much stress on its most
striking passages that he did not notice the entrance of his friend.
M. de Meroul had a paper in each hand. "Le Gaulois" for himself and "Le
Clarion" for his wife.
The ardent prose of the master-writer who overthrew the empire, violently
declaimed, recited in the accent of the South, rang through the peaceful
drawing-room, shook the old curtains with their rigid folds, seemed to
splash the walls, the large upholstered chairs, the solemn furniture fixed in
the same position for the past century, with a hail of words, rebounding,
impudent, ironical and crushing.
The husband and the wife, the one standing, the other seated, listened in a
state of stupor, so scandalized that they no longer even ventured to make a
gesture. Mouradour launched out the concluding passage in the article as
one lets forth a jet of fireworks, then in an emphatic tone remarked:
"That's a stinger, eh?"
But suddenly he perceived the two prints belonging to his friend, and he
seemed himself for a moment overcome with astonishment. Then, he came
across to his host with great strides, demanding in angry tone:
"What do you want to do with these papers?" M. de Meroul replied in a
hesitating voice:
"Why, these—these are my—my newspapers."
"Your newspapers! Look here, now, you are only laughing at me! You will
do me the favor to read mine, to stir you up with a few new ideas, and, as
for yours—this is what I do with them—"

And before his host, filled with confusion, could prevent him, he seized the
two newspapers and flung them out through the window. Then he gravely
placed "La Justice" in the hands of Madame de Meroul and "Le Voltaire" in
those of her husband, and he sank into an armchair to finish
"L'Intransigeant."
The husband and the wife, through feelings of delicacy, made a show of
reading a little, then they handed back the Republican newspapers, which
they touched with their finger-tips as if they had been poisoned.
Then he burst out laughing, and said:
"A week of this sort of nourishment, and I'll have you converted to my
ideas."
At the end of the week, in fact, he ruled the house. He had shut the door on
the curé, whom Madame Meroul went to see in secret. He gave orders that
neither the "Gaulois" nor the "Clarion" were to be admitted into the house,
which a man-servant went to get in a mysterious fashion at the post-office,
and which, on his entrance, were hidden away under the sofa cushions. He
regulated everything just as he liked, always charming, always good-
natured, a jovial and all powerful tyrant.
Other friends were about to come on a visit, religious people with
Legitimist opinions. The master and mistress of the chateau considered it
would be impossible to let them meet their lively guest, and, not knowing
what to do, announced to Joseph Mouradour one evening that they were
obliged to go away from home for a few days about a little matter of
business, and they begged of him to remain in the house alone.
He showed no trace of emotion, and replied:
"Very well; 'tis all the same to me; I'll wait here for you as long as you like.
What I say is this—there need be no ceremony between friends. You're
quite right to look after your own affairs—why the devil shouldn't you? I'll
not take offense at your doing that, quite the contrary. It only makes me feel
quite at my ease with you. Go, my friends—I'll wait for you."
M. and Madame Meroul started next morning.

He is waiting for them.

THE ORPHAN
ademoiselle Source had adopted this boy under very sad
circumstances. She was at the time thirty-six years old. She was
deformed, having in her infancy slipped off her nurse's lap into the
fireplace, and getting her face so shockingly burned that it ever afterwards
presented a frightful appearance. This deformity had made her resolve not
to marry, for she did not want any man to marry her for her money.
A female neighbor of hers, being left a widow during her pregnancy, died in
child-birth, without leaving a sou. Mademoiselle Source took the new-born
child, put him out to nurse, reared him, sent him to a boarding-school, then
brought him home in his fourteenth year, in order to have in her empty
house somebody who would love her, who would look after her, who would
make her old age pleasant.
She resided on a little property four leagues away from Rennes, and she
now dispensed with a servant. The expenses having increased to more than
double what they had been since this orphan's arrival, her income of three
thousand francs was no longer sufficient to support three persons.
She attended to the housekeeping and the cooking herself, and she sent out
the boy on errands, letting him further occupy himself with cultivating the
garden. He was gentle, timid, silent, and caressing. And she experienced a
deep joy, a fresh joy at being embraced by him, without any apparent
surprise or repugnance being exhibited by him on account of her ugliness.
He called her "Aunt" and treated her as a mother.
In the evening they both sat down at the fireside, and she got nice things
ready for him. She heated some wine and toasted a slice of bread, and it
made a charming little meal before going to bed. She often took him on her
knees and covered him with kisses, murmuring in his ear with passionate
tenderness. She called him: "My little flower, my cherub, my adored angel,
my divine jewel." He softly accepted her caresses, concealing his head on
the old maid's shoulder. Although he was now nearly fifteen years old, he
had remained small and weak, and had a rather sickly appearance.

Sometimes Mademoiselle Source brought him to the city, to see two
married female relatives of hers, distant cousins, who were living in the
suburbs, and who were the only members of her family in existence. The
two women had always found fault with her for having adopted this boy on
account of the inheritance; but for all that they gave her a cordial welcome,
having still hopes of getting a share for themselves, a third, no doubt, if
what she possessed were only equally divided.
She was happy, very happy, always taken up with her adopted child. She
bought books for him to improve his mind, and he devoted himself ardently
to reading.
He no longer now climbed on her knees to fondle her as he had formerly
done; but instead would go and sit down in his little chair in the chimney-
corner and open a volume. The lamp placed at the edge of the little table,
above his head, shone on his curly hair, and on a portion of his forehead; he
did not move, he did not raise his eyes, he did not make any gesture. He
read on, interested, entirely absorbed in the adventures which formed the
subject of the book.
She, seated opposite to him, gazed at him with an eager, steady look,
astonished at his studiousness, often on the point of bursting into tears.
She said to him now and then: "You will fatigue yourself, my treasure!" in
the hope that he would raise his head, and come across to embrace her; but
he did not even answer her; he had not heard or understood what she was
saying; he paid no attention to anything save what he read in these pages.
For two years he devoured an incalculable number of volumes. His
character changed.
After this, he asked Mademoiselle Source many times for money, which she
gave him. As he always wanted more, she ended by refusing, for she was
both regular and energetic, and knew how to act rationally when it was
necessary to do so. By dint of entreaties he obtained a large sum one night
from her; but when he urged her to give him another sum a few days later,
she showed herself inflexible, and did not give way to him further, in fact.
He appeared to be satisfied with her decision.

He again became quiet, as he had formerly been, loving to remain seated for
entire hours, without moving, plunged in deep reverie. He now did not even
talk to Madame Source, merely answering her remarks with short, formal
words. Nevertheless, he was agreeable and attentive in his manner towards
her; but he never embraced her now.
She had by this time grown slightly afraid of him when they sat facing one
another at night at opposite sides of the chimney-piece. She wanted to wake
him up, to make him say something, no matter what, that would break this
dreadful silence, which was like the darkness of a wood. But he did not
appear to listen to her, and she shuddered with the terror of a poor feeble
woman when she had spoken to him five or six times successively without
being able to get a word out of him.
What was the matter with him? What was going on in that closed up head?
When she had been thus two or three hours sitting opposite him, she felt
herself getting daft, and longed to rush away and to escape into the open
country in order to avoid that mute, eternal companionship and also some
vague danger, which she could not define, but of which she had a
presentiment.
She frequently shed tears when she was alone. What was the matter with
him? When she gave expression to a desire, he unmurmuringly carried it
into execution. When she wanted to have anything brought to her from the
city, he immediately went there to procure it. She had no complaint to make
of him; no, indeed! And yet....
Another year flitted by, and it seemed to her that a new modification had
taken place in the mind of the young man. She perceived it; she felt it; she
divined it. How? No matter! She was sure she was not mistaken; but she
could not have explained in what the unknown thoughts of this strange
youth had changed.
It seemed to her that till now he had been like a person in a hesitating frame
of mind who had suddenly arrived at a determination. This idea came to her
one evening as she met his glance, a fixed singular glance which she had
not seen in his face before.

Then, he commenced to watch her incessantly and she wished she could
hide herself in order to avoid that cold eye, riveted on her.
He kept staring at her, evening after evening for hours together, only
averting his eyes when she said, utterly unnerved:
"Do not look at me like that, my child!"
Then he hung down his head.
But, the moment her back was turned, she once more felt that his eyes were
upon her. Wherever she went he pursued her with his persistent gaze.
Sometimes, when she was walking in her little garden, she suddenly noticed
him squatted on the stump of a tree as if he were lying in wait for her; and
again when she sat in front of the house mending stockings while he was
digging some cabbage-bed, he kept watching her, as he worked, in a sly,
continuous fashion.
It was in vain that she asked him:
"What's the matter with you, my boy? For the last three years you have
become very different. I don't find you the same. Tell me what ails you, and
what you are thinking of, I beg of you."
He invariably replied, in a quiet, weary tone:
"Why, nothing ails me, Aunt!"
And when she persisted, appealing to him thus:
"Ah! my child, answer me, answer me when I speak to you. If you knew
what grief you caused me, you would always answer, and you would not
look at me that way. Have you any trouble? Tell me! I'll console you!"
He went away with a tired air, murmuring:
"But there is nothing the matter with me, I assure you."
He had not grown much, having always a childish aspect, although the
features of his face were those of a man. They were, however, hard and
badly-cut. He seemed incomplete, abortive, only half-finished, and

disquieting as a mystery. He was a close, impenetrable being, in whom
there seemed always to be some active, dangerous mental travail taking
place.
Mademoiselle Source was quite conscious of all this, and she could not
from that time forth, sleep at night, so great was her anxiety. Frightful
terrors, dreadful nightmares assailed her. She shut herself up in her own
room, and barricaded the door, tortured by fear.
What was she afraid of? She could not tell.
Fear of everything, of the night, of the walls, of the shadows thrown by the
moon on the white curtains of the windows, and above all, fear of him.
Why?
What had she to fear? Did she know what it was?
She could live this way no longer! She felt certain that a misfortune
threatened her, a frightful misfortune.
She set forth secretly one morning, and went into the city to see her
relatives. She told them about the matter in a gasping voice. The two
women thought she was going mad and tried to reassure her.
She said:
"If you knew the way he looks at me from morning till night. He never
takes his eyes off me! At times, I feel a longing to cry for help, to call in the
neighbors, so much am I afraid. But what could I say to them? He does
nothing to me except to keep looking at me."
The two female cousins asked:
"Is he ever brutal to you? Does he give you sharp answers?"
She replied:
"No, never; he does everything I wish; he works hard; he is steady; but I am
so frightened I don't mind that much. He has something in his head, I am
certain of that—quite certain. I don't care to remain all alone like that with
him in the country."

The relatives, scared by her words, declared to her that they were
astonished, and could not understand her; and they advised her to keep
silent about her fears and her plans, without, however, dissuading her from
coming to reside in the city, hoping in that way that the entire inheritance
would eventually fall into their hands.
They even promised to assist her in selling her house and in finding another
near them.
Mademoiselle Source returned home. But her mind was so much upset that
she trembled at the slightest noise, and her hands shook whenever any
trifling disturbance agitated her.
Twice she went again to consult her relatives, quite determined now not to
remain any longer in this way in her lonely dwelling. At last, she found a
little cottage in the suburbs, which suited her, and she privately bought it.
The signature of the contract took place on a Tuesday morning, and
Mademoiselle Source devoted the rest of the day to the preparations for her
change of residence.
At eight o'clock in the evening she got into the diligence which passed
within a few hundred yards of her house, and she told the conductor to let
her down in the place where it was his custom to stop for her. The man
called out to her as he whipped his horses:
"Good evening, Mademoiselle Source—good night!"
She replied as she walked on:
"Good evening, Pere Joseph." Next morning, at half-past seven, the
postman who conveyed letters to the village, noticed at the cross-road, not
far from the high road, a large splash of blood not yet dry. He said to
himself: "Hallo! some boozer must have got a bleeding in the nose."
But he perceived ten paces farther on a pocket-handkerchief also stained
with blood. He picked it up. The linen was fine, and the postman in alarm,
made his way over to the dike, where he fancied he saw a strange object.
Mademoiselle Source was lying at the bottom on the grass, her throat cut
open with a knife.

An hour later, the gendarmes, the examining magistrate, and other
authorities made an inquiry as to the cause of death.
The two female relatives, called as witnesses, told all about the old maid's
fears and her last plans.
The orphan was arrested. Since the death of the woman who had adopted
him, he wept from morning till night, plunged at least to all appearance, in
the most violent grief.
He proved that he had spent the evening up to eleven o'clock in a café. Ten
persons had seen him, having remained there till his departure.
Now the driver of the diligence stated that he had set down the murdered
woman on the road between half-past nine and ten o'clock.
The accused was acquitted. A will, a long time made, which had been left in
the hands of a notary in Rennes, made him universal legatee. So he
inherited everything.
For a long time, the people of the country put him into a quarantine, as they
still suspected him. His house, which was that of the dead woman, was
looked upon as accursed. People avoided him in the street.
But he showed himself so good-natured, so open, so familiar, that gradually
these horrible doubts were forgotten. He was generous, obliging, ready to
talk to the humblest about anything as long as they cared to talk to him.
The notary, Maitre Rameay, was one of the first to take his part, attracted by
his smiling loquacity. He said one evening at a dinner at the tax-collector's
house:
"A man who speaks with such facility and who is always in good humor
could not have such a crime on his conscience."
Touched by his argument, the others who were present reflected, and they
recalled to mind the long conversations with this man who made them stop
almost by force at the road corners to communicate his ideas to them, who
insisted on their going into his house when they were passing by his garden,
who could crack a joke better than the lieutenant of the gendarmes himself,
and who possessed such contagious gayety that, in spite of the repugnance

with which he inspired them, they could not keep from always laughing in
his company.
All doors were opened to him, after a time.
He is, to-day, the mayor of his own township.

