Jean-Christophe in Paris. Antoinette

The Jeannins were one of those old French families who, for centuries, remain rooted in the same corner of the provinces, untainted by any foreign admixture. There are more of them in France than one might think, in spite of all the changes that have overtaken society; it takes a very great upheaval to tear them from the soil to which they cling by so many deep bonds---bonds they themselves do not fully know. Reason has little to do with their attachment, and self-interest even less; as for the learned sentimentalism of historical memories, that counts only for a handful of literary people. What binds with an invincible grip is the obscure and powerful feeling, shared by the crudest and the most refined alike, of having been, for centuries, a piece of that earth---of living by its life, breathing its breath, feeling its heart beating against one’s own, like two beings lying in the same bed, side by side---of catching its imperceptible tremors, the thousand nuances of the hours, the seasons, the bright or veiled days, the voice and the silence of things. And it is perhaps not the most beautiful countries, nor those where life is easiest, that take the deepest hold on the heart, but those where the land is simplest, most humble, most close to man, and speaks to him an intimate and familiar tongue.

Such was the little region in the center of France where the Jeannins lived. A flat, damp landscape, a small old drowsy town that gazes at its own bored face in the murky water of a still canal; and around it, monotonous fields, plowed earth, meadows, little streams, great woods, monotonous fields… No scenery, no monument, no memory. Nothing made to attract. Everything made to hold. There is in this torpor and numbness a secret force. The spirit that tastes it for the first time suffers and rebels. But the one who, for generations, has been shaped by it could no longer break free; it has penetrated to the marrow; and this immobility of things, this harmonious tedium, this monotony, carries for him a charm, a sweetness, that he cannot account for, that he disparages, that he loves, that he could never forget.

The Jeannins had always lived there. One could trace the family back to the sixteenth century, in the town and in the surrounding country---for there was, of course, a great-uncle who had devoted his life to drawing up the genealogy of this line of obscure and hardworking ordinary people: peasants, tenant farmers, village craftsmen, then clerks, country notaries, finally settling in the sub-prefecture of the district, where Augustin Jeannin, the father of the present Jeannin, had conducted his affairs very shrewdly as a banker: a capable man, crafty and tenacious as a peasant, yet honest on the whole, without excessive scruple, a hard worker and a great liver, who had made himself regarded and feared throughout the surrounding country by his malicious good nature, his plain speaking, and his fortune. Squat, compact, vigorous, with small quick eyes in a large red face pitted with smallpox, he had been known in his day as a pursuer of skirts, and he had not entirely lost that taste. He loved broad jokes and good meals. You had to see him at table, where his son Antoine held his own with him, along with a few old friends of their stamp: the justice of the peace, the notary, the cathedral archpriest----(old Jeannin was happy to rail against priests, but he also knew how to eat with a priest, when the priest ate well)----solid fellows, all cut from the same Rabelaisian cloth. It was a running fire of enormous jokes, fists pounding the table, howls of laughter. The convulsions of that merriment spread to the servants in the kitchen and the neighbors in the street.

Then old Augustin had come down with pleurisy one very hot summer day when he had taken it into his head to go down to his cellar in his shirtsleeves to bottle his wine. Within twenty-four hours he had departed for the next world, in which he had little belief, having naturally received all the sacraments of the Church---as a good Voltairean provincial bourgeois, who lets himself be seen to at the last moment, so that the women will leave him in peace, and because it matters little to him either way… And then, one never knows…

His son Antoine had succeeded him in the business. He was a short, stout, ruddy, and jovial-looking man, clean-shaven, with mutton-chop whiskers, and a rapid, stumbling way of speaking---who made a great deal of noise and bustled about with small, quick, clipped gestures. He did not have his father’s financial intelligence, but he was a capable enough administrator. All he had to do was quietly continue the enterprises already under way, which were growing day by day simply by virtue of their duration. He enjoyed in the region a reputation for business acumen, though he had little real part in its success. He brought to it only regularity and application. For the rest, he was perfectly honorable, and everywhere inspired a well-deserved esteem. His affable, thoroughly open manner---perhaps a little too familiar for some tastes, a little too expansive, a little common---had won him in his small town and in the surrounding countryside a solid popularity. Without being lavish with his money, he was lavish with his feelings; he was easily moved to tears, and the sight of another’s misery genuinely affected him in a way that never failed to touch the victim of that misery.

Like most men in the small town, politics occupied a large place in his thoughts. He was ardently moderate in his republicanism, intolerant in his liberalism, patriotic, and, after his father’s example, extremely anticlerical. He served on the town council, and one of his pleasures---as with his colleagues---was to play some good trick on the parish priest or the Lenten preacher, who stirred up such enthusiasm among the ladies of the town. One must not forget, in fact, that this anticlericalism of the French small town is always, more or less, an episode in the war between spouses---a covert form of that muffled, bitter struggle between husbands and wives that recurs in almost every household.

Antoine Jeannin also had literary pretensions. Like the provincials of his generation, he had been nourished on Latin classics, of which he knew several pages by heart, along with a great many proverbs, La Fontaine, Boileau---the Boileau of the Art Poétique, and above all of the Lutrin---the author of la Pucelle, and the poetæ minores of the eighteenth-century French tradition, in whose taste he endeavored to rhyme a few pieces of verse. He was not the only man in his circle with this mania, and it added to his reputation. People repeated his verses---facetious poems, quatrains, bouts-rimés, acrostics, epigrams, and songs, sometimes rather risqué---that were not without a certain earthy wit. The mysteries of digestion were not overlooked: the Muse of the Loire country willingly lifts her trumpet in the manner of Dante’s famous devil:

« … Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta ».

This robust, jovial, and active little man had married a woman of an entirely different character---the daughter of a local magistrate, Lucie de Villiers. The de Villiers---or rather, Devilliers: for their name had split in two along the way, like a stone cracking as it rolls downhill---were magistrates from father to son, of that old French parliamentary stock that held a high opinion of law, duty, social propriety, personal dignity, and above all professional dignity, reinforced by a perfect honesty with a slight touch of prudhommery. In the previous century they had been tinged with the defiant Jansenism of the Fronde, and from it they had retained, along with a contempt for the Jesuit spirit, something pessimistic and a little querulous. They did not see life in a favorable light, and far from smoothing over its difficulties, they would sooner have added to them, in order to have the right to complain. Lucie de Villiers had some of these traits, which set her against the not very refined optimism of her husband. Tall---a full head taller than he---thin, well-made, knowing how to dress, but with a slightly stiff elegance that made her always appear---as if by design---older than she was, she possessed a very high moral worth, but was severe toward others; she admitted no fault, nor any real weakness; she was known as cold and disdainful. She was very devout, and this was the occasion of endless quarrels between husband and wife. For all that, they loved each other greatly, and, though they argued often, could not have done without each other. Neither was much more practical than the other: he, for want of any psychological sense----(he was always in danger of being taken in by a pleasing face and fine words)----she, through total ignorance of business----(she understood nothing of it; and having always been kept at a distance from it, she took no interest in it.)

They had two children: a daughter, Antoinette, who was five years older, and a boy, Olivier.

Antoinette was a pretty dark-haired girl with a graceful and candid little French face---round, with lively eyes, a domed forehead, a delicate chin, a small straight nose---“one of those fine and noble noses at their prettiest,” (as an old French portraitist charmingly puts it), “in which there played a certain imperceptible little movement that animated the countenance and revealed the delicacy of the feelings stirring within her, as she spoke or listened.” She had inherited from her father his gaiety and his carelessness.

