Felix lifted one stone, examined it carefully, dug into the mortar below.
“Dig up another one!” my mother commanded. “And that one also … another one … all of them … dig them all up! I want to find out. … And Monsieur is not coming!”
In the excitement of her gestures, forgetting that there was a man around, she uncovered herself and revealed her nude body. Kneeling on the blocks, Felix continued digging them up. He took each one out with his brawny hands and shook his head.
“If Madame wants me to tell her. … For the rest, Monsieur is way out in the park, busy sharpening the pickaxe. … And besides, there is nothing to it … the stone blocks are like stone blocks, seemingly of the pavement. That’s all! … Madame may be sure. … Only it might be that that was only in Master Jean’s imagination. … Madame knows that children are like grown-up folks and that they see things! But as to these slabs, they are just slabs, neither more nor less.”
My mother became pale, haggard.
“Shut up!” she ordered, “and get out of here, all of you!”
And without waiting for the execution of her order she carried me out of the room. Her cries, interrupted by the slamming of the door, resounded on the stairway and in the hall.
She never thought, however, poor dear creature that she was, of giving to the bathroom incident a natural explanation. One could have demonstrated to her that what had frightened me so badly might have been a moving reflection of a towel upon the humid surface of the floor, or perhaps the shadow of a leaf projected from outside across the window, which of course she would not have admitted as likely to have taken place. Her spirit, fed on dreams, tormented by lurid exaggerations and instinctively drawn to the mysterious and the fantastic, accepted with dangerous credulity the vaguest explanation and yielded to the most troubling suggestions. She imagined that her caresses, her kisses, her lulling me to sleep communicated to me the germs of her disease, that the nervous fits which almost caused my death, the hallucinations which shone in my eyes with the sombre radiance of madness, were to her a divine warning, and as soon as she conceived that, the last hope died in her heart.
Marie found her mistress half naked, stretched out on the bed.
“My God! My God!” she moaned, “that’s the end of it. … My poor little Jean! … You, too, they will take away from me! … Oh, God, have pity on him! … Could that be possible! … So little, so weak! …”
And while Marie was putting back her clothes which slipped to the ground, trying to quiet her:
“My good Marie,” she stammered, “listen to me. Promise me, yes promise me to do as I tell you. … You have seen it just now, you have seen it, haven’t you? … Well, take Jean, and bring him up because I—you see … he must not. … I’ll kill him. … Here, you’ll stay in this room with him, right near me. … You shall take good care of him and tell me all about him. … I’ll feel his presence there, I’ll hear him. … But you understand, he must not see me. … It is I who make him that way! …”
Marie held me in her arms.
“Madame, there is no sense in that at all,” she said, “and you really deserve a good scolding as a lesson. … Why just look at your little Jean! … He is just like a little quail. Now tell her, tell her, my little Jean, that you are well and brave! … Look, look at him laughing, the little creature. … Put your arms around him, Madame.”
“No, no!” my mother cried out wildly. “I must not. … Later. … Take him away! …”
It was impossible to make her abandon this idea. Marie well understood that if her mistress had any chance at all to come back to normal life, to cure herself of her “black moods,” it was not in being separated from her child. In the sad state in which my mother found herself, she had but one means of recovery and now she rejected it, impelled to do so by some new and unknown fit of madness. All that a little baby brings of joy, uneasiness, activity, anxiety, forgetfulness of self to the heart of a mother was exactly what she needed and yet she said:
“No, no. … I must not. … Later. … Take him away! …”
In her own language, familiar and rude, to which her long devotions entitled her, the old servant maid brought forward all the reasoning and arguments dictated by her common sense and by her simple peasant heart. She even reproached my mother for neglecting her duties, she spoke of her selfishness and declared that a good mother who had any religion at all or even a savage beast wouldn’t act as she did.
“Yes,” she ended, “that is bad! … you have already been so unkind to your husband, poor fellow. Must you now make your child unhappy?”
But mother, always sobbing, could but repeat:
“No, no. … I must not. … Later. … Take him away! …”
What was my childhood? A long torpor. Separated from my mother whom I saw but rarely, avoiding my father whom I did not love at all, living almost in seclusion, a miserable orphan between old Marie and Felix in this grand lugubrious house, the silence and neglect of which weighed down upon me like a night of death—I was bored. Yes, I was that rare and wretched specimen of a child who is bored. Always sad and grave, hardly speaking at all, I had none of the inquisitiveness and mischievousness of my age, one might have said that my intellect had been slumbering forever in the numbness of maternal gestation. I am trying to recall, I am trying to bring to life again my feelings of childhood; verily I believe I had none. I was dragging on, all wasted and stultified, without knowing what to do with my legs, my arms, my eyes, my poor little body which annoyed me like