THE BLIND MAN
ow is it that the sunlight gives us such joy? Why does this radiance
when it falls on the earth fill us with so much delight of living? The
sky is all blue, the fields are all green, the houses all white; and our
ravished eyes drink in those bright colors which bring mirthfulness to our
souls. And then there springs up in our hearts a desire to dance, a desire to
run, a desire to sing, a happy lightness of thought, a sort of enlarged
tenderness; we feel a longing to embrace the sun.
The blind, as they sit in the doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness,
remain as calm as ever in the midst of this fresh gayety, and, not
comprehending what is taking place around them, they keep every moment
stopping their dogs from gamboling.
When, at the close of the day, they are returning home on the arm of a
young brother or a little sister, if the child says: "It was a very fine day!" the
other answers: "I could notice that 'twas fine. Loulou wouldn't keep quiet."
I have known one of these men whose life was one of the most cruel
martyrdoms that could possibly be conceived.
He was a peasant, the son of a Norman farmer. As long as his father and
mother lived, he was more or less taken care of; he suffered little save from
his horrible infirmity; but as soon as the old people were gone, an atrocious
life of misery commenced for him. A dependent on a sister of his,
everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread
of others. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of
reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown; and although his
brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, the
soup was given to him grudgingly—just enough to save him from dying.
His face was very pale, and his two big white eyes were like wafers; and he
remained unmoved in spite of the insults inflicted upon him, so shut up in
himself that one could not tell whether he felt them at all.

Moreover, he had never known any tenderness, his mother having always
treated him unkindly, and caring scarcely at all for him; for in country
places the useless are obnoxious, and the peasants would be glad, like hens,
to kill the infirm of their species.
As soon as the soup had been gulped down, he went to the door in summer-
time and sat down, to the chimney-corner in winter time, and, after that,
never stirred all night. He made no gesture, no movement; only his eyelids,
quivering from some nervous affection, fell down sometimes over his
white, sightless orbs. Had he any intellect, any thinking faculty, any
consciousness of his own existence? Nobody cared to inquire as to whether
he had or no.
For some years things went on in this fashion. But his incapacity for doing
anything as well as his impassiveness eventually exasperated his relatives,
and he became a laughing-stock, a sort of martyred buffoon, a prey given
over to native ferocity, to the savage gaiety of the brutes who surrounded
him.
It is easy to imagine all the cruel practical jokes inspired by his blindness.
And, in order to have some fun in return for feeding him, they now
converted his meals into hours of pleasure for the neighbors and of
punishment for the helpless creature himself.
The peasants from the nearest houses came to this entertainment; it was
talked about from door to door, and every day the kitchen of the farmhouse
was full of people. Sometimes they put on the table, in front of his plate,
when he was beginning to take the soup, some cat or some dog. The animal
instinctively scented out the man's infirmity, and, softly approaching,
commenced eating noiselessly, lapping up the soup daintily; and, when a
rather loud licking of the tongue awakened the poor fellow's attention, it
would prudently scamper away to avoid the blow of the spoon directed at it
by the blind man at random!
Then the spectators huddled against the walls burst out laughing, nudged
each other, and stamped their feet on the floor. And he, without ever
uttering a word, would continue eating with the aid of his right hand, while
stretching out his left to protect and defend his plate.

At another time they made him chew corks, bits of wood, leaves, or even
filth, which he was unable to distinguish.
After this, they got tired even of these practical jokes; and the brother-in-
law, mad at having to support him always, struck him, cuffed him
incessantly, laughing at the useless efforts of the other to ward off or return
the blows. Then came a new pleasure—the pleasure of smacking his face.
And the plough-men, the servant girls, and even every passing vagabond
were every moment giving him cuffs, which caused his eyelashes to twitch
spasmodically. He did not know where to hide himself, and remained with
his arms always held out to guard against people coming too close to him.
At last he was forced to beg.
He was placed somewhere on the high-road on market-days, and as soon as
he heard the sound of footsteps or the rolling of a vehicle, he reached out
his hat, stammering:—
"Charity, if you please!"
But the peasant is not lavish, and for whole weeks he did not bring back a
sou.
Then he became the victim of furious, pitiless hatred. And this is how he
died.
One winter the ground was covered with snow, and it froze horribly. Now
his brother-in-law led him one morning at this season a great distance along
the high-road in order that he might solicit alms. The blind man was left
there all day, and when night came on, the brother-in-law told the people of
his house that he could find no trace of the mendicant. Then he added:
"Pooh! best not bother about him! He was cold, and got someone to take
him away. Never fear! he's not lost. He'll turn up soon enough to-morrow to
eat the soup."
Next day, he did not come back.
After long hours of waiting, stiffened with the cold, feeling that he was
dying, the blind man began to walk. Being unable to find his way along the
road, owing to its thick coating of ice, he went on at random, falling into

dykes, getting up again, without uttering a sound, his sole object being to
find some house where he could take shelter.
But by degrees the descending snow made a numbness steal over him, and
his feeble limbs being incapable of carrying him farther, he had to sit down
in the middle of an open field. He did not get up again.
The white flakes which kept continually falling buried him, so that his
body, quite stiff and stark, disappeared under the incessant accumulation of
their rapidly thickening mass; and nothing any longer indicated the place
where the corpse was lying.
His relatives made pretense of inquiring about him and searching for him
for about a week. They even made a show of weeping.
The winter was severe, and the thaw did not set in quickly. Now, one
Sunday, on their way to mass, the farmers noticed a great flight of crows,
who were whirling endlessly above the open field, and then, like a shower
of black rain, descended in a heap at the same spot, ever going and coming.
The following week these gloomy birds were still there. There was a crowd
of them up in the air, as if they had gathered from all corners of the horizon;
and they swooped down with a great cawing into the shining snow, which
they filled curiously with patches of black, and in which they kept
rummaging obstinately. A young fellow went to see what they were doing,
and discovered the body of the blind man, already half devoured, mangled.
His wan eyes had disappeared, pecked out by the long, voracious beaks.
And I can never feel the glad radiance of sunlit days without sadly
remembering and gloomily pondering over the fate of the beggar so
disinherited in life that his horrible death was a relief for all those who had
known him.

A WIFE'S CONFESSION
y friend, you have asked me to relate to you the liveliest
recollections of my life. I am very old, without relatives, without
children; so I am free to make a confession to you. Promise me one
thing—never to reveal my name.
I have been much loved, as you know; I have often myself loved. I was very
beautiful; I may say this to-day, when my beauty is gone. Love was for me
the life of the soul, just as the air is the life of the body. I would have
preferred to die rather than exist without affection, without having
somebody always to care for me. Women often pretend to love only once
with all the strength of their hearts; it has often happened to be so violent in
one of my attachments that I thought it would be impossible for my
transports ever to end. However, they always died out in a natural fashion,
like a fire when it has no more fuel.
I will tell you to-day the first of my adventures, in which I was very
innocent, but which led to the others. The horrible vengeance of that
dreadful chemist of Pecq recalls to me the shocking drama of which I was,
in spite of myself, a spectator.
I had been a year married to a rich man, Comte Herve de Ker—— a Breton
of ancient family, whom I did not love, you understand. True love needs, I
believe at any rate, freedom and impediments at the same time. The love
which is imposed, sanctioned by law, and blessed by the priest—can we
really call that love? A legal kiss is never as good as a stolen kiss. My
husband was tall in stature, elegant, and a really fine gentleman in his
manners. But he lacked intelligence. He spoke in a downright fashion, and
uttered opinions that cut like the blade of a knife. He created the impression
that his mind was full of ready-made views instilled into him by his father
and mother, who had themselves got them from their ancestors. He never
hesitated, but on every subject immediately made narrow-minded
suggestions, without showing any embarrassment and without realizing that
there might be other ways of looking at things. One felt that his head was

closed up, that no ideas circulated in it, none of those ideas which renew a
man's mind and make it sound, like a breath of fresh air passing through an
open window into a house.
The chateau in which we lived was situated in the midst of a desolate tract
of country. It was a large, melancholy structure, surrounded by enormous
trees, with tufts of moss on it resembling old men's white beards. The park,
a real forest, was enclosed in a deep trench called the ha-ha; and at its
extremity, near the moorland, we had big ponds full of reeds and floating
grass. Between the two, at the edge of a stream which connected them, my
husband had got a little hut built for shooting wild ducks.
We had, in addition to our ordinary servants, a keeper, a sort of brute
devoted to my husband to the death, and a chambermaid, almost a friend,
passionately attached to me. I had brought her back from Spain with me
five years before. She was a deserted child. She might have been taken for a
gipsy with her dusky skin, her dark eyes, her hair thick as a wood and
always clustering around her forehead. She was at the time sixteen years
old, but she looked twenty.
The autumn was beginning. We hunted much, sometimes on neighboring
estates, sometimes on our own; and I noticed a young man, the Baron de C
——, whose visits at the chateau became singularly frequent. Then he
ceased to come; I thought no more about it; but I perceived that my husband
changed in his demeanor towards me.
He seemed taciturn and preoccupied; he did not kiss me; and, in spite of the
fact that he did not come into my room, as I insisted on separate apartments
in order to live a little alone, I often at night heard a furtive step drawing
near my door, and withdrawing a few minutes after.
As my window was on the ground-floor I thought I had also often heard
someone prowling in the shadow around the chateau. I told my husband
about it, and, having looked at me intently for some seconds, he answered:
"It is nothing—it is the keeper."

Now, one evening, just after dinner, Herve, who appeared to be
extraordinarily gay, with a sly sort of gaiety, said to me:
"Would you like to spend three hours out with the guns, in order to shoot a
fox who comes every evening to eat my hens?"
I was surprised. I hesitated; but, as he kept staring at me with singular
persistency, I ended by replying:
"Why, certainly, my friend." I must tell you that I hunted like a man the
wolf and the wild boar. So it was quite natural that he should suggest this
shooting expedition to me.
But my husband, all of a sudden, had a curiously nervous look; and all the
evening he seemed agitated, rising up and sitting down feverishly.
About ten o'clock, he suddenly said to me:
"Are you ready?"
I rose; and, as he was bringing me my gun himself, I asked:
"Are we to load with bullets or with deershot?"
He showed some astonishment; then he rejoined:
"Oh! only with deershot; make your mind easy! that will be enough."
Then, after some seconds, he added in a peculiar tone:
"You may boast of having splendid coolness."
I burst out laughing.
"I? Why, pray? Coolness because I went to kill a fox? But what are you
thinking of, my friend?"
And we quietly made our way across the park. All the household slept. The
full moon seemed to give a yellow tint to the old gloomy building, whose
slate roof glittered brightly. The two turrets that flanked it had two plates of
light on their summits, and no noise disturbed the silence of this clear, sad
night, sweet and still, which seemed in a death-trance. Not a breath of air,

not a shriek from a toad, not a hoot from an owl; a melancholy numbness
lay heavy on everything. When we were under the trees in the park, a sense
of freshness stole over me, together with the odor of fallen leaves. My
husband said nothing; but he was listening, he was watching, he seemed to
be smelling about in the shadows, possessed from head to foot by the
passion for the chase.
We soon reached the edges of the ponds.
Their tufts of rushes remained motionless; not a breath of air caressed it; but
movements which were scarcely perceptible ran through the water.
Sometimes the surface was stirred by something, and light circles gathered
around, like luminous wrinkles enlarging indefinitely.
When we reached the hut where we were to lie in wait, my husband made
me go in first; then he slowly loaded his gun, and the dry cracking of the
powder produced a strange effect on me. He saw that I was shuddering, and
asked:
"Does this trial happen to be quite enough for you? If so, go back."
I was much surprised, and I replied:
"Not at all. I did not come to go back without doing anything. You seem
queer this evening."
He murmured, "As you wish," and we remained there without moving.
At the end of about half-an-hour, as nothing broke the oppressive stillness
of this bright autumn night, I said, in a low tone:
"Are you quite sure he is passing this way?"
Herve winced as if I had bitten him, and with his mouth close to my ear, he
said:
"Make no mistake about it. I am quite sure."
And once more there was silence.
I believe I was beginning to get drowsy when my husband pressed my arm,
and his voice, changed to a hiss, said:

"Do you see him over there under the trees?"
I looked in vain; I could distinguish nothing. And slowly Herve now cocked
his gun, all the time fixing his eyes on my face.
I was myself making ready to fire, and suddenly, thirty paces in front of us,
appeared in the full light of the moon a man who was hurrying forward with
rapid movements, his body bent, as if he were trying to escape.
I was so stupefied that I uttered a loud cry; but, before I could turn round,
there was a flash before my eyes; I heard a deafening report, and I saw the
man rolling on the ground, like a wolf hit by a bullet.
I burst into dreadful shrieks, terrified, almost going mad; then a furious
hand—it was Herve's—seized me by the throat. I was flung down on the
ground, then carried off by his strong arms. He ran, holding me up, till we
reached the body lying on the grass, and he threw me on top of it violently,
as if he wanted to break my head.
I thought I was lost; he was going to kill me; and he had just raised his heel
up to my forehead when, in his turn, he was gripped, knocked down before
I could yet realize what had happened.
I rose up abruptly, and I saw kneeling on top of him Porquita, my maid,
clinging like a wild cat to him with desperate energy, tearing off his beard,
his moustache, and the skin of his face.
Then, as if another idea had suddenly taken hold of her mind, she rose up,
and, flinging herself on the corpse, she threw her arms around the dead
man, kissing his eyes and his mouth, opening the dead lips with her own
lips, trying to find in them a breath and a long, long kiss of lovers.
My husband, picking himself up, gazed at me. He understood, and falling at
my feet, said:
"Oh! forgive me, my darling, I suspected you, and I killed this girl's lover. It
was my keeper that deceived me."
But I was watching the strange kisses of that dead man and that living
woman, and her sobs and her writhings of sorrowing love—

And at that moment I understood that I might be unfaithful to my husband.