Olivier was a slight fair-haired boy, small like his father, but of an entirely different nature. His health had been seriously tried by continual illnesses throughout his childhood, and though he had been all the more pampered by everyone around him for that reason, his physical weakness had made him early on a melancholy, dreamy little boy who was afraid of death and poorly equipped for life. He kept to himself, out of shyness and by inclination; he avoided the company of other children, where he felt ill at ease; he disliked their games and their fights; their roughness horrified him. He would let them hit him, not from lack of courage, but from timidity---because he was afraid to defend himself, afraid of hurting someone. He would have been their martyr had he not been protected by his father’s position. He was tender and morbidly sensitive: a word, a sign of affection, a reproach, would dissolve him in tears. His sister, far more robust, made fun of him and called him: little fountain.

The two children loved each other wholeheartedly; but they were too different to share the same world. Each went their own way, pursuing their own daydreams. As Antoinette grew older she became prettier; people told her so, and she knew it well --- it made her happy, and she was already spinning novels about the future. Olivier, sickly and withdrawn, felt himself perpetually bruised by every contact with the outside world; and he took refuge in his absurd little mind, telling himself stories. He had an ardent, almost feminine need to love and be loved; and, living alone, apart from everyone his own age, he had invented two or three imaginary friends --- one was called Jean, another Étienne, another François; he was always with them. And so he was never truly with those around him. He slept little and drifted in daydream without cease. In the morning, once he had been dragged from his bed, he would lose himself --- his two small bare legs dangling over the edge, or, as often as not, both stockings pulled onto the same leg. He would lose himself with both hands in his washbasin. He would lose himself at his worktable, writing a single line, reciting a lesson: he would dream for hours, and then suddenly wake with terror to find he had learned nothing. At dinner he was dazed when anyone spoke to him; he answered two minutes after the question had been put; by the middle of his own sentence he had forgotten what he meant to say. He grew numb in the murmur of his thoughts and in the familiar sensations of those monotonous provincial days, which passed with such slowness: the great house, half empty, with only a portion of it inhabited; the vast and forbidding cellars and attics; the rooms mysteriously shut, shutters closed, furniture draped in dustcovers, mirrors veiled, candlesticks swathed in cloth; the old family portraits with their haunting smiles; the Empire engravings with their virtuous and slightly lewd heroism --- Alcibiades and Socrates at the courtesan’s house, Antiochus and Stratonice, the Story of Epaminondas, Belisarius Begging… And outside, the blacksmith’s noise from the forge across the street, the limping dance of hammers on the anvil, the panting of the wheezing bellows, the smell of scorched horn, the laundresses’ paddles beating from where they crouched at the water’s edge, the muffled thud of the butcher’s cleaver in the neighboring house, the clop of a horse’s hooves on the cobblestone street, the squeal of a pump, the swing bridge over the canal, the heavy barges loaded with stacked timber drifting slowly past the garden, hauled on a long rope; the small flagstoned courtyard with its square of earth where two lilacs grew amid a clump of geraniums and petunias, the tubs of laurels and flowering pomegranates on the terrace above the canal; now and then, the clamor of a fair on the nearby square --- peasants in gleaming blue smocks, and squealing pigs… And on Sundays, at church, the cantor who sang off-key, the old priest who dozed through the Mass; the family walk along the avenue by the station, spent exchanging ceremonious hat-tipping with other wretches who likewise felt obliged to promenade together --- until at last one reached the sunlit fields above which larks swayed invisible --- or the shimmering, still canal, lined on both sides by rows of trembling poplars… And then, the great provincial dinners, the interminable meals where food was discussed with expertise and relish: for there was no shortage of connoisseurs; and in the provinces, gluttony is the great occupation, Art itself. And they spoke too of affairs and of ribaldry and, here and there, of illnesses, with endless detail… --- And the little boy, sitting in his corner, quiet as a mouse, nibbled at his plate, ate little, and listened with all his ears. Nothing escaped him; and what he could not quite hear, his imagination supplied. He had that singular gift --- one often seen in children of old families and old lineages, where the weight of centuries is too deeply pressed --- of intuiting thoughts he had never had himself and scarcely understood. --- There was also the kitchen, where bloody and savory mysteries were prepared; and the old maidservant, who told burlesques and frightening tales… And finally there was the evening: the silent flight of bats, the dread of monstrous lives one knew were teeming in the bowels of the old house --- the great rats, the enormous and hairy spiders; the prayer at the foot of the bed, muttered without knowing what one said; the fitful little bell of the neighboring hospice ringing the nuns to bed; --- the bed itself, that island of dreams…

The best times of the year were those spent at a family property a few leagues from town, in spring and autumn. There, one could dream to one’s heart’s content: no one came. Like most petit-bourgeois children, the two were kept away from the working people around them --- servants and tenant farmers --- toward whom they felt, underneath everything, a certain unease and distaste. From their mother they had inherited an aristocratic --- or rather essentially bourgeois --- disdain for manual workers. Olivier spent his days perched in the branches of an ash tree, reading wonderful stories: the delightful mythology, the Tales of Musäus, or of Madame d’Aulnoy, or the Thousand and One Nights, or tales of travel. For he had that strange nostalgia for distant lands, those “oceanic dreams” that sometimes torment the young boys of small French provincial towns. A thicket hid the house from him; he could imagine himself very far away. But he knew he was close by, and was glad of it: for he did not much like going far alone; the natural world made him feel lost. The trees surged around him. Through his nest of foliage he could see in the distance the yellowing vines and the meadows where the dappled cows grazed, their slow and plaintive lowing filling the silence of the drowsing countryside. The shrill-voiced cocks answered one another from farm to farm. One could hear the uneven rhythm of flails on the threshing-room floors. In that peace of things, the feverish life of myriads of creatures continued to run at full flood. Olivier watched with uneasy eyes the columns of perpetually hurrying ants, and the bees heavy with plunder, droning like organ pipes, and the gorgeous and foolish wasps that never know what they want --- all that world of busy creatures who seem consumed by a desire to arrive somewhere… But where? They do not know. Anywhere. Somewhere… Olivier shivered, in the midst of that blind and hostile universe. He startled like a young hare at the sound of a pine cone dropping, or a dry branch snapping… He took heart again when he heard, from the other end of the garden, the clinking of the rings on the swing where Antoinette rocked herself, furiously.

She was dreaming too --- but in her own way. She spent the day foraging through the garden, greedy, curious, and laughing, pecking at the grapes on the vines like a thrush, slipping a peach secretly from the espalier, climbing a plum tree, or giving it a sly little knock in passing to bring down a rain of golden mirabelles, which melt in the mouth like scented honey. Or she gathered flowers, though it was forbidden: quickly she would snatch a rose she had been coveting since morning, and dash with it into the bower at the far end of the garden. There she would bury her little nose voluptuously in the intoxicating flower, kissing it, biting it, sucking it; and then she would hide her theft, tucking it into her collar against her throat, between her two small breasts, which she would glance at curiously as they swelled beneath her half-open chemise… Another pleasure, exquisite and forbidden, was to take off her shoes and stockings and walk barefoot on the cool fine sand of the paths, and on the wet grass of the lawns, and on the stones cold in shadow or burning in sun, and in the little stream that ran along the edge of the wood, kissing with her feet, her legs, her knees the water, the earth, and the light. Lying in the shade of the fir trees, she would hold up her transparent hands to the sun, and absently run her lips over the satiny skin of her slender, rounded arms. She made herself crowns, necklaces, robes of ivy leaves and oak leaves, pinning in blue thistles, red barberry, and small branches of fir with their green cones: she looked like a little barbarian princess. And she danced, all alone, around the fountain; and, arms outstretched, she spun and spun until her head spun too, and she let herself fall on the lawn, her face buried in the grass, laughing helplessly for minutes on end, unable to stop, and without knowing why.

