“I joined him as he was going to Mass (it was on Sunday) and gave him a franc, scanning his face anxiously. He began to laugh in an ignoble fashion, took the money, then, again constrained by my eye, he fled, after having blurted out a word, almost inarticulate, which meant to say ‘Thank you,’ without doubt.
“That day passed for me in the same agony as the preceding. Toward evening I sent for the proprietor and, with great caution, precautions, and finesse, I told him that I had become interested in this poor being so abandoned by everybody and so deprived of everything, and that I wished to do something for him.
“The man replied: ‘Oh, don’t worry about him, sir. He wants nothing; you will only make trouble for yourself. I employ him to clean the stable, and it is all that he can do. For that, I feed him and he sleeps with the horses. He needs nothing more. If you have an old pair of trousers, give them to him, but they will be in pieces in a week.’
“I did not insist, but waited to see.
“The fellow returned that evening, horribly drunk, almost setting fire to the house, striking one of the horses a blow with a pickax, and finally went to sleep in the mud out in the rain, thanks to my generosity. They begged me, the next day, not to give him any more money. Liquor made him furious, and when he had two sous in his pocket he drank it. The innkeeper added: ‘To give him money is to kill him.’ This man had absolutely never had any money, save a few centimes thrown to him by travellers, and he knew no other destination for it but the alehouse.
“Then I passed some hours in my room with an open book which I made a pretence of reading, but without accomplishing anything except to look at this brute. My son! my son! I was trying to discover if he was anything like me. By dint of searching I believed I recognized some similar lines in the brow and about the nose. And I was immediately convinced of a resemblance which only different clothing and the hideous mane of the man disguised.
“I could not stay there very long without being suspected, and I set out with breaking heart, after having left with the innkeeper some money to ease the existence of his stable-boy.
“For six years I have lived with this thought, this horrible uncertainty, this abominable doubt, and each year an irresistible force drags me back to Pont-Labbé. Each year I condemn myself to the torture of seeing this brute wallow in his filth, imagining that he resembles me, and of seeking, always in vain, to be helpful to him. And each year I come back more undecided, more tortured, more anxious.
“I have tried to have him educated, but he is an incurable idiot. I have tried to render life less painful to him, but he is an incurable drunkard and uses all the money that is given him for drink. And he knows very well how to sell his new clothes to get cognac.
“I have tried to arouse pity in his employer for him, that he might treat him more gently, always offering him money. The innkeeper, astonished, finally remarked very wisely: ‘Everything you do for him, sir, will only ruin him. He must be kept like a prisoner. As soon as he has time given him or favours shown, he becomes vicious. If you wish to do good there are plenty of abandoned children. Choose one that will be worth your trouble.’
“What could I say to that?
“And if I should disclose a suspicion of the doubts which torture me, this brute would certainly turn rogue and exploit me, compromise me, ruin me. He would cry out to me: ‘Papa,’ as in my dream.
“And I tell myself that I have killed the mother and ruined this atrophied being, larva of the stable, born and bred on a dunghill, this man who, if he had been brought up as others are, might have been like others.
“And you cannot imagine the strange, confused, intolerable sensation I feel in his presence, as I think that this has come from me, that he belongs to me by that intimate bond which binds father to son, that, thanks to the terrible laws of heredity, he is a part of me in a thousand things, by his blood and his flesh, and that he has the same germs of sickness and the same ferments of passion.
“And I have always an unappeasable and painful desire to see him, and the sight of him makes me suffer horribly; and from my window down there I look at him for hours as he pitchforks and carts away the dung of the beasts, repeating to myself: ‘That is my son!’
“And I feel, sometimes, an intolerable desire to embrace him. But I have never even touched his filthy hand.”
The Academician was silent. And his companion, the politician, murmured: “Yes, indeed; we ought to think a little more about the children who have no father.”
Then a breath of wind came up, and the great tree shook its clusters, and enveloped with a fine, odorous cloud the two old men, who took long draughts of the sweet perfume.
And the senator added: “It is fine to be twenty-five years old, and even to become a father like that.”
Saint-Agnès, .
My Dear Friend,
You asked me to write to you often, and particularly to tell you what I had seen. You also asked me to search through my memories of travel and find some of those short anecdotes which one hears from a peasant met by the way, from