RELICS OF THE PAST
y dear Colette,—I do not know whether you remember a verse of
M. Sainte-Beuve which we have read together, and which has
remained fixed in my memory; for me this verse speaks eloquently;
and it has very often reassured my poor heart, especially for some time past.
Here it is:
"To be born, to live, and die in the same house."
I am now all alone in this house where I was born, where I have lived, and
where I hope to die. It is not gay every day, but it is pleasant; for there I
have souvenirs all around me.
My son Henri is a barrister; he comes to see me twice a year. Jeanne is
living with her husband at the other end of France, and it is I who go to see
her each autumn. So here I am, all, all alone, but surrounded by familiar
objects which incessantly speak to me about my own people, the dead, and
the living separated from me by distance.
I no longer read much; I am too old for that; but I am constantly thinking, or
rather dreaming. I do not dream as I used to do long ago. You may recall to
mind any wild fancies, the adventures our brains concocted when we were
twenty, and all the horizons of happiness that dawned upon us!
Nothing out of all our dreaming has been realized, or rather it is quite a
different thing that has happened, less charming, less poetic, but sufficient
for those who know how to accept their lot in this world bravely.
Do you know why we women are so often unhappy? It is because we are
taught in our youth to believe too much in happiness! We are never brought
up with the idea of fighting, of striving, of suffering. And, at the first shock,
our hearts are broken; we look forward, with blind faith, to cascades of
fortunate events. What does happen is at best but a partial happiness, and
thereupon we burst out sobbing. Happiness, the real happiness that we
dream of, I have come to know what that is. It does not consist in the arrival

of great bliss, for any great bliss that falls to our share is to be found in the
infinite expectation of a succession of joys to which we never attain.
Happiness is happy expectation; it is the horizon of hope; it is, therefore,
endless illusion; and, old as I am, I create illusions for myself still, in fact,
every day I live; only their object is changed, my desires being no longer
the same. I have told you that I spend my brightest hours in dreaming. What
else should I do?
I have two ways of doing this. I am going to tell you what they are; they
may perhaps prove useful to you.
Oh! the first is very simple; it consists in sitting down before my fire in a
low armchair made soft for my old bones, and looking back at the things
that have been put aside.
One life is so short, especially a life entirely spent in the same spot:
"To be born, to live, and die in the same house."
The things that bring back the past to our recollection are heaped, pressed
together; and, we are old, it sometimes seems no more than ten days since
we were young. Yes; everything slips away from us, as if life itself were but
a single day: morning, evening, and then comes night—a night without a
dawn!
When I gaze into the fire, for hours and hours, the past rises up before me
as though it were but yesterday. I no longer think of my present existence;
reverie carries me away; once more I pass through all the changes of my
life.
And I often am possessed by the illusion that I am a young girl, so many
breaths of bygone days are wafted back to me, so many youthful sensations
and even impulses, so many throbbings of my young heart—all the
passionate ardor of eighteen; and I have clear, as fresh realities, visions of
forgotten things. Oh! how vividly, above all, do the memories of my walks
as a young girl come back to me! There, in the armchair of mine, before the
fire, I saw once more, a few nights since, a sunset on Mont Saint-Michel,
and immediately afterwards I was riding on horseback through the forest of
Uville with the odors of the damp sand and of the flowers steeped in dew,
and the evening star sending its burning reflection through the water and

bathing my face in its rays as I galloped through the copse. And all I
thought of then, my poetic enthusiasm at the sight of the boundless sea, my
keen delight at the rustling of the branches as I passed, my most trivial
impressions, every fragment of thought, desire, or feeling, all, all came back
to me as if I were there still, as if fifty years had not glided by since then, to
chill my blood and moderate my hopes. But my other way of reviving the
long ago is much better.
You know, or you do not know, my dear Colette, that we destroy nothing in
the house. We have upstairs, under the roof, a large room for cast-off things
which we call "the lumber-room." Everything which is no longer used is
thrown there. I often go up there, and gaze around me. Then I find once
more a heap of nothings that I had ceased to think about, and that recalled a
heap of things to my mind. They are not those beloved articles of furniture
which we have known since our childhood and to which are attached
recollections of events of joys or sorrows, dates in our history, which, from
the fact of being intermingled with our lives, have assumed a kind of
personality, a physiognomy, which are the companions of our pleasant or
gloomy house, the only companions, alas! that we are sure not to lose, the
only ones that will not die, like the others—those whose features, whose
loving eyes, whose lips, whose voices, have vanished for ever. But I find
instead among the medley of worn-out gewgaws those little old
insignificant objects which have hung on by our side for forty years without
ever having been noticed by us, and which, when we suddenly lay eyes on
them again, have somehow the importance, the significance of relics of the
past. They produce on my mind the effect of those people—whom we have
known for a very long time without ever having seen them as they really
are, and who, all of a sudden, some evening, quite unexpectedly, break out
into a stream of interminable talk, and tell us all about themselves down to
their most hidden secrets, of which we had never even suspected the
existence.
And I move about from one object to the other with a little thrill in my heart
every time something fixes my attention. I say to myself: "See there! I
broke that the night Paul started for Lyons;" or else, "Ah! there is mamma's
little lantern, which she used to carry with her going to her evening
devotions on dark winter nights." There are even things in this room which
have no story to tell me, which have come down from my grandparents,

things therefore, whose history and adventures are utterly unknown to those
who are living to-day, and whose very owners nobody knows now. Nobody
has seen the hands that used to touch them or the eyes that used to gaze at
them. These are the things that make me have long, long dreams. They
represent to my mind desolate people whose last remaining friend is dead.
You, my dear Colette, can scarcely comprehend all this, and you will smile
at my simplicity, my childish, sentimental whims. You are a Parisian, and
you Parisians do not understand this interior life, those eternal echoes of
one's own heart. You live in the outer world, with all your thoughts in the
open. Living alone as I do, I can only speak about myself. When you are
answering this letter, tell me a little about yourself, that I may also be able
to put myself in your place, as you will be able to put yourself in mine to-
morrow.
But you will never completely understand M. de Sainte Beuve's verse:

"To be born, to live, and to die in one house."

A thousand kisses, my old friend,
Adelaide.

THE PEDDLER
ow many trifling occurrences, things which have left only a passing
impression on our minds, humble dramas of which we have got a
mere glimpse so that we have to guess at or suspect their real nature,
are, while we are still young and inexperienced, threads, so to speak,
guiding us, step by step, towards a knowledge of the painful truth!
Every moment, when I am retracing my steps during the long wandering
reveries which distract my thoughts along the path through which I saunter
at random, my soul takes wing, and suddenly I recall little incidents of a
gay or sinister character which, emerging from the shades of the past, flit
before my memory as the birds flit through the bushes before my eyes.
This summer, I wandered along a road in Savoy which commands a view of
the right bank of the Lake of Bourget, and, while my glance floated over
that mass of water, mirror-like and blue, with a unique blue, pale, tinted
with glittering beams by the setting sun, I felt my heart stirred by that
attachment which I have had since my childhood for the surface of lakes,
for rivers, and for the sea. On the opposite bank of the vast liquid plate, so
wide that you did not see the ends of it, one vanishing in the Rhone, and the
other in the Bourget, rose the high mountain, jagged like a crest up to the
topmast peak of the "Cats's Tooth." On either side of the road, vines, trailing
from tree to tree, choked under their leaves their slender supporting
branches, and they extended in garlands through the fields, green, yellow,
and red garlands, festooning from one trunk to the other, and spotted with
clusters of dark grapes.
The road was deserted, white, and dusty. All of a sudden, a man emerged
out of the thicket of large trees which shuts in the village of Saint-Innocent,
and, bending under a load, he came towards me, leaning on a stick.
When he had come closer to me, I discovered that he was a peddler, one of
those itinerant dealers who go about the country from door to door, selling
paltry objects cheaply, and thereupon a reminiscence of long ago arose up
in my mind, a mere nothing almost, the recollection simply of an accidental

meeting I had one night between Argenteuil and Paris when I was twenty-
one.
All the happiness of my life, at this period, was derived from boating. I had
taken a room in an obscure inn at Argenteuil, and, every evening, I took the
Government clerks' train, that long slow train which, in its course, sets
down at different stations a crowd of men with little parcels, fat and heavy,
for they scarcely walk at all, so that their trousers are always baggy owing
to their constant occupation of the office-stool. This train, in which it
seemed to me I could even sniff the odor of the writing-desk, of official
documents and boxes, deposited me at Argenteuil. My boat was waiting for
me, ready to glide over the water. And I rapidly plied my oar so that I might
get out and dine at Bezons or Chatou or Epinay or Saint-Ouen. Then I came
back, put up my boat, and made my way back on foot to Paris with the
moon shining down on me.
Well, one night on the white road I perceived just in front of me a man
walking. Oh! I was constantly meeting those night travelers of the Parisian
suburbs so much dreaded by belated citizens. This man went on slowly
before me with a heavy load on his shoulders.
I came right up to him by quickening my pace so much that my footsteps
rang on the road. He stopped and turned round; then, as I kept approaching
nearer and nearer, he crossed to the opposite side of the road.
As I rapidly passed him, he called out to me:
"Hallo! good evening, monsieur."
I responded:
"Good evening, mate."
He went on:
"Are you going far?"
"I am going to Paris."
"You won't be long getting there; you're going at a good pace. As for me, I
have too big a load on my shoulders to walk so quickly."

I slackened my pace. Why had this man spoken to me? What was he
carrying in this big pack? Vague suspicions of crime sprang up in my mind,
and rendered me curious. The columns of the newspapers every morning
contain so many accounts of crimes committed in this place, the peninsula
of Gennevilliers, that some of them must be true. Such things are not
invented merely to amuse readers—all this catalogue of arrests and varied
misdeeds with which the reports of the law courts are filled.
However, this man's voice seemed rather timid than bold, and up to the
present his manner had been more discreet than aggressive.
In my turn I began to question him:
"And you—are you going far?"
"Not farther than Asnieres."
"Is Asnieres your place of abode?"
"Yes, monsieur, I am a peddler by occupation, and I live at Asnieres."
He had quitted the sidewalk, where pedestrians move along in the daytime
under the shadows of the trees, and he was soon in the middle of the road. I
followed his example. We kept staring at each other suspiciously, each of us
holding his stick in his hand. When I was sufficiently close to him, I felt
less distrustful. He evidently was disposed to assume the same attitude
towards me, for he asked:
"Would you mind going a little more slowly?"
"Why do you say this?"
"Because I don't care for this road by night. I have goods on my back, and
two are always better than one. When two men are together, people don't
attack them."
I felt that he was speaking truly, and that he was afraid. So I yielded to his
wishes, and the pair of us walked on, side by side, this stranger and I, at one
o'clock in the morning, along the road leading from Argenteuil to Asnieres.

"Why are you going home so late when it is so dangerous?" I asked my
companion.
He told me his history. He had not intended to return home this evening, as
he had brought with him that very morning a stock of goods to last him
three or four days. But he had been so fortunate in disposing of them that he
found it necessary to get back to his abode without delay in order to deliver
next day a number of things which had been bought on credit.
He explained to me with genuine satisfaction that he had managed the
business very well, having a tendency to talk confidentially, and that the
knick-knacks he displayed were useful to him in getting rid, while
gossiping, of other things which he could not easily sell.
He added:
"I have a shop in Asnieres. 'Tis my wife keeps it."
"Ah! So you're married?"
"Yes, m'sieur, for the last fifteen months. I have got a very nice wife. She'll
get a surprise when she sees me coming home to-night."
He then gave me an account of his marriage. He had been after this young
girl for two years, but she had taken time to make up her mind.
She had, since her childhood, kept a little shop at the corner of a street,
where she sold all sorts of things—ribbons, flowers in summer, and
principally pretty little shoe-buckles, and many other gewgaws, in which,
owing to the favor of a manufacturer, she enjoyed a speciality. She was
well-known in Asnieres as "La Bluette." This name was given to her
because she often dressed in blue. And she made money, as she was very
skillful in everything she did. His impression was that she was not very well
at the present moment; he believed she was in the family way, but he was
not quite sure. Their business was prospering; and he traveled about
exhibiting samples to all the small traders in the adjoining districts. He had
become a sort of traveling commission-agent for some of the
manufacturers, working at the same time for them and for himself.
"And you—what are you," he said.