So the days of the two children flowed past, a few paces apart, each paying no attention to the other --- except when Antoinette took it into her head, in passing, to play a trick on her brother, to fling a handful of pine needles in his face, or to shake his tree, threatening to bring him down, or to frighten him by rushing at him and crying out suddenly:

--- Boo! Boo!…

She was seized at times by a fury to tease him. She would lure him down from his tree by pretending their mother was calling. Then, once he had climbed down, she would take his place and refuse to budge. Then Olivier would whine and threaten to tell. But there was no danger that Antoinette would stay in the tree forever: she could not remain still for two minutes. When she had mocked Olivier quite enough from her branch, when she had vexed him to her heart’s content and he was on the verge of tears, she would scramble down, fling herself on him, shake him laughing, call him “little canary,” and roll him on the ground, rubbing his nose in handfuls of grass. He tried to struggle; but he was no match for her. So he would go still, lying on his back like an upturned beetle, his thin arms pinned to the lawn by Antoinette’s sturdy little fists; and he would assume an air of pitiful resignation. Antoinette could not hold out: she would look at him, defeated and submissive; she would burst out laughing, kiss him abruptly, and leave him --- not without first, by way of farewell, jamming a little wad of fresh grass into his mouth, which he hated above all things, being extremely squeamish. And he would spit and wipe his mouth and protest with indignation, while she ran off at full speed, laughing.

She was always laughing. At night, in her sleep, she laughed still. Olivier, lying in the next room unable to sleep, would start out of the stories he was telling himself to hear those fits of laughter and the broken words she spoke into the silence of the night. Outside, the trees creaked in the wind’s breath, an owl cried, dogs howled in distant villages and in the farms deep in the woods. In the uncertain phosphorescence of the night, Olivier could see swaying before his window, like specters, the heavy dark branches of the fir trees; and Antoinette’s laughter was a relief to him.

The two children were very religious, especially Olivier. Their father scandalized them with his anticlerical professions of faith; but he left them free; and at bottom, like so many bourgeois who do not believe, he was not displeased that his family believed on his behalf: for it is always useful to have allies in the other camp, and one never knows which way fortune will turn. On the whole he was a deist, and he reserved the right, when the time came, to send for a priest, as his own father had done: if it does no good, it can do no harm; one need not believe one will be burned to take out insurance against fire.

Olivier, sickly as he was, had a tendency toward mysticism. There were moments when he felt as if he no longer existed. Trusting and tender, he needed something to lean on; he found in confession a painful kind of pleasure, the comfort of confiding in the invisible Friend whose arms are always open, to whom you can tell everything, who understands and forgives all; he savored the sweetness of that bath of humility and love, from which the soul emerges clean, washed, and rested. Belief came so naturally to him that he could not understand how anyone could doubt; he thought it required malice, or that God was punishing you. He prayed in secret for his father to be touched by grace; and one day, visiting a country church together, he felt a great surge of joy when he saw his father make the sign of the cross, absent-mindedly. The stories of Holy Scripture had mingled in him with the wondrous tales of Rübezahl, of Gracieuse and Percinet, and of the caliph Harun al-Rashid. As a small child, he had no more reason to doubt the truth of one than the other. And just as he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t met Schahabarim of the split lips, or the babbling barber, or the little hunchback of Casgar, just as he would scan the countryside during walks for the black woodpecker that carries in its beak the magic root of the treasure-seeker, so Canaan and the Promised Land became, by the power of his child’s imagination, localities in Burgundy or Berry. A hill in the region, perfectly round with a small tree at the summit like a worn old plume, seemed to him the mountain where Abraham had built his pyre. And a great dead thicket at the edge of the stubble fields was the Burning Bush, extinguished by the centuries. Even when he was no longer very small, and when his critical sense was beginning to wake, he still loved to cradle himself in the popular legends that garland faith; and he took such pleasure in them that, without being entirely taken in, he amused himself by pretending to be. It was in this way that for a long time he watched, each Holy Saturday, for the return of the Easter bells, which had left for Rome the Thursday before and came flying back through the air trailing little pennants. He had eventually worked out that this wasn’t true; but he went on lifting his nose to the sky when he heard them ring all the same; and once he had the illusion --- knowing perfectly well it couldn’t be --- of seeing one disappear above the house, trailing blue ribbons.

He had an urgent need to immerse himself in this world of legend and faith. He fled from life. He fled from himself. Thin, pale, frail, he suffered from being this way, and could not bear to hear it said aloud. He carried within him a native pessimism, inherited no doubt from his mother, which had found fertile ground in this sickly child. He was unaware of it: he believed that everyone was the same; and this little ten-year-old, during recess, instead of playing in the garden, would shut himself in his room and, nibbling his afternoon snack, write his last will and testament.

He wrote a great deal. He kept doggedly at his diary each evening in secret --- he didn’t know why, since he had nothing to say, and said nothing but trivialities. Writing was for him an inherited compulsion, that centuries-old need of the provincial French bourgeois --- the old indestructible race --- who writes for himself every day until the day he dies, with idiotic and almost heroic patience, detailed notes of everything he has, each day, seen, said, done, heard, eaten, and drunk. For himself. For no one else. No one will ever read it: he knows this; and he himself never reads it back.

Music was, like faith, a shelter from the day’s too-bright light. Both the brother and the sister were musicians by nature --- Olivier especially, who had inherited this gift from his mother. Their taste, it must be said, was far from excellent. There was no one capable of forming it in that provincial town where the only music to be heard was the local brass band playing quick-step marches, or --- on its better days --- potpourris from Adolphe Adam; the church organ executing popular romances; and the piano exercises of the young ladies of the bourgeoisie, who tapped away on poorly tuned instruments, playing a few waltzes and polkas, the overture to Le Calife de Bagdad or La Chasse du jeune Henri, and two or three Mozart sonatas, always the same ones, always with the same wrong notes. This formed part of the invariable programme of evenings when company was received. After dinner, those with talents were asked to display them: they refused at first, blushing, then eventually yielded to the assembly’s insistence; and they performed their showpiece from memory. Everyone then admired the artist’s memory and their “pearly” touch.

This ceremony, which repeated itself at nearly every gathering, ruined all the pleasure of dinner for both children. Even so, when they had to play their four-hand Voyage en Chine by Bazin, or their little Weber pieces, they could rely on each other and were not too frightened. But when one of them had to play alone, it was an ordeal. Antoinette, as always, was the braver of the two. Though it bored her to death --- since she knew there was no escaping it, she made her peace with the situation, sat herself down at the piano with a look of resolute purpose, and galloped through her rondo pell-mell, stumbling over certain passages, bogging down in others, stopping, turning her head, and saying with a smile:

--- Ah! I’ve forgotten how it goes…

then bravely picking it up again a few bars later and pressing on to the end. Afterward she made no secret of her relief at being done; and when she returned to her seat amid the compliments, she laughed and said:

--- I hit so many wrong notes!…

But Olivier was less easygoing by temperament. He could not bear to put himself on display in public, to be the focus of an entire gathering. It was already a torment for him simply to speak when company was present. To play, especially for people who did not love music --- (he could see this perfectly well), --- people who were even bored by music and had you play only out of habit, seemed to him a tyranny against which he struggled in vain. He refused outright. On certain evenings he would slip away and hide in a dark room, in the corridor, or even in the attic, despite his terrible fear of spiders. His resistance sharpened the insistence and the mockery; the parents’ reproaches were added to the mix, accompanied by a few smacks when the spirit of revolt blew too insolently. And he always ended up playing in the end --- naturally, against all reason. Afterward he would lie awake suffering over having played badly, because he had his pride, and because he genuinely loved music.