I answered him with an air of embarrassment. I explained that I had a
sailing-boat and two yawls in Argenteuil, that I came for a row every
evening, and that, as I was fond of exercise, I sometimes walked back to
Paris, where I had a profession, which—I led him to infer—was a lucrative
one.
He remarked:
"Faith, if I had spondulics like you, I wouldn't amuse myself by trudging
that way along the roads at night—'Tisn't safe along here."
He gave me a sidelong glance, and I asked myself whether he might not all
the same, be a criminal of the sneaking type who did not want to run any
fruitless risk.
Then he restored my confidence when he murmured:
"A little less quickly, if you please. This pack of mine is heavy."
The sight of a group of houses showed that we had reached Asnieres.
"I am nearly at home," he said. "We don't sleep in the shop; it is watched at
night by a dog, but a dog who is worth four men. And then it costs too much
to live in the center of the town. But listen to me, monsieur! You have
rendered me a precious service, for I don't feel my mind at ease when I'm
traveling with my pack along the roads. Well, now you must come in with
me, and drink a glass of mulled wine with my wife if she hasn't gone to bed,
for she is a sound sleeper, and doesn't like to be waked up. Besides, I'm not
a bit afraid without my pack, and so I'll see you to the gates of the city with
a cudgel in my hand."
I declined the invitation; he insisted on my coming in; I still held back; he
pressed me with so much eagerness, with such an air of real
disappointment, such expressions of deep regret—for he had the art of
expressing himself very forcibly—asking me in the tone of one who felt
wounded "whether I objected to have a drink with a man like him," that I
finally gave way and followed him up a lonely road towards one of those
big dilapidated houses which are to be found on the outskirts of suburbs.

In front of this dwelling I hesitated. This high barrack of plaster looked like
a den for vagabonds, a hiding-place for suburban brigands. But he pushed
forward a door which had not been locked, and made me go in before him.
He led me forward by the shoulders, through profound darkness, towards a
staircase where I had to feel my way with my hands and feet, with a well-
grounded apprehension of tumbling into some gaping cellar.
When I had reached the first landing, he said to me: "Go on up! 'Tis the
sixth story."
I searched my pockets, and, finding there a box of vestas, I lighted the way
up the ascent. He followed me, puffing under his pack, repeating:
"Tis high! 'tis high!"
When we were at the top of the house, he drew forth from one of his inside
pockets a key attached to a thread, and unlocking his door he made me
enter.
It was a little whitewashed room, with a table in the center, six chairs, and a
kitchen-cupboard close to the wall.
"I am going to wake up my wife," he said; "then I am going down to the
cellar to fetch some wine; it doesn't keep here."
He approached one of the two doors which opened out of this apartment,
and exclaimed:
"Bluette! Bluette!" Bluette did not reply. He called out in a louder tone:
"Bluette! Bluette!"
Then knocking at the partition with his fist, he growled: "Will you wake up
in God's name?"
He waited, glued his ear to the key-hole, and muttered, in a calmer tone:
"Pooh! if she is asleep, she must be let sleep! I'll go and get the wine: wait a
couple of minutes for me."
He disappeared. I sat down and made the best of it.

What had I come to this place for? All of a sudden, I gave a start, for I heard
people talking in low tones, and moving about quietly, almost noiselessly, in
the room where the wife slept.
Deuce take it! Had I fallen into some cursed trap? Why had this woman—
this Bluette—not been awakened by the loud knocking of her husband at
the doorway leading into her room; could it have been merely a signal
conveying to accomplices: "There's a mouse in the trap! I'm going to look
out to prevent him escaping. 'Tis for you to do the rest!"
Certainly, there was more stir than before now in the inner room; I heard the
door opening from within. My heart throbbed. I retreated towards the
further end of the apartment, saying to myself: "I must make a fight of it!"
and, catching hold of the back of a chair with both hands, I prepared for a
desperate struggle.
The door was half opened, a hand appeared which kept it ajar; then a head,
a man's head covered with a billycock hat, slipped through the folding-
doors, and I saw two eyes staring hard at me. Then so quickly that I had not
time to make a single movement by way of defense, the individual, the
supposed criminal, a tall young fellow in his bare feet with his shoes in his
hands, a good looking chap, I must admit—half a gentleman, in fact, made
a dash for the outer door, and rushed down the stairs.
I resumed my seat. The adventure was assuming a humorous aspect. And I
waited for the husband, who took a long time fetching the wine. At last I
heard him coming up the stairs, and the sound of his footsteps made me
laugh, with one of those solitary laughs which it is hard to restrain.
He entered with two bottles in his hands. Then he asked me:
"Is my wife still asleep? You didn't hear her stirring—did you?"
I knew instinctively that there was an ear pasted against the other side of the
partition-door, and I said: "No, not at all."
And now he again called out:
"Pauline!"
She made no reply, and did not even move.

He came back to me, and explained:
"You see, she doesn't like me to come home at night, and take a drop with a
friend."
"So then you believe she was not asleep?"
He wore an air of dissatisfaction.
"Well, at any rate," he said, "let us have a drink together."
And immediately he showed a disposition to empty the two bottles one after
the other without more ado.
This time I did display some energy. When I had swallowed one glass I rose
up to leave. He no longer spoke of accompanying me, and with a sullen
scowl, the scowl of a common man in an angry mood, the scowl of a brute
whose violence is only slumbering, in the direction of his wife's sleeping
apartment, he muttered:
"She'll have to open that door when you've gone."
I stared at this poltroon, who had worked himself into a fit of rage without
knowing why, perhaps, owing to an obscure presentiment, the instinct of the
deceived male who does not like closed doors. He had talked about her to
me in a tender strain; now assuredly he was going to beat her.
He exclaimed, as he shook the lock once more:
"Pauline!"
A voice like that of a woman waking out of her sleep, replied from behind
the partition:
"Eh! what?"
"Didn't you hear me coming in?"
"No, I was asleep! Let me rest."
"Open the door!"

"Yes, when you're alone. I don't like you to be bringing home fellows at
night to drink with you."
Then I took myself off, stumbling down the stairs, as the other man, of
whom I had been the accomplice had done. And, as I resumed my journey
toward Paris, I realized that I had just witnessed in that wretched abode a
scene of the eternal drama which is being acted every day, under every
form, and among every class.

THE AVENGER
hen M. Antoine Leuillet married the Widow Mathilde Souris, he
had been in love with her for nearly ten years.
M. Souris had been his friend, his old college chum. Leuillet was very fond
of him, but found him rather a muff. He often used to say: "That poor
Souris will never set the Seine on fire."
When Souris married Mdlle. Mathilde Duval, Leuillet was surprised and
somewhat vexed, for he had a slight weakness for her. She was the daughter
of a neighbor of his, a retired haberdasher with a good bit of money. She
was pretty, well-mannered, and intelligent. She accepted Souris on account
of his money.
Then Leuillet cherished hopes of another sort. He began paying attentions
to his friend's wife. He was a handsome man, not at all stupid, and also well
off. He was confident that he would succeed; he failed. Then he fell really
in love with her, and he was the sort of lover who is rendered timid,
prudent, and embarrassed by intimacy with the husband. Mme. Souris
fancied that he no longer meant anything serious by his attentions to her,
and she became simply his friend. This state of affairs lasted nine years.
Now, one morning, Leuillet received a startling communication from the
poor woman. Souris had died suddenly of aneurism of the heart.
He got a terrible shock, for they were of the same age; but the very next
moment, a sensation of profound joy, of infinite relief of deliverance,
penetrated his body and soul. Mme. Souris was free.
He had the tact, however, to make such a display of grief as the occasion
required; he waited for the proper time to elapse, and attended to all the
conventional usages. At the end of fifteen months he married the widow.
His conduct was regarded as not only natural but generous. He had acted
like a good friend and an honest man. In short he was happy, quite happy.

They lived on terms of the closest confidence, having from the first
understood and appreciated each other. One kept nothing secret from the
other, and they told each other their inmost thoughts. Leuillet now loved his
wife with a calm trustful affection; he loved her as a tender, devoted partner,
who is an equal and a confidante. But there still lingered in his soul a
singular and unaccountable grudge against the deceased Souris, who had
been the first to possess this woman, who had had the flower of her youth
and of her soul, and who had even robbed her of her poetic attributes. The
memory of the dead husband spoiled the happiness of the living husband;
and this posthumous jealousy now began to torment Leuillet's heart day and
night.
The result was that he was incessantly talking about Souris, asking a
thousand minute and intimate questions about him, and seeking for
information as to all his habits and personal characteristics. And he pursued
him with railleries even into the depths of the tomb, recalling with self-
satisfaction his oddities, emphasizing his absurdities, and pointing out his
defects.
Every minute he kept calling out to his wife from one end to the other of the
house:
"Hallo, Mathilde!"
"Here am I, dear."
"Come and let us have a chat."
She always came over to him, smiling, well aware that Souris was to be the
subject of the chat, and anxious to gratify her second husband's harmless
fad.
"I say! do you remember how Souris wanted, one day, to prove to me that
small men are always better loved than big men?"
And he launched out into reflections unfavorable to the defunct husband,
who was small, and discreetly complimentary to himself, as he happened to
be tall.

And Mme. Leuillet let him think that he was quite right; and she laughed
very heartily, turned the first husband into ridicule in a playful fashion for
the amusement of his successor, who always ended by remarking:
"Never mind! Souris was a muff!"
They were happy, quite happy. And Leuillet never ceased to testify his
unabated attachment to his wife by all the usual manifestations.
Now, one night when they happened to be both kept awake by the renewal
of youthful ardor, Leuillet, who held his wife clasped tightly in his arms,
and had his lips glued to hers, said:
"Tell me this, darling."
"What?"
"Souris—'tisn't easy to put the question—was he very—very amorous?"
She gave him a warm kiss, as she murmured:
"Not so much as you, my duck."
His male vanity was flattered, and he went on:
"He must have been—rather a flat—eh?"
She did not answer. There was merely a sly little laugh on her face, which
she pressed close to her husband's neck.
He persisted in his questions:
"Come now! Don't deny that he was a flat—well, I mean, rather an
awkward sort of fellow?"
She nodded slightly.
"Well, yes, rather awkward."
He went on:
"I'm sure he used to weary you many a night—isn't that so?"

This time, she had an access of frankness, and she replied:
"Oh! yes."
He embraced her once more when she made this acknowledgment, and
murmured:
"What an ass he was! You were not happy with him?"
She answered:
"No. He was not always jolly."
Leuillet felt quite delighted, making a comparison in his own mind between
his wife's former situation and her present one.
He remained silent for some time: then, with a fresh outburst of merit, he
said:
"Tell me this!"
"What?"
"Will you be quite candid—quite candid with me?"
"Certainly, dear."
"Well, look here! Have you never been tempted to—to deceive this
imbecile, Souris?"
Mme. Leuillet uttered a little "Oh!" in a shamefaced way, and again cuddled
her face closer to her husband's chest. But he could see that she was
laughing.
He persisted:
"Come now, confess it! He had a head just suited for a cuckold, this
blockhead! It would be so funny! This good Souris! Oh! I say, darling, you
might tell it to me—only to me!"
He emphasized the words "to me," feeling certain that if she wanted to
show any taste when she deceived her husband, he, Leuillet, would have
been the man; and he quivered with joy at the expectation of this avowal,

sure that if she had not been the virtuous woman she was he could have had
her then.
But she did not reply, laughing incessantly as if at the recollection of
something infinitely comic.
Leuillet, in his turn, burst out laughing at the notion that he might have
made a cuckold of Souris. What a good joke! What a capital bit of fun, to be
sure!
He exclaimed in a voice broken by convulsions of laughter.
"Oh! poor Souris! poor Souris! Ah! yes, he had that sort of head—oh,
certainly he had!"
And Mme. Leuillet now twisted herself under the sheets, laughing till the
tears almost came into her eyes.
And Leuillet repeated: "Come, confess it! confess it! Be candid. You must
know that it cannot be unpleasant to me to hear such a thing."
Then she stammered, still choking with laughter.
"Yes, yes."
Her husband pressed her for an answer.
"Yes, what? Look here! tell me everything."
She was now laughing in a more subdued fashion, and, raising her mouth
up to Leuillet's ear, which was held towards her in anticipation of some
pleasant piece of confidence, she whispered—"Yes, I did deceive him!"
He felt a cold shiver down his back, and utterly dumbfounded, he gasped.
"You—you—did—really—deceive him?"
She was still under the impression that he thought the thing infinitely
pleasant, and replied.
"Yes—really—really."

He was obliged to sit up in bed so great was the shock he received, holding
his breath, just as overwhelmed as if he had just been told that he was a
cuckold himself. At first, he was unable to articulate properly; then after the
lapse of a minute or so, he merely ejaculated.
"Ah!"
She, too, had stopped laughing now, realizing her mistake too late.
Leuillet, at length asked.
"And with whom?"
She kept silent, cudgeling her brain to find some excuse.
He repeated his question.
"With whom?"
At last, she said.
"With a young man."
He turned towards her abruptly, and in a dry tone, said.
"Well, I suppose it wasn't with some kitchen wench. I ask you who was the
young man—do you understand?"
She did not answer. He tore away the sheet which she had drawn over her
head, and pushed her into the middle of the bed, repeating.
"I want to know with what young man—do you understand?"
Then, she replied with some difficulty in uttering the words.
"I only wanted to laugh." But he fairly shook with rage: "What? How is
that? You only wanted to laugh? So then you were making game of me? I'm
not going to be satisfied with these evasions, let me tell you! I ask you what
was the young man's name?"
She did not reply, but lay motionless on her back.
He caught hold of her arm and pressed it tightly.

"Do you hear me, I say? I want you to give me an answer when I speak to
you."
Then, she said, in nervous tones.
"I think you must be going mad! Let me alone!"
He trembled with fury, so exasperated that he scarcely knew what he was
saying, and, shaking her with all his strength, he repeated.
"Do you hear me? do you hear me?"
She wrenched herself out of his grasp with a sudden movement, and with
the tips of her fingers slapped her husband on the nose. He entirely lost his
temper, feeling that he had been struck, and angrily pounced down on her.
He now held her under him, boxing her ears in a most violent manner, and
exclaiming:
"Take that—and that—and that—there you are, you trollop!"
Then, when he was out of breath, exhausted from beating her, he got up,
and went over to the chest of drawers to get himself a glass of sugared
orange-water for he was almost ready to faint after his exertion.
And she lay huddled up in bed, crying and heaving great sobs, feeling that
there was an end of her happiness, and that it was all her own fault.
Then, in the midst of her tears, she faltered:
"Listen, Antoine, come here! I told you a lie—listen! I'll explain it to you."
And now, prepared to defend herself, armed with excuses and subterfuges,
she slightly raised her head all tangled under her crumpled nightcap.
And he, turning towards her, drew close to her, ashamed at having whacked
her, but feeling intensely still in his heart's core as a husband an
inexhaustible hatred against that woman who had deceived his predecessor,
Souris.

ALL OVER
he Comte de Lormerin had just finished dressing himself. He cast a
parting glance at the large glass, which occupied an entire panel of
his dressing-room, and smiled.
He was really a fine-looking man still, though he was quite gray. Tall,
slight, elegant, with no projecting paunch, with a scanty moustache of
doubtful shade in his thin face, which seemed fair rather than white, he had
presence, that "chic" in short, that indescribable something which
establishes between two men more difference than millions.
He murmured, "Lormerin is still alive!"
And he made his way into the drawing-room where his correspondence
awaited him.
On his table, where everything had its place, the work-table of the
gentleman who never works, there were a dozen letters lying beside three
newspapers of different opinions. With a single touch of the finger he
exposed to view all these letters, like a gambler giving the choice of a card;
and he scanned the handwriting, a thing he did each morning before tearing
open the envelopes.
It was for him a moment of delightful expectancy, of inquiry and vague
anxiety. What did these sealed mysterious papers bring him? What did they
contain of pleasure, of happiness, or of grief? He surveyed them with a
rapid sweep of the eye, recognizing in each case the hand that wrote them,
selecting them, making two or three lots, according to what he expected
from them. Here, friends; there, persons to whom he was indifferent; further
on, strangers. The last kind always gave him a little uneasiness. What did
they want from him? What hand had traced those curious characters full of
thoughts, promises, or threats?
This day one letter in particular caught his eye. It was simple nevertheless,
without seeming to reveal anything; but he regarded it with disquietude,

with a sort of internal shiver.
He thought: "From whom can it be? I certainly know this writing, and yet I
can't identify it."
He raised it to a level with his face, holding it delicately between two
fingers, striving to read through the envelope without making up his mind
to open it.
Then he smelled it, and snatched up from the table a little magnifying glass
which he used in studying all the niceties of handwriting. He suddenly felt
unnerved. "Who is it from? This hand is familiar to me, very familiar. I
must have often read its prosings, yes, very often. But this must have been a
long, long time ago. Who the deuce can it be from? Pooh! 'tis only from
somebody asking for money."
And he tore open the letter. Then he read.
"My dear Friend,—You have, without doubt, forgotten me, for it
is now twenty-five years since we saw each other. I was young;
I am old. When I bade you farewell, I quitted Paris in order to
follow into the provinces my husband, my old husband, whom
you used to call 'my hospital.' Do you remember him? He died
five years ago, and now, I am returning to Paris to get my
daughter married, for I have a daughter, a beautiful girl of
eighteen, whom you have never seen. I informed you about her
entrance into the world, but you certainly did not pay much
attention to so trifling an event.
"You, you are always the handsome Lormerin; so I have been
told. Well, if you still recollect little Lise, whom you used to call
Lison, come and dine this evening with her, with the elderly
Baronne de Vance, your ever faithful friend, who, with some
emotion, stretches out to you, without complaining of her lot, a
devoted hand, which you must clasp, but no longer kiss, my
poor Jaquelet.
"Lise de Vance."

Lormerin's heart began to throb. He remained sunk in his armchair, with the
letter on his knees, staring straight before him, overcome by poignant
feelings that made the tears mount up to his eyes!
If he had ever loved a woman in his life it was this one, little Lise, Lise de
Vance, whom he called "Cinder-Flower" on account of the strange color of
her hair, and the pale gray of her eyes. Oh! what a fine, pretty, charming
creature she was, this frail Baronne, the wife of that, gouty, pimply Baron,
who had abruptly carried her off to the provinces, shut her up, kept her apart
through jealousy, through jealousy of the handsome Lormerin.
Yes, he had loved her, and he believed that he, too, had been truly loved.
She familiarly gave him the name of Jaquelet, and she used to pronounce
that word in an exquisite fashion.
A thousand memories that had been effaced came back to him, far off and
sweet and melancholy now. One evening, she called on him on her way
home from a ball, and they went out for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne,
she in evening dress, he in his dressing-jacket. It was springtime; the
weather was beautiful. The odor of her bodice embalmed the warm air—the
odor of her bodice, and also a little, the odor of her skin. What a divine
night! When they reached the lake, as the moon's rays fell across the
branches into the water, she began to weep. A little surprised, he asked her
why.
She replied:
"I don't know. 'Tis the moon and the water that have affected me. Every
time I see poetic things, they seize hold of my heart, and I have to cry."
He smiled, moved himself, considering her feminine emotion charming—
the emotion of a poor little woman whom every sensation overwhelms. And
he embraced her passionately, stammering:
"My little Lise, you are exquisite."
What a charming love affair short-lived and dainty it had been, and all over
too so quickly, cut short in the midst of its ardor by this old brute of a
Baron, who had carried off his wife, and never shown her afterwards to
anyone!

Lormerin had forgotten, in good sooth, at the end of two or three months.
One woman drives out the other so quickly in Paris when one is a bachelor!
No matter he had kept a little chapel for her in his heart, for he had loved
her alone! He assured himself now that this was so.
He rose up, and said: "Certainly, I will go and dine with her this evening!"
And instinctively he turned round towards the glass in order to inspect
himself from head to foot. He reflected: "She must have grown old
unpleasantly, more than I have!" And he felt gratified at the thought of
showing himself to her still handsome, still fresh, of astonishing her,
perhaps of filling her with emotion, and making her regret those bygone
days so far, far distant!
He turned his attention to the other letters. They were not of importance.
The whole day, he kept thinking of this phantom. What was she like now?
How funny it was to meet in this way after twenty-five years! Would he
alone recognize her?
He made his toilet with feminine coquetry, put on a white waistcoat, which
suited him better with the coat, sent for the hairdresser to give him a
finishing touch with the curling-iron, for he had preserved his hair, and
started very early in order to show his eagerness to see her.
The first thing he saw on entering a pretty drawing-room freshly furnished,
was his own portrait, an old faded photograph, dating from the days of his
good-fortune, hanging on the wall in an antique silk frame.
He sat down and waited. A door opened behind him. He rose up abruptly,
and, turning round, beheld an old woman with white hair who extended
both hands towards him.
He seized them, kissed them one after the other with long, long kisses, then,
lifting up his head, he gazed at the woman he had loved.
Yes, it was an old lady, an old lady whom he did not recognize, and who,
while she smiled, seemed ready to weep.
He could not abstain from murmuring:

"It is you, Lise?"
She replied:
"Yes, it is I; it is I, indeed. You would not have known me, isn't that so? I
have had so much sorrow—so much sorrow. Sorrow has consumed my life.
Look at me now—or rather don't look at me! But how handsome you have
kept—and young! If I had by chance met you in the street, I would have
cried, 'Jaquelet!' Now sit down and let us, first of all, have a chat. And then
I'll show you my daughter, my grown-up daughter. You'll see how she
resembles me—or rather how I resemble her—no, it is not quite that: she is
just like the 'me' of former days—you shall see! But I wanted to be alone
with you first. I feared that there would be some emotion on my side, at the
first moment. Now it is all over; it is past. Pray be seated, my friend."
He sat down beside her, holding her hand; but he did not know what to say;
he did not know this woman—it seemed to him that he had never seen her
before. What had he come to do in this house? Of what could he speak? Of
the long-ago? What was there in common between him and her? He could
no longer recall anything to mind in the presence of this grandmotherly
face. He could no longer recall to mind all the nice, tender things so sweet,
so bitter, that had assailed his heart, some time since, when he thought of
the other, of little Lise, of the dainty Cinder-Flower. What then had become
of her, the former one, the one he had loved? that woman of far-off dreams,
the blonde with gray eyes, the young one who used to call him "Jaquelet" so
prettily?
They remained side by side, motionless, both constrained, troubled,
profoundly ill at ease.
As they only talked in commonplace phrases, broken and slow, she rose up,
and pressed the button of the bell.
"I am going to call Renee," she said.
There was a tap at the door, then the rustle of a dress; next, a young voice
exclaimed:
"Here I am, mamma!"

Lormerin remained scared, as if at the sight of an apparition.
He stammered:
"Good-day, Mademoiselle."
Then, turning towards the mother:
"Oh! it is you!..."
In fact, it was she, she whom he had known in bygone days, the Lise who
had vanished and come back! In her he found the woman he had won
twenty-five years before. This one was even younger still, fresher, more
childlike.
He felt a wild desire to open his arms, to clasp her to his heart again,
murmuring in her ear:
"Good-day, Lison!"
A man-servant announced:
"Dinner is ready, Madame."
And they proceeded towards the dining-room.
What passed at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he
say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams
which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in
his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea:
"Which is the real one?"
The mother smiled, repeating over and over again:
"Do you remember?" And it was in the bright eye of the young girl that he
found again his memories of the past. Twenty times he opened his mouth to
say to her: "Do you remember, Lison?—" forgetting this white-haired lady
who was regarding him with looks of tenderness.
And yet there were moments when he no longer felt sure, when he lost his
head. He could see that the woman of to-day was not exactly the woman of

long ago. The other one, the former one, had in her voice, in her glance, in
her entire being, something which he did not find again. And he made
prodigious efforts of mind to recall his lady love, to seize again what had
escaped from her to him, what this resuscitated one did not possess.
The Baronne said:
"You have lost your old sprightliness, my poor friend."
He murmured:
"There are many other things that I have lost!"
But in his heart touched with emotion, he felt his old love springing to life
once more, like an awakened wild beast ready to bite him.
The young girl went on chattering, and every now and then some familiar
phrase of her mother which she had borrowed, a certain style of speaking
and thinking, that resemblance of mind and manner which people acquire
by living together, shook Lormerin from head to foot. All these things
penetrated him, making the reopened wound of his passion bleed anew.
He got away early, and took a turn along the boulevard. But the image of
this young girl pursued him, haunted him, quickened his heart, inflamed his
blood. Apart from the two women, he now saw only one, a young one, the
one of former days returned, and he loved her as he had loved her in bygone
years. He loved her with greater ardor, after an interval of twenty-five years.
He went home to reflect on this strange and terrible thing, and to think on
what he should do.
But, as he was passing, with a wax candle in his hand, before the glass, the
large glass in which he had contemplated himself and admired himself
before he started, he saw reflected there an elderly, gray-haired man; and
suddenly he recollected what he had been in olden days, in the days of little
Lise. He saw himself charming and handsome, as he had been when he was
loved! Then, drawing the light nearer, he looked at himself more closely, as
one inspects a strange thing with a magnifying glass, tracing the wrinkles,
discovering those frightful ravages, which he had not perceived till now.

And he sat down, crushed at the sight of himself, at the sight of his
lamentable image, murmuring:
"All over, Lormerin!"