The town’s taste had not always been so mediocre. People remembered a time when quite decent chamber music was made in the homes of two or three bourgeois families. Mme Jeannin often spoke of her grandfather, who scraped away at the cello with passion and sang airs by Gluck, Dalayrac, and Berton. There was still a thick notebook of these at home, along with a bundle of Italian arias. For the amiable old man was like M. Andrieux, of whom Berlioz said: “He quite liked Gluck.” And he added bitterly: “He quite liked Piccinni too.” --- Perhaps he liked Piccinni better. In any case, the Italian arias far outnumbered the rest in the grandfather’s collection. They had been little Olivier’s musical bread. Not very nourishing, and somewhat like the provincial sweets that children are stuffed with: they dull the palate, ruin the stomach, and risk destroying forever any appetite for more substantial fare. But Olivier’s greediness was not to blame. More substantial fare was not on offer. He had no bread, so he ate cake. It was in this way, by force of circumstance, that Cimarosa, Paisiello, and Rossini became the nourishers of this melancholy and mystical little boy, whose head spun a little as he drank the Asti spumante that these hilarious and shameless old Sileni poured for him instead of milk, along with the two little skipping Bacchantes of Naples and Catania, with their ingenuous and lascivious smiles: Pergolesi and Bellini.

He played a great deal of music, alone, for his own pleasure. He was steeped in it. He made no effort to understand what he played; he received it passively. No one thought to have him study harmony, and he himself had no inclination for it. Everything that was science and scientific spirit was foreign to his family, particularly on his mother’s side. All those lawyers, wits, and humanists were lost before a problem. One family member was cited as a phenomenon --- a distant cousin --- who had entered the Bureau des Longitudes. It was even said that it had driven him mad. The old provincial bourgeoisie, sturdy and practical in spirit but stupefied by long digestions and the monotony of days, is full of its own good sense; it has such faith in it that it is confident of finding no difficulty that good sense cannot resolve; and it is not far from considering men of science as a kind of artist, more useful than the others but less distinguished, because at least artists serve no purpose --- and this idleness is not without a certain distinction. --- (Besides, every bourgeois flatters himself that he could have been an artist, had he chosen.) --- Whereas scientists are almost manual laborers --- (which is degrading) --- better-educated foremen, a little crackbrained; very strong on paper, but outside their factories of numbers, they count for nothing! They would not get far if it were not for the people of good sense who direct them, with their experience of life and affairs.

The trouble is that this experience of life and affairs is not proven to be as solid as these people of good sense would like to believe. It is rather a routine, limited to a very small number of very simple cases. Let some unforeseen case arise, where a prompt and vigorous decision must be taken, and they are disarmed.

The banker Jeannin was of this type. Everything had been so thoroughly foreseen in advance, everything repeated itself so exactly in the rhythm of provincial life, that he had never encountered any serious difficulties in his affairs. He had taken over his father’s practice without any special aptitude for the profession; since everything had gone well since then, he credited his natural intelligence. He liked to say that it was enough to be honest, diligent, and possessed of good sense; and he intended to hand his position on to his son without giving the boy’s inclinations any more thought than his own father had given his. He made no effort to prepare him for it. He let his children grow up as they pleased, so long as they were good children, and above all so long as they were happy: for he adored them. As a result, the two of them were as ill-prepared as possible for the struggle of life: they were hothouse flowers. But were they not meant to live always like this? In their gentle province, in their prosperous, well-regarded family, with a pleasant, cheerful, warm-hearted father surrounded by friends, holding one of the foremost positions in the region, life was so easy and so bright!

Antoinette was sixteen. Olivier was about to make his first communion. He was growing drowsy in the humming of his mystical dreams. Antoinette listened to the voluptuous song of intoxicated hope, which, like the nightingale in April, fills young hearts in springtime. She took pleasure in feeling her body and soul come into bloom, in knowing she was pretty, and in hearing others say so. Her father’s praise, his imprudent words, would have been enough to turn her head.

He was in raptures over her; he was charmed by her coquetry, by her languorous glances at her mirror, by her innocent and mischievous wiles. He would take her on his knee and tease her about her little heart, about the conquests she was making, about the marriage proposals he claimed to have received on her behalf; he would enumerate them: respectable bourgeois men, each older and uglier than the last. She would cry out in horror, bursting with laughter, her arms around her father’s neck, her face pressed against his cheek. And he would ask her who the fortunate one was: whether it was the public prosecutor, of whom the Jeannins’ old housekeeper said he was as ugly as the seven deadly sins, or perhaps the fat notary. She would give him little taps to make him stop, or press her hands over his mouth. He would kiss her little hands and, bouncing her on his knee, would sing the well-known song:

Que voulez-vous, la belle? Est-ce un mari bien laid?

She would respond, choking with laughter and tying his side-whiskers under his chin, with the refrain:

Plutôt joli que laid, Madame, s’il vous plaît.

She fully intended to make her own choice. She knew that she was, or would be, very wealthy --- (her father repeated it to her on every occasion): --- she was “a fine match.” The distinguished families of the area who had sons were already courting her, spreading around her a web of small flatteries and calculated stratagems, woven all too obviously, to catch the pretty silver fish. But the fish was likely to be nothing but an April fish for them; for the shrewd Antoinette missed none of their maneuvering, and she was amused by it: she was quite willing to let herself be caught; but she would not let herself be taken. In her little head, she had already decided whom she would marry.

The noble family of the region --- (there is generally only one per district: it claims descent from the ancient lords of the province; and most often it descends from some purchaser of national properties, an eighteenth-century steward, or a supplier to Napoleon’s armies) --- the Bonnivet family, who owned a château two leagues from the town, with pointed slate-covered towers rising amid great woods scattered with fish-filled ponds, were themselves making overtures to the Jeannins. Young Bonnivet was very attentive to Antoinette. He was a handsome fellow, fairly strong and stout for his age, spending every blessed day of his life hunting, eating, drinking, and sleeping; he rode well, knew how to dance, had reasonably good manners, and was no more stupid than the next man. He would come from the château to town now and then, all booted, on horseback or in his rattling gig; he paid calls on the banker under the pretext of business; and sometimes he brought a hamper of game, or a large bouquet of flowers for the ladies. He used these visits to press his suit with the young mademoiselle. They would walk together in the garden. He paid her compliments of the most extravagant kind, and bantered pleasantly, twirling his mustache and making his spurs ring on the terrace flagstones. Antoinette found him charming. Her pride and her heart were deliciously flattered. She gave herself over to those first sweet hours of a childish love. Olivier detested the country squire, because he was strong, heavy, brutal, because he laughed with a loud laugh, because he had hands that gripped like vises, and a disdainful habit of always calling him “Little one…” while pinching his cheek. He detested him above all --- without knowing it --- because this stranger loved his sister: … his sister, his own possession, his and no one else’s!…

Nevertheless, the catastrophe was coming. Sooner or later it always comes in the lives of those old bourgeois families who have been rooted for centuries in the same patch of earth and have drained all its nourishment. They drowse tranquilly and believe themselves as eternal as the soil that bears them. But the soil has died beneath them, and there are no more roots: a single stroke of the pickaxe is enough to tear everything out. Then people speak of bad luck, of unforeseen misfortune. There would have been no bad luck if the tree had been more resilient; or at least the trial would have passed like a storm that tears away a few branches but does not shake the tree itself.