LETTER FOUND ON A DROWNED MAN
ou ask me, madame, whether I am laughing at you? You cannot
believe that a man has never been smitten with love. Well, no, I have
never loved, never!
What is the cause of this? I really cannot tell. Never have I been under the
influence of that sort of intoxication of the heart which we call love! Never
have I lived in that dream, in that exaltation, in that state of madness into
which the image of a woman casts us. I have never been pursued, haunted,
roused to fever-heat, lifted up to Paradise by the thought of meeting, or by
the possession of, a being who had suddenly become for me more desirable
than any good fortune, more beautiful than any other creature, more
important than the whole world! I have never wept, I have never suffered,
on account of any of you. I have not passed my nights thinking of one
woman without closing my eyes. I have no experience of waking up with
the thought and the memory of her shedding their illumination on me. I
have never known the wild desperation of hope when she was about to
come, or the divine sadness of regret when she parted with me, leaving
behind her in the room a delicate odor of violet powder and flesh.
I have never been in love.
I, too, have often asked myself why is this. And truly I can scarcely tell.
Nevertheless, I have found some reasons for it; but they are of a
metaphysical character, and perhaps you will not be able to appreciate them.
I suppose I sit too much in judgment on women to submit much to their
fascination. I ask you to forgive me for this remark. I am going to explain
what I mean. In every creature there is a moral being and a physical being.
In order to love, it would be necessary for me to find a harmony between
these two beings which I have never found. One has always too great a
predominance over the other, sometimes the moral, sometimes the physical.
The intellect which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to love
her, is not the same as virile intellect. It is more and it is less. A woman

must have a mind open, delicate, sensitive, refined, impressionable. She has
no need of either power or initiative in thought, but she must have kindness,
elegance, tenderness, coquetry, and that faculty of assimilation which, in a
little while, raises her to an equality with him who shared her life. Her
greatest quality must be tact, that subtle sense which is to the mind what
touch is to the body. It reveals to her a thousand little things, contours,
angles, and forms in the intellectual order.
Very frequently pretty women have not intellect to correspond with their
personal charms. Now the slightest lack of harmony strikes me and pains
me at the first glance. In friendship, this is not of importance. Friendship is
a compact in which one fairly divides defects and merits. We may judge of
friends, whether man or woman, take into account the good they possess,
neglect the evil that is in them, and appreciate their value exactly, while
giving ourselves up to an intimate sympathy of a deep and fascinating
character.
In order to love, one must be blind, surrender oneself absolutely, see
nothing, reason on nothing, understand nothing. One must adorn the
weakness as well as the beauty of the beloved object, renounce all
judgment, all reflection, all perspicacity.
I am incapable of such blindness, and rebel against a seductiveness not
founded on reason. This is not all. I have such a high and subtle idea of
harmony, that nothing can ever realize my ideal. But you will call me a
madman. Listen to me. A woman, in my opinion, may have an exquisite
soul and a charming body, without that body and that soul being in perfect
accord with one another. I mean that persons who have noses made in a
certain shape are not to be expected to think in a certain fashion. The fat
have no right to make use of the same words and phrases as the thin. You,
who have blue eyes, madame, cannot look at life, and judge of things and
events as if you had black eyes. The shades of your eyes should correspond,
by a sort of fatality, with the shades of your thought. In perceiving these
things I have the scent of a bloodhound. Laugh if you like, but it is so.
And yet I imagined that I was in love for an hour, for a day. I had foolishly
yielded to the influence of surrounding circumstances. I allowed myself to

be beguiled by the mirage of an aurora. Would you like me to relate for you
this short history?

I met, one evening, a pretty enthusiastic woman who wanted, for the
purpose of humoring a poetic fancy, to spend a night with me in a boat on a
river. I would have preferred a room and a bed; however, I consented to
take instead the river and the boat.
It was in the month of June. My fair companion chose a moonlight night in
order to excite her imagination all the better.
We had dined at a riverside inn, and then we set out in the boat about ten
o'clock. I thought it a rather foolish kind of adventure; but as my companion
pleased me I did not bother myself too much about this. I sat down on the
seat facing her; I seized the oars, and off we started.
I could not deny that the scene was picturesque. We glided past a wooded
isle full of nightingales, and the current carried us rapidly over the river
covered with silvery ripples. The toads uttered their shrill, monotonous cry;
the frogs croaked in the grass by the river's bank, and the lapping of the
water as it flowed on made around us a kind of confused murmur almost
imperceptible, disquieting, and gave us a vague sensation of mysterious
fear.
The sweet charm of warm nights and of streams glittering in the moonlight
penetrated us. It seemed bliss to live and to float thus, and to dream and to
feel by one's side a young woman sympathetic and beautiful.
I was somewhat affected, somewhat agitated, somewhat intoxicated by the
pale brightness of the night and the consciousness of my proximity to a
lovely woman.
"Come and sit beside me," she said.
I obeyed.
She went on:

"Recite some verses for me."
This appeared to be rather too much. I declined; she persisted. She certainly
wanted to have the utmost pleasure, the whole orchestra of sentiment, from
the moon to the rhymes of poets. In the end, I had to yield, and, as if in
mockery, I recited for her a charming little poem by Louis Bouilbet, of
which the following are a few strophes:

"I hate the poet who with tearful eye
Murmurs some name while gazing tow'rds a star,
Who sees no magic in the earth or sky,
Unless Lizette or Ninon be not far.

"The bard who in all Nature nothing sees
Divine, unless a petticoat he ties
Amorously to the branches of the trees
Or nightcap to the grass, is scarcely wise.

"He has not heard the eternal's thunder tone,
The voice of Nature in her various moods,
Who cannot tread the dim ravines alone,
And of no woman dream 'mid whispering woods."

I expected some reproaches. Nothing of the sort. She murmured:
"How true it is!"
I remained stupefied. Had she understood?
Our boat was gradually drawing nearer to the bank, and got entangled under
a willow which impeded its progress. I drew my arm around my
companion's waist, and very gently moved my lips towards her neck. But
she repulsed me with an abrupt, angry movement:
"Have done, pray! You are rude!"
I tried to draw her towards me. She resisted, caught hold of the tree, and
was near flinging us both into the water. I deemed it the prudent course to
cease my importunities.

She said:
"I would rather have you capsized. I feel so happy. I want to dream—that is
so nice." Then, in a slightly malicious tone, she added:
"Have you, then, already forgotten the verses you recited for me just now?"
She was right. I became silent.
She went on:
"Come! row!"
And I plied the oars once more.
I began to find the night long and to see the absurdity of my conduct.
My companion said to me:
"Will you make me a promise?"
"Yes. What is it?"
"To remain quiet, well-behaved, and discreet, if I permit you—"
"What? Say what you mean!"
"Here is what I mean! I want to lie down on my back at the bottom of the
boat with you by my side. But I forbid you to touch me, to embrace me—in
short to—to caress me."
I promised. She warned me:
"If you move, I'll capsize the boat."
And then we lay down side by side, our eyes turned towards the sky, while
the boat glided slowly through the water. We were rocked by the gentle
movements of the shallop. The light sounds of the night came to us more
distinctly in the bottom of the boat, sometimes causing us to start. And I felt
springing up within me a strange, poignant emotion, an infinite tenderness,
something like an irresistible impulse to open my arms in order to embrace,
to open my heart in order to love, to give myself, to give my thoughts, my
body, my life, my entire being to someone.

My companion murmured, like one in a dream:
"Where are we? Where are we going? It seems to me that I am quitting the
earth. How sweet it is! Ah! if you loved me—a little!!!"
My heart began to throb. I had no answer to give. It seemed to me that I
loved her. I had no longer any violent desire. I felt happy there by her side,
and that was enough for me.
And thus we remained for a long, long time without stirring. We caught
each other's hands; some delightful force rendered us motionless, an
unknown force stronger than ourselves, an alliance, chaste, intimate,
absolute of our persons lying there side by side which belonged to each
other without touching. What was this? How do I know. Love, perhaps?
Little by little, the dawn appeared. It was three o'clock in the morning.
Slowly, a great brightness spread over the sky. The boat knocked against
something. I rose up. We had come close to a tiny islet.
But I remained ravished, in a state of ecstasy. In front of us stretched the
shining firmament, red, rosy, violet, spotted with fiery clouds resembling
golden vapors. The river was glowing with purple, and three houses on one
side of it seemed to be burning.
I bent towards my companion. I was going to say: "Oh! look!" But I held
my tongue, quite dazed, and I could no longer see anything except her. She,
too, was rosy, with the rosy flesh tints with which must have mingled a little
the hue of the sky. Her tresses were rosy; her eyes were rosy; her teeth were
rosy; here dress, her laces, her smile, all were rosy. And in truth I believed,
so overpowering was the illusion, that the aurora was there before me.
She rose softly to her feet, holding out her lips to me; and I moved towards
her, trembling, delirious, feeling indeed that I was going to kiss Heaven, to
kiss happiness, to kiss a dream which had become a woman, to kiss the
ideal which had descended into human flesh.
She said to me: "You have a caterpillar in your hair." And suddenly I felt
myself becoming as sad as if I had lost all hope in life.

That is all, madame. It is puerile, silly, stupid. But I am sure that since that
day it would be impossible for me to love. And yet—who can tell?
[The young man upon whom this letter was found was yesterday taken out
of the Seine between Bougival and Marly. An obliging bargeman, who had
searched the pockets in order to ascertain the name of the deceased, brought
this paper to the author.]

MOTHER AND SON!!!
e were chatting in the smoking-room after a dinner at which only
men were present. We talked about unexpected legacies, strange
inheritances. Then M. le Brument, who was sometimes called "the
illustrious master" and at other times the "illustrious advocate," came and
stood with his back to the fire.
"I have," he said, "just now to search for an heir who disappeared under
peculiarly terrible circumstances. It is one of those simple and ferocious
dramas of ordinary life, a thing which possibly happens every day, and
which is nevertheless one of the most dreadful things I know. Here are the
facts:
"Nearly six months ago I got a message to come to the side of a dying
woman. She said to me:
"'Monsieur, I want to entrust to you the most delicate, the most difficult, and
the most wearisome mission that can be conceived. Be good enough to take
cognizance of my will, which is there on the table. A sum of five thousand
francs is left to you as a fee if you do not succeed, and of a hundred
thousand francs if you do succeed. I want to have my son found after my
death.'
"She asked me to assist her to sit up in the bed, in order that she might be
able to speak with greater ease, for her voice, broken and gasping, was
gurgling in her throat.
"I saw that I was in the house of a very rich person. The luxurious
apartment, with a certain simplicity in its luxury, was upholstered with
materials solid as the walls, and their soft surface imparted a caressing
sensation, so that every word uttered seemed to penetrate their silent depths
and to disappear and die there.
"The dying woman went on:

"'You are the first to hear my horrible story. I will try to have strength
enough to go on to the end of it. You must know everything so that you,
whom I know to be a kind-hearted man as well as a man of the world,
should have a sincere desire to aid me with all your power.
"'Listen to me.
"'Before my marriage, I loved a young man, whose suit was rejected by my
family because he was not rich enough. Not long afterwards, I married a
man of great wealth. I married him through ignorance, through obedience,
through indifference, as young girls do marry.
"'I had a child, a boy. My husband died in the course of a few years.
"'He whom I had loved had got married, in his turn. When he saw that I was
a widow, he was crushed by horrible grief at knowing he was not free. He
came to see me; he wept and sobbed so bitterly before my eyes that it was
enough to break my heart. He at first came to see me as a friend. Perhaps I
ought not to have seen him. What would you have? I was alone, so sad, so
solitary, so hopeless! And I loved him still. What sufferings we women have
sometimes to endure!
"'I had only him in the world, my parents also being dead. He came
frequently; he spent whole evenings with me. I should not have let him
come so often, seeing that he was married. But I had not enough of will-
power to prevent him from coming.
"'How am I to tell you what next happened?... He became my lover. How
did this come about? Can I explain it? Can anyone explain such things? Do
you think it could be otherwise when two human beings are drawn towards
each other by the irresistible force of a passion by which each of them is
possessed? Do you believe, monsieur, that it is always in our power to
resist, that we can keep up the struggle for ever, and refuse to yield to the
prayers, the supplications, the tears, the frenzied words, the appeals on
bended knees, the transports of passion, with which we are pursued by the
man we adore, whom we want to gratify even in his slightest wishes, whom
we desire to crown with every possible happiness, and whom, if we are to
be guided by a worldly code of honor, we must drive to despair. What

strength would it not require? What a renunciation of happiness? what self-
denial? and even what virtuous selfishness?
"'In short, monsieur, I was his mistress; and I was happy. I became—and
this was my greatest weakness and my greatest piece of cowardice—I
became his wife's friend.
"'We brought up my son together; we made a man of him, a thorough man,
intelligent, full of sense and resolution, of large and generous ideas. The
boy reached the age of seventeen.
"'He, the young man, was fond of my—my lover, almost as fond of him as I
was myself, for he had been equally cherished and cared for by both of us.
He used to call him his "dear friend," and respected him immensely, having
never received from him anything but wise counsels, and a good example of
rectitude, honor, and probity. He looked upon him as an old, loyal and
devoted comrade of his mother, as a sort of moral father, tutor, protector—
how am I to describe it?
"'Perhaps the reason why he never asked any questions was that he had
been accustomed from his earliest years to see this man in the house, by his
side, and by my side, always concerned about us both.
"'One evening the three of us were to dine together (these were my principal
festive occasions), and I waited for the two of them, asking myself which of
them would be the first to arrive. The door opened; it was my old friend. I
went towards him, with outstretched arms; and he drew his lips towards
mine in a long, delicious kiss.
"'All of a sudden, a sound, a rustling which was barely audible, that
mysterious sensation which indicates the presence of another person, made
us start and turn round with a quick movement. Jean, my son, stood there,
livid, staring at us.
"'There was a moment of atrocious confusion. I drew back, holding out my
hand towards my son as if in supplication; but I could see him no longer. He
had gone.
"'We remained facing each other—my lover and I—crushed, unable to utter
a word. I sank down on an armchair, and I felt a desire, a vague, powerful

desire to fly, to go out into the night, and to disappear for ever. Then,
convulsive sobs rose up in my throat, and I wept, shaken with spasms, with
my heart torn asunder, all my nerves writhing with the horrible sensation of
an irremediable misfortune, and with that dreadful sense of shame which, in
such moments as this, falls on a mother's heart.
"'He looked at me in a scared fashion, not venturing to approach me or to
speak to me or to touch me, for fear of the boy's return. At last he said:
"'"I am going to follow him—to talk to him—to explain matters to him. In
short, I must see him and let him know—"
"'And he hurried away.
"'I waited—I waited in a distracted frame of mind, trembling at the least
sound, convulsed with terror, and filled with some unutterably strange and
intolerable emotion by every slight crackling of the fire in the grate.
"'I waited for an hour, for two hours, feeling my heart swell with a dread I
had never before experienced, such an anguish that I would not wish the
greatest of criminals to have ten minutes of such misery. Where was my
son? What was he doing?
"'About midnight, a messenger brought me a note from my lover. I still
know its contents by heart:
"'"Has your son returned? I did not find him. I am down here. I do not want
to go up at this hour."
"'I wrote in pencil on the same slip of paper:
"'"Jean has not returned. You must go and find him."
"'And I remained all night in the armchair, waiting for him.
"'I felt as if I were going mad. I longed to have to run wildly about, to roll
myself on the ground. And yet I did not even stir, but kept waiting hour
after hour. What was going to happen? I tried to imagine, to guess. But I
could form no conception, in spite of my efforts, in spite of the tortures of
my soul!