The banker Jeannin was weak, trusting, and a little vain. He liked to put on a show, and was prone to confuse “being” with “seeming.” He spent freely and carelessly, though it is true that ancient habits of thrift would moderate these extravagances in fits of remorse --- (he would splurge on a cord of firewood, then scrimp on a single match) --- without seriously eating into his assets. He was also not very prudent in his affairs. He never refused to lend money to friends; and it was not very difficult to become one of his friends. He did not even always take the trouble to obtain a receipt; he kept a careless account of everything owed to him, which he rarely pressed for unless it was offered. He relied on other people’s good faith just as he expected them to rely on his. He was, moreover, more timid than his easy, unpretentious manner would have suggested. He would never have dared to turn away certain importunate petitioners, nor to voice his doubts about their solvency. There was both kindness and pusillanimity in this. He did not want to wound anyone, and he dreaded giving offense. So he always gave way. And to put a better face on it, he did so with enthusiasm, as if having one’s money taken were a favor being done to him. He was not far from believing it: his self-regard and his optimism easily persuaded him that every transaction he entered into was a good one.

These habits of dealing did nothing to alienate the affections of his borrowers; he was adored by the country people, who knew they could always count on his obligingness, and who took full advantage of it. But the gratitude of people --- even good people --- is a fruit that must be gathered at the right moment. Leave it too long on the branch and it soon goes rotten. When a few months had passed, those whom M. Jeannin had helped grew accustomed to thinking that his assistance had been their due; and they even had a tendency to believe that, since M. Jeannin had shown such pleasure in helping them, he must have found some advantage in it himself. The more delicate among them considered themselves quit --- if not of their debt, at least of their gratitude --- with a hare they had shot or a basket of eggs from their henhouse, which they would bring to the banker on market day.

Since until now it had been a matter, all in all, of only small sums, and since M. Jeannin had dealt only with fairly honest people, no great harm had come of it: the financial losses --- of which the banker breathed a word to no one --- were minimal. But things changed from the day M. Jeannin crossed the path of a certain schemer who was launching a large industrial venture and had caught wind of the banker’s complaisance and financial resources. This personage with his important manner, who wore the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur and claimed friendship with two or three ministers, an archbishop, a collection of senators, various notorieties from the worlds of letters and finance, and an all-powerful newspaper, knew marvellously well how to strike the authoritative and familiar tone suited to his man. By way of introduction, he exhibited --- with a brazenness that might have put someone shrewder than M. Jeannin on guard --- the banally complimentary letters he had received from these illustrious acquaintances, thanking him for a dinner invitation or inviting him in return: for everyone knows that the French are never stingy with this kind of epistolary currency, nor reluctant to shake hands and accept the dinners of a man they have known for an hour, provided only that he amuses them and does not ask them for money. Indeed, many of them would not refuse money to a new friend if others did likewise. And it would be very bad luck for an intelligent man who sought to relieve his fellow creatures of money that encumbered them, if he did not end by finding a first sheep willing to jump so as to carry the others along. --- Had there been no other sheep before him, M. Jeannin would have been that one. He was of the good wool-bearing breed, made to be shorn. He was captivated by the fine connections, by the eloquence, by the flatteries of his visitor, and also by the first good results that his advice produced. He ventured a little at first, and with success; then he ventured much; and then he ventured everything: not only his own money but that of his clients. He was careful not to inform them of this: he was certain of winning; he wanted to dazzle them with the service rendered.

The enterprise sank. He learned of it indirectly through one of his Parisian correspondents, who mentioned in passing the new crash, without suspecting that Jeannin was among the victims: for the banker had said nothing to anyone; with inconceivable recklessness he had neglected --- avoided, it seemed --- to seek advice from those capable of informing him; he had done everything in secret, puffed up with his infallible good sense, and had contented himself with the vaguest information. There are such aberrations in life: one would think that at certain moments a man absolutely must destroy himself; it seems that he fears someone might come to his aid; he flees every counsel that might save him, he hides, he hurries with feverish eagerness, so as to be able to take the great plunge entirely at his leisure.

M. Jeannin ran to the station and, his heart crushed with anguish, boarded the train for Paris. He was going in search of his man. He still flattered himself with the hope that the news was false, or at least exaggerated. Naturally he found no trace of the man, and he received confirmation of the disaster, which was as complete as possible. He came back, frantic, concealing everything. No one yet suspected anything. He tried to gain a few weeks, a few days. In his incurable optimism he strained to believe he would find a way to repair, if not his own losses, those he had caused his clients to suffer. He tried various expedients with a clumsy haste that would have destroyed any chance of success, had he ever had any. The loans he sought to arrange were refused him everywhere. The reckless speculations in which, out of desperation, he sank the little that remained to him completed his ruin. From that point on his character changed entirely. He fell into a frightening state of terror: he spoke of nothing; but he was embittered, violent, harsh, horribly sad. Even now, when he was with strangers, he continued to simulate gaiety; but it escaped no one that he had changed: people attributed it to his health. With his family he was less guarded; and they had immediately noticed that he was hiding something serious. He was no longer recognizable. At times he would burst into a room and ransack a piece of furniture, flinging all the papers helter-skelter across the floor, working himself into wild rages because he could find nothing, or because someone tried to help him. Then he would stand lost in the middle of the disorder; and when asked what he was looking for, he no longer knew himself. He seemed to take no more interest in his family; or he would embrace them with tears in his eyes. He no longer slept. He no longer ate.

Mme Jeannin could see clearly that they were on the eve of a catastrophe; but she had never taken any part in her husband’s affairs and understood nothing of them. She questioned him: he pushed her away brutally; and she, wounded in her pride, pressed no further. But she trembled, without knowing why.

The children could not have suspected the danger. Antoinette, no doubt, was too intelligent not to share, like her mother, a presentiment of some misfortune; but she was entirely absorbed in the pleasure of her nascent love: she did not want to think about disturbing things; she persuaded herself that the clouds would disperse of their own accord --- or that there would be time enough to face them when there was no other choice.

The one who was perhaps nearest to understanding what was passing in the soul of the unhappy banker was little Olivier. He felt that his father was suffering; and he suffered in secret along with him. But he dared say nothing: he could do nothing, he knew nothing. And besides, he too turned his thoughts away from these sad things that eluded him: like his mother and his sister, he had a superstitious tendency to believe that misfortune, if one refused to see it coming, might perhaps not come at all. Poor people who feel themselves threatened readily do as the ostrich does: they hide their heads behind a stone and imagine that misfortune cannot see them.

Disquieting rumors began to spread. It was said that the bank’s credit was shaken. Despite the banker’s show of great confidence with his clients, some of the more suspicious ones began asking for their funds back, on one pretext or another. M. Jeannin felt himself lost; he fought back desperately, playing at indignation, complaining with haughtiness and bitterness that people had lost faith in him; he went so far as to make violent scenes with old clients, which finished him definitively in public opinion. Demands for repayment poured in. Cornered and at bay, he lost his head entirely. He made a brief journey, went to gamble his last banknotes at a nearby spa town, was stripped of everything in a quarter of an hour, and came home.

His sudden departure had finally thrown the little town into an uproar, where people were already saying he had fled; and Mme Jeannin had had great difficulty holding her own against the furious anxiety of the townspeople: she begged them to be patient, she swore to them that her husband would return. They barely believed her, though with all their might they wanted to. So when it became known that he had come back, there was a general sense of relief: many were not far from believing they had worried needlessly, and that the Jeannins were far too clever not to find their way out of a tight spot, granted they had fallen into one. The banker’s manner confirmed this impression. Now that he had no more doubt about what remained for him to do, he seemed tired but very calm. On the avenue outside the station, stepping down from the train, he chatted tranquilly with a few friends he encountered, about the countryside that had been starved of rain for weeks, about the vines that were superb, and about the fall of the ministry announced in the evening papers.

Arrived home, he pretended to pay no attention to his wife’s agitation --- she had come running at the sound of him entering --- as she recounted with confused volubility everything that had happened in his absence. She tried to read in his features whether he had succeeded in turning aside the unknown danger; she asked him nothing, however, out of pride: she waited for him to speak of it first. But he said not a word about what tormented them both. He quietly brushed aside her desire to confide in him and to draw out his confidences. He spoke of the heat, of his fatigue; he complained of a terrible headache; and they sat down to table, as usual.

He spoke little, weary, absorbed, his brow furrowed; he tapped his fingers on the tablecloth; he forced himself to eat, knowing he was being watched, and looked with vacant, distant eyes at his children, who had been made timid by the silence, and at his wife, stiffened in her wounded pride, who was watching his every movement without looking at him. Toward the end of dinner, he seemed to wake; he tried to talk with Antoinette and with Olivier; he asked what they had done during his trip; but he was not listening to their answers, only to the sound of their voices; and though his eyes were fixed on them, his gaze was elsewhere. Olivier felt this: he would stop in the middle of his little stories, with no desire to go on. But in Antoinette, after a moment of awkwardness, her gaiety had gotten the better of her: she chattered away like a happy magpie, laying her hand on her father’s hand, or touching his arm, so that he would really listen to what she was telling him. M. Jeannin was silent; his eyes moved from Antoinette to Olivier, and the crease in his forehead deepened. In the middle of one of the girl’s stories, he could bear it no longer: he rose from the table and went to the window to hide his emotion. The children folded their napkins and stood as well. Mme Jeannin sent them to play in the garden; they could be heard at once chasing each other along the paths, letting out shrill cries. Mme Jeannin watched her husband, who had his back to her, and moved around the table as though straightening something. Suddenly she drew close to him and said, in a voice muffled by her fear that the servants might hear, and by her own anguish:

--- Antoine, what is it? Something is wrong… Yes it is! You’re hiding something… Has something terrible happened? Are you ill?

But M. Jeannin, once again, pushed her away, shrugging impatiently and saying in a harsh tone:

--- No! No, I tell you! Leave me alone!

She withdrew, indignant; she told herself, in her blind anger, that whatever might happen to her husband, she would no longer trouble herself over it.

M. Jeannin went down to the garden. Antoinette was still in her exuberant mood, harrying her brother to make him run. But the child suddenly announced that he no longer wanted to play; and he leaned his elbows on the terrace wall, a few steps from his father. Antoinette tried to tease him again; but he pushed her away, sulking: so she said a few impertinent things to him; and since there was nothing more to be done here for amusement, she went back inside and sat down at her piano.

M. Jeannin and Olivier were left alone.

--- What’s the matter, little one? Why don’t you want to play anymore? asked the father, gently.

--- I’m tired, Papa.

--- Very well. Then let’s sit on the bench together for a little while.

They sat down. A beautiful September night. The sky clear and dark. The sweet smell of petunias mingled with the flat, slightly corrupt smell of the dark canal that lay sleeping at the foot of the terrace wall. Evening moths, large pale sphinx moths, beat their wings around the flowers with a hum like a small spinning wheel. The calm voices of neighbors sitting outside their doors, on the far side of the canal, resonated in the silence. In the house, Antoinette was playing Italian cavatinas with florid ornaments on her piano. M. Jeannin held Olivier’s hand in his. He was smoking. In the darkness that was gradually concealing his father’s features, the child could see the small glow of the pipe, flaring up, going out with each puff, flaring up again, and finally going out altogether. They did not speak. Olivier asked the names of a few stars. M. Jeannin, quite ignorant of natural things, as almost all provincial bourgeois are, knew none of them apart from the great constellations that everyone knows; but he pretended to believe those were the ones the child was asking about; and he named them. Olivier did not protest: he always liked to hear them named, and to repeat their beautiful, mysterious names under his breath. Besides, he was less trying to learn than instinctively drawing closer to his father. They fell silent. Olivier, his head resting on the back of the bench, his mouth open, watched the stars; and he grew drowsy: the warmth of his father’s hand soaked into him. Suddenly that hand began to tremble. Olivier found this amusing, and said in a laughing, sleepy voice:

--- Oh, how your hand is trembling, Papa!

M. Jeannin withdrew his hand.

After a moment, Olivier, whose small mind kept on working on its own, said:

--- Are you tired too, Papa?

--- Yes, my little one.

The child’s affectionate voice resumed:

--- You mustn’t tire yourself out so much, Papa.

M. Jeannin drew Olivier’s head toward him and rested it against his chest, murmuring:

--- My poor little one!…

But already Olivier’s thoughts had taken another turn. The clock in the tower was striking eight. He pulled free and said:

--- I’m going to read.

On Thursdays, he was allowed to read for an hour after dinner, until bedtime: it was his greatest happiness; and nothing in the world could have made him sacrifice a single minute of it.

M. Jeannin let him go. He walked back and forth a while longer on the dark terrace. Then he went inside as well.

In the bedroom, gathered around the lamp, the children and their mother were all together. Antoinette was sewing a ribbon onto a bodice, never for a moment stopping her talking or humming, to the great displeasure of Olivier, who sat in front of his book, brow furrowed and elbows on the table, pressing his fists against his ears so as to hear nothing. Mme Jeannin was darning stockings and talking with the old servant, who stood beside her giving the account of the day’s expenses and taking the opportunity to chat a little; she always had amusing stories to tell, in a priceless slang that made them burst out laughing, which Antoinette tried her best to imitate. M. Jeannin watched them in silence. No one paid any attention to him. He stood there uncertainly for a moment, sat down, picked up a book, opened it at random, closed it, stood up: clearly he could not stay. He lit a candle and said goodnight to them. He went to the children and kissed them with feeling: they responded distractedly, without looking up at him --- Antoinette busy with her sewing, and Olivier with his book. Olivier did not even lower his hands from his ears, and grunted an irritated goodnight while continuing to read --- (when he was reading, one of his family could have fallen into the fire and he would not have stirred.) --- M. Jeannin left the room. He lingered in the adjoining room. His wife came in shortly after, the servant having gone, to put away some sheets in a wardrobe. She pretended not to see him. He hesitated, then came to her and said:

--- I’m sorry. I spoke to you a little abruptly earlier.

She had wanted to say:

--- My poor dear, I hold nothing against you; but whatever is the matter? Tell me what is making you suffer.

But she said, too glad of the chance for revenge:

--- Leave me alone! You are odiously brutal with me. You treat me as you would not treat a servant.

And she went on in this vein, listing her grievances with sharp, bitter volubility.

He made a weary gesture, smiled bitterly, and left her.