"'And now my apprehension was lest they might meet. What would they do
in that case? What would my son do? My mind was lacerated by fearful
doubts, by terrible suppositions.
"'You understand what I mean, do you not, monsieur?
"'My chambermaid, who knew nothing, who understood nothing, was
coming in every moment, believing, naturally, that I had lost my reason. I
sent her away with a word or a movement of the hand. She went for the
doctor, who found me in the throes of a nervous fit.
"'I was put to bed. I got an attack of brain-fever.
"'When I regained consciousness, after a long illness, I saw beside my bed
my—lover—alone.
"'I exclaimed:
"'"My son? Where is my son?"
"'He replied:
"'"No, no, I assure you every effort has been made by me to find him, but I
have failed!"
"'Then, becoming suddenly exasperated and even indignant—for women
are subject to such outbursts of unaccountable and unreasoning anger—I
said:
"'"I forbid you to come near me or to see me again unless you find him. Go
away!"
"'He did go away.
"'I have never seen one or the other of them since, monsieur, and thus I have
lived for the last twenty years.
"'Can you imagine what all this meant to me? Can you understand this
monstrous punishment, this slow perpetual laceration of a mother's heart,
this abominable, endless waiting? Endless, did I say? No: it is about to end,
for I am dying. I am dying without ever again seeing either of them—either
one or the other!

"'He—the man I loved—has written to me every day for the last twenty
years; and I—I have never consented to see him, even for one second; for I
had a strange feeling that, if he came back here, it would be at that very
moment my son would again make his appearance! Ah! my son! my son! Is
he dead? Is he living? Where is he hiding? Over there, perhaps, at the other
side of the ocean, in some country so far away that even its very name is
unknown to me! Does he ever think of me? Ah! if he only knew! How cruel
children are! Did he understand to what frightful suffering he condemned
me, into what depths of despair, into what tortures, he cast me while I was
still in the prime of life, leaving me to suffer like this even to this moment,
when I am going to die—me, his mother, who loved him with all the
violence of a mother's love! Oh! isn't it cruel, cruel?
"'You will tell him all this, monsieur—will you not? You will repeat for him
my last words:
"'My child, my dear, dear child, be less harsh towards poor women! Life is
already brutal and savage enough in its dealings with them. My dear son,
think of what the existence of your poor mother has been ever since the day
when you left her. My dear child, forgive her, and love her, now that she is
dead, for she has had to endure the most frightful penance ever inflicted on
a woman.'
"She gasped for breath, shuddering, as if she had addressed the last words
to her son and as if he stood by her bedside.
"Then she added:
"'You will tell him also, monsieur, that I never again saw—the other.'
"Once more she ceased speaking, then, in a broken voice she said:
"'Leave me now, I beg of you. I want to die all alone, since they are not with
me.'"
Maitre Le Brument added:
"And I left the house, messieurs, crying like a fool, so vehemently, indeed,
that my coachman turned round to stare at me.

"And to think that, every day, heaps of dramas like this are being enacted all
around us!
"I have not found the son—that son—well, say what you like about him,
but I call him that criminal son!"

THE SPASM
he hotel-guests slowly entered the dining-room, and sat down in
their places. The waiters began to attend on them in a leisurely
fashion so as to enable those who were late to arrive, and so as to
avoid bringing back the dishes; and the old bathers, the habitués, those
whose season was advancing, gazed with interest towards the door,
whenever it opened, with a desire to see new faces appearing.
This is the principal distraction of health-resorts. People look forward to the
dinner-hour in order to inspect each day's new arrivals, to find out who they
are, what they do, and what they think. A vague longing springs up in the
mind, a longing for agreeable meetings, for pleasant acquaintances, perhaps
for love-adventures. In this life of elbowings, not only those with whom we
have come into daily contact, but strangers, assume an extreme importance.
Curiosity is aroused, sympathy is ready to exhibit itself, and sociability is
the order of the day.
We cherish antipathies for a week and friendships for a month; we see other
people with different eyes when we view them through the medium of the
acquaintanceship that is brought about at health-resorts. We discover in men
suddenly, after an hour's chat, in the evening after dinner, under the trees in
the park where the generous spring bubbles up, a high intelligence and
astonishing merits, and a month afterwards, we have completely forgotten
these new friends, so fascinating when we first met them.
There also are formed lasting and serious ties more quickly than anywhere
else. People see each other every day; they become acquainted very
quickly; and with the affection thus originated is mingled something of the
sweetness and self-abandonment of long-standing intimacies. We cherish in
after years the dear and tender memories of those first hours of friendship,
the memory of those first conversations through which we have been able
to unveil a soul, of those first glances which interrogate and respond to the
questions and secret thoughts which the mouth has not as yet uttered, the

memory of that first cordial confidence, the memory of that delightful
sensation of opening our hearts to those who are willing to open theirs to us.
And the melancholy of health-resorts, the monotony of days that are all
alike, help from hour to hour in this rapid development of affection.

Well, this evening, as on every other evening, we awaited the appearance of
strange faces.
Only two appeared, but very remarkable-looking, a man and a woman—
father and daughter. They immediately produced the same effect on my
mind as some of Edgar Poe's characters; and yet there was about them a
charm, the charm associated with misfortune. I looked upon them as the
victims of fatality. The man was very tall and thin, rather stooping, with hair
perfectly white, too white for his comparatively youthful physiognomy; and
there was in his bearing, and in his person that austerity peculiar to
Protestants. The daughter, who was probably twenty-four or twenty-five,
was small in stature, and was also very thin, very pale, and she had the air
of one who was worn out with utter lassitude. We meet people like this from
time to time who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of daily life, too
weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every day. This young girl
was very pretty, with the diaphanous beauty of a phantom; and she ate with
extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving her arms.
It must have been she assuredly who had come to take the waters.
They found themselves facing me at the opposite side of the table; and I at
once noticed that the father had a very singular nervous spasm.
Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand made a hook-like
movement, a sort of irregular zigzig, before it succeeded in touching what it
was in search of; and, after a little while, this action was so wearisome to
me that I turned aside my head in order not to see it.
I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her left
hand.

After dinner, I went for a stroll in the park of the thermal establishment.
This led towards the little Auvergnese station of Chatel Guyot, hidden in a
gorge at the foot of the high mountain, of that mountain from which flow so
many boiling springs, arising from the deep bed of extinct volcanoes. Over
there, above us, the domes, which had once been craters, raised their
mutilated heads on the summit of the long chain. For Chatel Guyot is
situated at the spot where the region of domes begins.
Beyond it, stretches out the region of peaks, and further on again the region
of precipices.
The "Puy de Dome" is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is the
loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these mountain-
heights.
This evening it was very warm. I walked up and down a shady path, on the
side of the mountain overlooking the park, listening to the opening strains
of the Casino band.
And I saw the father and the daughter advancing slowly in my direction. I
saluted them, as we are accustomed to salute our hotel-companions at
health resorts; and the man, coming to a sudden halt, said to me,
"Could you not, monsieur, point out to us a short walk, nice and easy, if that
is possible? and excuse my intrusion on you."
I offered to show them the way towards the valley through which the little
river flowed, a deep valley forming a gorge between two tall craggy,
wooded slopes.
They gladly accepted my offer.
And we talked naturally about the virtues of the waters.
"Oh!" he said, "My daughter has a strange malady, the seat of which is
unknown. She suffers from incomprehensible nervous disorders. At one
time, the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time,
they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another time they
declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day, her condition is attributed to
the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator of the body, that

Protean source of diseases with a thousand forms and a thousand
susceptibilities to attack. This is why we have come here. For my part, I am
rather inclined to think it is the nerves. In any case it is very sad."
Immediately the remembrance of the violent spasmodic movement of his
hand came back to my mind, and I asked him.
"But is this not the result of heredity? Are not your own nerves somewhat
affected?"
He replied calmly:
"Mine? Oh! no—my nerves have always been very steady."
Then suddenly, after a pause, he went on:
"Ah! You were alluding to the spasm in my hand every time I want to reach
for anything? This arises from a terrible experience which I had. Just
imagine! this daughter of mine was actually buried alive?"
I could only give utterance to the word "Ah!" so great were my
astonishment and emotion.

He continued:
"Here is the story. It is simple. Juliette had been subject for some time to
serious attacks of the heart. We believed that she had disease of that organ,
and we were prepared for the worst.
"One day she was carried into the house cold, lifeless, dead. She had fallen
down unconscious in the garden. The doctor certified that life was extinct. I
watched by her side for a day and two nights. I laid her with my own hands
in the coffin, which I accompanied to the cemetery, where she was
deposited in the family vault. It is situated in the very heart of Lorraine.
"I wished to have her interred with her jewels, bracelets, necklaces, rings,
all presents which she had got from me, and with her first ball-dress on.

"You may easily imagine the state of mind in which I was when I returned
home. She was the only one I had, for my wife has been dead for many
years. I found my way to my own apartment in a half distracted condition,
utterly exhausted, and I sank into my easy-chair, without the capacity to
think or the strength to move. I was nothing better now than a suffering,
vibrating machine, a human being who had, as it were, been flayed alive;
my soul was like a living wound.
"My old valet, Prosper, who had assisted me in placing Juliette in her
coffin, and preparing her for her last sleep, entered the room noiselessly,
and asked:
"'Does monsieur want anything?'
"I merely shook my head, by way of answering 'No.'
"He urged, 'Monsieur is wrong. He will bring some illness on himself.
Would monsieur like me to put him to bed?'
"I answered, 'No! let me alone!'
"And he left the room.
"I know not how many hours slipped away. Oh! what a night, what a night!
It was cold. My fire had died out in the huge grate; and the wind, the winter
wind, an icy wind, a hurricane accompanied by frost and snow, kept
blowing against the window with a sinister and regular noise.
"How many hours slipped away? There I was without sleeping, powerless,
crushed, my eyes wide open, my legs stretched out, my body limp,
inanimate, and my mind torpid with despair. Suddenly, the great bell of the
entrance gate, the great bell of the vestibule, rang out.
"I got such a shock that my chair cracked under me. The solemn, ponderous
sound vibrated through the empty chateau as if through a vault. I turned
round to see what the hour was by the clock. It was just two in the morning.
Who could be coming at such an hour!
"And abruptly the bell again rang twice. The servants, without doubt, were
afraid to get up. I took a wax-candle and descended the stairs. I was on the
point of asking, 'Who is there?'

"Then I felt ashamed of my weakness, and I slowly opened the huge door.
My heart was throbbing wildly; I was frightened; I hurriedly drew back the
door, and in the darkness I distinguished a white figure, standing erect,
something that resembled an apparition.
"I recoiled, petrified with horror, faltering:
"'Who—who—who are you?'
"A voice replied:
"'It is I, father.'
"It was my daughter.
"I really thought I must be mad, and I retreated backwards before this
advancing specter. I kept moving away, making a sign with my hand, as if
to drive the phantom away, that gesture which you have noticed—that
gesture of which since then I have never got rid.
"'Do not be afraid, papa; I was not dead. Somebody tried to steal my rings,
and cut one of my fingers, the blood began to flow, and this reanimated me.'
"And, in fact, I could see that her hand was covered with blood.
"I fell on my knees, choking with sobs and with a rattling in my throat.
"Then, when I had somewhat collected my thoughts, though I was still so
much dismayed that I scarcely realized the gruesome good-fortune that had
fallen to my lot, I made her go up to my room, and sit down in my easy-
chair; then I ran excitedly for Prosper to get him to light up the fire again
and to get her some wine and summon the rest of the servants to her
assistance.
"The man entered, stared at my daughter, opened his mouth with a gasp of
alarm and stupefaction, and then fell back insensible.
"It was he who had opened the vault, and who had mutilated, and then
abandoned, my daughter, for he could not efface the traces of the theft. He
had not even taken the trouble to put back the coffin into its place, feeling

sure, besides, that he would not be suspected by me, as I completely trusted
him.
"You see, Monsieur, that we are very unhappy people."

He stopped.
The night had fallen, casting its shadows over the desolate, mournful vale,
and a sort of mysterious fear possessed me at finding myself by the side of
those strange beings, of this young girl who had come back from the tomb
and this father with his uncanny spasm.
I found it impossible to make any comment on this dreadful story. I only
murmured:
"What a horrible thing!"
Then, after a minute's silence, I added:
"Suppose we go back. I think it is getting cold."
And we made our way back to the hotel.