No one heard the revolver shot. Not until the following day, when people learned what had happened, did a few neighbors recall having perceived, around the middle of the night, in the silence of the street, a sharp noise, like the crack of a whip. They had paid it no mind. The peace of the night had settled again at once over the town, enfolding in its heavy folds the living and the dead.

Mme Jeannin, who had been asleep, woke up one or two hours later. Not finding her husband beside her, she got up, alarmed, went through all the rooms, came downstairs to the floor below, went to the bank offices, which were in a wing adjacent to the house; and there, in M. Jeannin’s study, she found him in his armchair, slumped over his desk, amid his blood, which was still dripping onto the floor. She let out a piercing cry, dropped the candle she was holding, and lost consciousness. The sound carried to the house. The servants came running, lifted her up, attended to her, and carried M. Jeannin’s body to a bed. The children’s room was closed. Antoinette was sleeping like one blessed. Olivier heard voices and footsteps: he would have liked to know; but he was afraid of waking his sister; and he fell back asleep.

The next morning, the news was already circulating through the town before they knew anything. It was the old servant who told them, in tears. Their mother was in no state to think of anything at all; her health itself was giving cause for concern. The two children found themselves alone, face to face with death. In those first moments, their terror was still greater than their grief. Moreover, they were not left with any time to weep in peace. From early in the morning, the cruel legal formalities began. Antoinette, taking refuge in her room, directed all the forces of her juvenile self-absorption toward a single thought, the only one capable of helping her push back the horror of the reality that was suffocating her: the thought of her friend; she waited for his visit, hour by hour. Never had he been more attentive to her than the last time she had seen him: she had no doubt that as soon as he learned of the catastrophe, he would come running to share in her grief. --- But no one came. Nor any word from anyone. No sign of sympathy. Instead, from the first news of the suicide, people who had entrusted their money to the banker came rushing to the Jeannins’, forced their way in, and, with pitiless ferocity, made furious scenes at the wife and children.

Within a few days, every kind of ruin accumulated upon them: the loss of a beloved being, the loss of all fortune, all social standing, all public esteem, the abandonment of friends. It was a total collapse. Nothing was left standing of what had sustained their lives. All three of them had an uncompromising sense of moral purity, which made them suffer all the more acutely from a dishonor of which they were innocent. Of the three, the one most ravaged by grief was Antoinette, because she had been furthest from it. Mme Jeannin and Olivier, torn apart as they were, were not strangers to this world of suffering. Pessimists by instinct, they were less surprised than crushed. The thought of death had always been a refuge for them: now it was more so than ever; they wished to die. A pitiable resignation, no doubt, but still less terrible than the revolt of a young being, trusting, happy, in love with life, who suddenly finds herself backed into a grief that is without remedy and without bottom, or into a death that fills her with horror…

Antoinette discovered all at once the ugliness of the world. Her eyes opened: she saw life, men; she judged her father, her mother, her brother. While Olivier and Mme Jeannin wept together, she withdrew into her own grief. Her desperate little mind reflected on the past, the present, the future; and she saw that there was nothing left for her, no hope, no support: she could count on no one anymore.

The funeral took place, grim and shameful. The church had refused to receive the body of the suicide. The widow and the orphans were left alone by the cowardice of their former friends. Barely two or three appeared, for a moment; and their awkward manner was even more painful than the absence of the others. They seemed to be conferring a favor by coming, and their silence was heavy with blame and contemptuous pity. From the family side, things were even worse: not only did no consoling word come from that quarter, but bitter reproaches. The banker’s suicide, far from dulling their grievances, seemed scarcely less criminal than his bankruptcy. The bourgeoisie does not forgive those who take their own lives. That anyone should prefer death to even the most ignominious existence strikes them as monstrous; and they would readily call down all the rigor of the law upon a man who seems to be saying:

--- There is no misfortune that could equal that of going on living among you.

The most cowardly are not the least eager to call his act cowardice. And when the one who kills himself also injures, by writing himself out of life, their interests and their revenge, they become almost frenzied. --- Not for a single moment did they think of all that the unfortunate Jeannin must have suffered to have come to that. They would have wished him to suffer a thousand times more. And since he had escaped them, they turned their reprobation upon his family. They would not have admitted this: for they knew it was unjust. But they did it nonetheless: for they needed a victim.

Mme Jeannin, who seemed good for nothing but grieving, found all her energy again when anyone attacked her husband. She was discovering now how deeply she had loved him; and these three beings, who had no idea what they would become by the next day, were entirely agreed in renouncing the mother’s dowry, all their personal fortune, in order to repay, as far as possible, the father’s debts. And, since they could no longer remain in that town, they decided to go to Paris.

The departure was like a flight.

The evening before, --- (a bleak evening at the end of September: the fields were disappearing beneath a veil of great white fogs, from which the skeletons of shivering, dripping bushes emerged on both sides of the road as they advanced, like aquarium plants), --- they went together to say goodbye to the cemetery. All three knelt on the narrow stone border that surrounded the freshly turned earth. Their tears fell in silence: Olivier had the hiccups; Mme Jeannin blew her nose desperately. She was adding to her grief, tormenting herself by repeating endlessly the words she had spoken to her husband the last time she had seen him alive. Olivier was thinking of their conversation on the bench of the terrace. Antoinette was thinking of what would become of them. Not one of them harbored even a shadow of reproach in their heart for the unfortunate man who had brought them down with him. But Antoinette thought:

--- Ah! dear Papa, how we are going to suffer!

The fog was deepening, the dampness seeping into their bones. But Mme Jeannin could not bring herself to leave. Antoinette saw Olivier shivering, and she said to her mother:

--- Maman, I am cold.

They rose. At the moment of leaving, Mme Jeannin turned back, one last time, toward the grave:

--- My poor friend! she said.

They left the cemetery, in the falling night. Antoinette held in her hand the icy hand of Olivier.

They returned to the old house. It was their last night in the nest where they had always slept, where their lives had passed, and the lives of their parents --- these walls, this hearth, this small patch of earth, to which all the joys and sorrows of the family had become so indissolubly bound that it seemed as though these things too were part of the family, that they were part of life itself, and that one could only leave them by dying.

Their trunks were packed. They were to take the first train the next morning, before the neighbors’ shops were open: they wanted to avoid their curiosity and their spiteful commentary. --- They needed to press close to one another; and yet, each went instinctively to their own room and lingered there: they stood motionless, not even thinking to remove their hats and coats, touching the walls, the furniture, everything they were about to leave behind, pressing their foreheads against the windowpanes, trying to absorb and hold within themselves the feel of beloved things. At last, they made an effort to tear themselves away, each from the selfishness of their painful thoughts, and they gathered in Mme Jeannin’s room --- the family room, with a large alcove at the far end: it was there that they used to gather of an evening, after dinner, when there were no visitors. Once upon a time!… All of this already seemed so distant to them! --- They sat without speaking around the sparse fire; then they said their prayers together, kneeling before the bed; and they went to sleep very early, for they had to be up before dawn. But it was a long time before sleep came.

Around four in the morning, Mme Jeannin, who had been looking at her watch every hour to see whether it was not time to get ready, lit her candle and got up. Antoinette, who had barely slept, heard her and rose as well. Olivier was plunged in a deep sleep. Mme Jeannin gazed at him with emotion, and could not bring herself to wake him. She tiptoed away and said to Antoinette:

--- Let us not make any noise: let the poor child enjoy his last minutes here!