A DUEL
he war was over. The Germans occupied France. The country was
panting like a wrestler lying under the knee of his successful
opponent.
The first trains from Paris, after the city's long agony of famine and despair,
were making their way to the new frontiers, slowly passing through the
country districts and the villages. The passengers gazed through the
windows at the ravaged fields and burnt hamlets. Prussian soldiers, in their
black helmets with brass spikes, were smoking their pipes on horseback or
sitting on chairs in front of the houses which were still left standing. Others
were working or talking just as if they were members of the families. As
you passed through the different towns you saw entire regiments drilling in
the squares, and, in spite of the rumble of the carriage-wheels, you could
every moment hear the hoarse words of command.
M. Dubuis, who during the entire siege, had served as one of the National
Guard in Paris, was going to join his wife and daughter, whom he had
prudently sent away to Switzerland before the invasion.
Famine and hardship had not diminished his big paunch so characteristic of
the rich, peace-loving merchant. He had gone through the terrible events of
the past year with sorrowful resignation and bitter complaints at the
savagery of men. Now that he was journeying to the frontier at the close of
the war, he saw the Prussians for the first time, although he had done his
duty at the ramparts, and staunchly mounted guard on cold nights.
He stared with mingled fear and anger at those bearded, armed men,
installed all over French soil as if in their own homes, and he felt in his soul
a kind of fever of impotent patriotism even while he yielded to that other
instinct of discretion and self-preservation which never leaves us. In the
same compartment, two Englishmen, who had come to the country as sight-
seers, were gazing around with looks of stolid curiosity. They were both
also stout, and kept chattering in their own language, sometimes referring to

their guide-book, and reading in loud tones the names of the places
indicated.
Suddenly, the train stopped at a little village station, and a Prussian officer
jumped up with a great clatter of his saber on the double footboard of the
railway-carriage. He was tall, wore a tight-fitting uniform, and his face had
a very shaggy aspect. His red hair seemed to be on fire, and his long
moustache, of a paler color, was stuck out on both sides of his face, which it
seemed to cut in two.
The Englishmen at once began staring at him with smiles of newly-
awakened interest, while M. Dubuis made a show of reading a newspaper.
He sat crouched in a corner, like a thief in the presence of a gendarme.
The train started again. The Englishmen went on chatting, and looking out
for the exact scene of different battles, and, all of a sudden, as one of them
stretched out his arm towards the horizon to indicate a village, the Prussian
officer remarked in French, extending his long legs and lolling backwards:
"We killed a dozen Frenchmen in that village, and took more than a
hundred prisoners."
The Englishman, quite interested, immediately asked:
"Ha! and what is the name of this village?"
The Prussian replied:
"Pharsbourg."
He added: "We caught these French blackguards by the ears."
And he glanced towards M. Dubuis, laughing into his moustache in an
insulting fashion.
The train rolled on, always passing through hamlets occupied by the
victorious army. German soldiers could be seen along the roads, on the
edges of fields, standing in front of gates, or chatting outside cafés. They
covered the soil like African locusts.
The officer said, with a wave of his hand:

"If I were in command, I'd take Paris, burn everything, kill everybody. No
more France!"
The Englishman, through politeness, replied simply:
"Ah! yes."
He went on:
"In twenty years, all Europe, all of it, will belong to us. Prussia is more than
a match for all of them."
The Englishmen, getting uneasy, said nothing in answer to this. Their faces,
which had become impassive, seemed made of wax behind their long
whiskers. Then, the Prussian officer began to laugh. And still, lolling back,
he began to sneer. He sneered at the downfall of France, insulted the
prostrate enemy; he sneered at Austria which had been recently conquered;
he sneered at the furious but fruitless defense of the departments; he
sneered at the Garde Mobile and at the useless artillery. He announced that
Bismarck was going to build a city of iron with the captured cannon. And
suddenly he pushed his boots against the thigh of M. Dubuis, who turned
his eyes round, reddening to the roots of his hair.
The Englishmen seemed to have assumed an air of complete indifference,
as if they had found themselves all at once shut up in their own island, far
from the din of the world.
The officer took out his pipe, and looking fixedly at the Frenchman, said:
"You haven't any tobacco—have you?"
M. Dubuis replied:
"No, monsieur."
The German said:
"You might go and buy some for me when the train stops next."
And he began laughing afresh, as he added:
"I'll let you have the price of a drink."

The train whistled, and slackened its pace. They had reached the station
which had been burnt down; and here there was a regular stop.
The German opened the carriage-door, and, catching M. Dubuis by the arm,
said:
"Go and do what I told you—quick, quick!"
A Prussian detachment occupied the station. Other soldiers were looking on
from behind wooden gratings. The engine was already getting up steam in
order to start off again. Then M. Dubuis hurriedly jumped on the platform,
and, in spite of the warnings of the station master, dashed into the adjoining
compartment.

He was alone! He tore open his waistcoat, so rapidly did his heart beat, and,
panting for breath, he wiped the perspiration off his forehead.
The train drew up at another station. And suddenly the officer appeared at
the carriage-door, and jumped in, followed close behind by the two
Englishmen, who were impelled by curiosity. The German sat facing the
Frenchman, and, laughing still, said:
"You did not want to do what I asked you?"
M. Dubuis replied:
"No, monsieur."
The train had just left the station.
The officer said:
"I'll cut off your moustache to fill my pipe with."
And he put out his hand towards the Frenchman's face.
The Englishmen kept staring in the same impassive fashion with fixed
glances.

Already the German had caught hold of the moustache and was tugging at
it, when M. Dubuis, with a back stroke of his hand, threw back the officer's
arm, and, seizing him by the collar, flung him down on the seat. Then,
excited to a pitch of fury, with his temples swollen and his eyes glaring, he
kept throttling the officer with one hand, while with the other clenched, he
began to strike him violent blows in the face. The Prussian struggled, tried
to draw his saber, and to get a grip, while lying back, of his adversary. But
M. Dubuis crushed him with the enormous weight of his stomach, and kept
hitting him without taking breath or knowing where his blows fell. Blood
flowed down the face of the German, who, choking and with a rattling in
his throat, spat forth his broken teeth, and vainly strove to shake off this
infuriated man who was killing him.
The Englishmen had got on their feet and came closer in order to see better.
They remained standing, full of mirth and curiosity, ready to bet for or
against each of the combatants.
And suddenly M. Dubuis, exhausted by his violent efforts, went and
resumed his seat without uttering a word.
The Prussian did not attack him, for the savage assault had scared and
terrified the officer. When he was able to breathe freely, he said:
"Unless you give me satisfaction with pistols, I will kill you."
M. Dubuis replied:
"Whenever you like. I'm quite ready."
The German said:
"Here is the town of Strasbourg. I'll get two officers to be my seconds, and
there will be time before the train leaves the station."
M. Dubuis, who was puffing as much as the engine, said to the Englishmen:
"Will you be my seconds?" They both answered together:
"Ah! yes."
And the train stopped.

In a minute, the Prussian had found two comrades who carried pistols, and
they made their way towards the ramparts.
The Englishmen were continually looking at their watches, shuffling their
feet, and hurrying on with the preparations, uneasy lest they should be too
late for the train.
M. Dubuis had never fired a pistol in his life.
They made him stand twenty paces away from his enemy. He was asked:
"Are you ready?"
While he was answering: "Yes, monsieur," he noticed that one of the
Englishmen had opened his umbrella in order to keep off the rays of the
sun.
A voice gave the word of command:
"Fire!"
M. Dubuis fired at random without minding what he was doing, and he was
amazed to see the Prussian staggering in front of him, lifting up his arms,
and immediately afterwards, falling straight on his face. He had killed the
officer.
One of the Englishmen ejaculated: "Ah!" quivering with delight, satisfied
curiosity, and joyous impatience. The other, who still kept the watch in his
hand, seized M. Dubuis's arm, and hurried him in double-quick time
towards the station, his fellow-countryman counting their steps, with his
arms pressed close to his sides—"One! two! one! two!"
And all three marching abreast they rapidly made their way to the station
like three grotesque figures in a comic newspaper.
The train was on the point of starting. They sprang into their carriage. Then,
the Englishmen, taking off their traveling-caps, waved them three times
over their heads, exclaiming:
"Hip! hip! hip! hurrah!"

Then gravely, one after the other, they stretched out the right hand to M.
Dubuis, and they went back and sat in their own corner.

THE LOVE OF LONG AGO
he old-fashioned chateau was built on a wooded height. Tall trees
surrounded it with dark greenery; and the vast park extended its
vistas here over a deep forest and there over an open plain. Some
little distance from the front of the mansion stood a huge stone basin in
which marble nymphs were bathing. Other basins arranged in order
succeeded each other down as far as the foot of the slope, and a hidden
fountain sent cascades dancing from one to the other.
From the manor-house which preserved the grace of a superannuated
coquette down to the grottos encrusted with shell-work, where slumbered
the loves of a bygone age, everything in this antique demesne had retained
the physiognomy of former days. Everything seemed to speak still of
ancient customs, of the manners of long ago, of faded gallantries, and of the
elegant trivialities so dear to our grandmothers.
In a parlor in the style of Louis XV, whose walls were covered with
shepherds paying court to shepherdesses, beautiful ladies in hoop-
petticoats, and gallant gentlemen in wigs, a very old woman who seemed
dead as soon as she ceased to move was almost lying down in a large easy-
chair, while her thin, mummy-like hands hung down, one at each side of
her.
Her eyes were gazing languidly towards the distant horizon as if they
sought to follow through the park visions of her youth. Through the open
window every now and then came a breath of air laden with the scent of
grass and the perfume of flowers. It made her white locks flutter around her
wrinkled forehead and old memories, through her brain.
Beside her on a tapestried stool, a young girl with long, fair hair hanging in
plaits over her neck, was embroidering an altar-cloth. There was a pensive
expression in her eyes, and it was easy to see that, while her agile fingers
worked, her brain was busy with thoughts.
But the old lady suddenly turned round her head.

"Berthe," she said, "read something out of the newspapers for me, so that I
may still know sometimes what is happening in the world."
The young girl took up a newspaper, and cast a rapid glance over it.
"There is a great deal about politics, grandmamma; am I to pass it by?"
"Yes, yes, darling. Are there no accounts of love affairs? Is gallantry, then,
dead in France, that they no longer talk about abductions or adventures as
they did formerly?"
The girl made a long search through the columns of the newspaper.
"Here is one," she said. "It is entitled: 'A Love-Drama!'"
The old woman smiled through her wrinkles. "Read that for me," she said.
And Berthe commenced. It was a case of vitriol-throwing. A wife, in order
to avenge herself on her husband's mistress, had burned her face and eyes.
She had left the Assize Court acquitted, declared to be innocent, amid the
applause of the crowd.
The grandmother moved about excitedly in her chair, and exclaimed:
"This is horrible—why, it is perfectly horrible! See whether you can find
anything else to read for me, darling."
Berthe again made a search; and further down in the reports of criminal
cases at which her attention was still directed. She read:
"'Gloomy Drama.—A shop girl, no longer young, allowed herself to yield to
the embraces of a young man. Then, to avenge herself on her lover, whose
heart proved fickle, she shot him with a revolver. The unhappy man is
maimed for life. The Jury, consisting of men of moral character, took the
part of the murderess—regarding her as the victim of illicit love, and
honorably acquitted her.'"
This time the old grandmother appeared quite shocked, and, in a trembling
voice, she said.
"Why, you are mad, then, nowadays. You are mad! The good God has given
you love, the only allurement in life. Man has added to this gallantry, the

only distraction of our dull hours, and here are you mixing up with it vitriol
and revolvers, as if one were to put mud into a flagon of Spanish wine."
Berthe did not seem to understand her grandmother's indignation.
"But grandmamma, this woman avenged herself. Remember she was
married, and her husband deceived her."
The grandmother gave a start.
"What ideas have they been filling your head with, you young girls of to-
day?"
Berthe replied:
"But marriage is sacred, grandmamma."
The grandmother's heart, which had its birth in the great age of gallantry,
gave a sudden leap.
"It is love that is sacred," she said, "Listen, child, to an old woman who has
seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience of men and
women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a
family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot
dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that
chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek for metals of the same
kind. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must
combine fortunes, unite similar races, and aim at the common interest,
which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the
world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime
because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law, and love is
an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes
along a crooked path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts—it
was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we
ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the
laws only come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much
love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody
would care to take it just as it is."
Berthe opened her eyes widely in astonishment. She murmured:

"Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once."
The grandmother raised her trembling hands towards Heaven, as if again to
invoke the defunct God of gallantries. She exclaimed indignantly:
"You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the
Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognize society. You have
attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of
existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have written
verses telling you that people have died of love. In my time verses were
written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we liked a
gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh caprice came
into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last lover—unless we
kept both of them."
The old woman smiled with a keen smile, and a gleam of roguery twinkled
in her gray eye, the sprightly, skeptical roguery of those people who did not
believe that they were made of the same clay as the others, and who lived as
masters for whom common beliefs were not made.
The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:
"So then women have no honor?"
The grandmother ceased to smile. If she had kept in her soul some of
Voltaire's irony, she had also a little of Jean-Jaques's glowing philosophy:
"No honor! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even boasted of it?
But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in France, were to live
without a lover, she would have the entire court laughing at her. Those who
wished to live differently had only to enter a convent. And you imagine,
perhaps, that your husbands will love you alone all their lives. As if, indeed,
this could be the case. I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order
that Society should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you
understand? There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how
you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn
like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress."
The young girl caught the old woman's trembling hands in her own.
"Hold your tongue, I beg of you, grandmamma!"

And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed to Heaven to bestow
on her a great passion, one eternal passion alone, in accordance with the
dream of modern poets, while the grandmother, kissing her on the forehead,
quite penetrated still by that charming, healthy logic by which the
philosophers of gallantry sprinkled salt with the life of the eighteenth
century, murmured:
"Take care, my poor darling! If you believe in such follies as this, you will
be very unhappy."