The two women finished dressing and completed their packing. Around the house hung the deep silence of cold nights, when everything that lives --- men and animals alike --- burrows more greedily into the warmth of sleep. Antoinette’s teeth were chattering: her heart and her body were frozen.

The front door resounded in the frozen air. The old servant, who had the key to the house, was coming one last time to attend her employers. Small and stout, short of breath and hampered by her plumpness, yet singularly nimble for her age, she appeared with her good face bundled up, her nose red and her eyes watering. She was distressed to see that Mme Jeannin had gotten up without waiting for her, and had already lit the kitchen stove. --- Olivier awoke as she came in. His first impulse was to close his eyes again and turn back into his covers to go on sleeping. Antoinette came and gently laid her hand on her brother’s shoulder, and called to him in a low voice:

--- Olivier, my dear, it is time.

He sighed, opened his eyes, saw his sister’s face bending toward his: she smiled at him sadly, and stroked his forehead with her hand. She repeated:

--- Come now.

He got up.

They left the house without a sound, like thieves. Each of them had packages in hand. The old servant went before them, rolling their trunk on a wheelbarrow. They were leaving behind almost everything they owned; they were taking, so to speak, only what they had on their backs, and a few articles of clothing. A few poor keepsakes were to be sent on later, by slow freight: some books, some portraits, the old clock whose ticking had seemed to them the very beating of their lives. --- The air was sharp. No one else was yet up in the town; the shutters were closed, the streets empty. They said nothing. Only the servant spoke. Mme Jeannin tried to engrave on her memory, for the last time, those images that recalled her whole past.

At the station, Mme Jeannin, out of pride, bought second-class tickets, though she had promised herself she would take third class; but she did not have the courage for that humiliation in front of the two or three railway employees who knew her. She slipped hurriedly into an empty compartment and shut herself in with the children. Hidden behind the curtains, they trembled lest a familiar face appear. But no one showed up: the town was barely stirring at the hour of their departure; the train was deserted; there were only three or four peasants and some oxen who, their heads thrust over the side of the cattle car, lowed mournfully. After a long wait, the locomotive gave a long whistle, and the train lurched forward into the fog. The three emigrants drew back the curtains and, faces pressed against the glass, looked one last time at the little town, whose Gothic tower was barely visible through the veil of mist, at the hill covered in stubble, the meadows white with frost and steaming --- it was already a dreamlike landscape, distant, barely real. And when it had disappeared at a bend in the track where the line plunged into a cutting, sure that they were no longer observed, they held back no more. Mme Jeannin, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth, was sobbing. Olivier had thrown himself against her, and with his head on his mother’s knees he covered her hands with kisses and tears. Antoinette, seated in the far corner of the compartment and turned toward the window, wept silently. They were not all three weeping for the same reason. Mme Jeannin and Olivier thought only of what they were leaving behind. Antoinette was thinking far more of what they were going to find: she reproached herself for it; she would have liked to lose herself in her memories… --- She was right to think of the future: she had a clearer view of things than her mother and brother. They were deceiving themselves about Paris. Antoinette herself was far from guessing what awaited them there. They had never been before. Mme Jeannin imagined that, however sad their situation might be, it was not alarming. She had in Paris a sister who had married well, to a magistrate; and she was counting on her help. She was convinced, besides, that her children, with the education they had received and their natural gifts --- about which she was mistaken, as all mothers are --- would have no difficulty earning an honest living.

The impression of arrival was sinister. Already at the station they were bewildered by the jostling of people in the baggage hall, and the din of entangled carriages in front of the exit. It was raining. There was no cab to be found. They had to run a long way, their arms broken by packages that were too heavy, forcing them to stop in the middle of the street at the risk of being crushed or splashed by passing vehicles. No coachman answered their calls. At last they managed to stop one who was driving an old wreck of hideous filth. While hoisting their packages up, they dropped a roll of blankets into the mud. The station porter carrying their trunk, and the coachman, both took advantage of their ignorance to charge them double. Mme Jeannin had given the address of one of those mediocre and expensive hotels frequented by provincials who, because a grandparent stayed there thirty years before, continue to go there in spite of every inconvenience. They were fleeced. The hotel was full, they were told: all three of them were crammed together into a cramped space and charged the price of three rooms. At dinner, trying to economize by avoiding the table d’hôte, they ordered a modest menu that cost as much and left them half-starved. From the very first moments of their arrival, their illusions had crumbled. And in that first hotel night --- piled together in an airless room, unable to sleep, alternately too cold and too hot, unable to breathe, starting at every footstep in the corridor, every slamming door, every electric bell, their heads battered by the endless rumble of carriages and heavy carts --- they felt the terrifying weight of this monstrous city into which they had flung themselves, and in which they were lost.

The next day, Mme Jeannin hurried to her sister’s, who lived in a luxurious apartment on the boulevard Haussmann. She hoped, without saying so, that they would be offered lodgings in the house until they were back on their feet. The first reception was enough to disabuse her. The Poyet-Delormes were furious about the bankruptcy of their relative. The wife especially, who feared that the ruined family would be thrust upon them and damage her husband’s advancement, found it the height of indecency that they had come to Paris to cling to her and compromise her still further. The magistrate felt the same; but he was a decent enough man; he would have been more helpful had his wife not kept watch --- which suited him perfectly well. Mme Poyet-Delorme therefore received her sister with glacial coldness. Mme Jeannin was taken aback; she forced herself to set aside her pride: she hinted in veiled terms at the difficulties she faced, and at what she had hoped the Poyets might do. They behaved as though they had not heard. They did not even keep them for dinner that evening; they invited them with great ceremony for the end of the week. And even that invitation did not come from Mme Poyet, but from the magistrate, who, himself a little uncomfortable with his wife’s reception, tried to soften its harshness: he affected a kind of bluff bonhomie; but one felt that he was not entirely honest, and that he was thoroughly selfish. --- The unfortunate Jeannins returned to the hotel without daring to exchange impressions about this first visit.

They spent the following days wandering through Paris, looking for an apartment, worn out by climbing staircases, sickened by these barracks where bodies are stacked on top of one another, these dirty stairwells, these lightless rooms, so dreary after the spacious house in the provinces. They were more and more oppressed. And everywhere --- in the streets, in the shops, in the restaurants --- there was that same bewilderment that caused everyone to take advantage of them. Everything they asked for cost an exorbitant price; one would have said they had the power of turning everything they touched to gold: only it was they who had to pay for it. They were impossibly clumsy, and without the strength to defend themselves.

Little as she had left in the way of hopes regarding her sister, Mme Jeannin still nurtured illusions about the dinner to which they had been invited. They prepared for it with pounding hearts. They were received as guests, not as family --- though no further trouble had been taken over the dinner than that ceremonious tone. The children met their cousins, roughly their own age, who were no more welcoming than their father and mother. The girl, very elegant and very coquettish, spoke to them with a lisp, in an air of polite superiority, with affected and honeyed manners that disconcerted them. The boy was put out by the burden of this dinner with poor relations, and was as disagreeable as possible. Mme Poyet-Delorme, stiff and upright in her chair, seemed always to be lecturing her sister, even when offering a dish. M. Poyet-Delorme talked about trifles to avoid any serious subject. The insipid conversation never strayed beyond what one eats, for fear of anything intimate or dangerous. Mme Jeannin made an effort to steer the conversation toward what weighed on her heart: Mme Poyet-Delorme cut her off sharply with an inconsequential remark. She did not have the courage to try again.

After dinner, she persuaded her daughter to play a piece on the piano, to show off her talent. The girl, embarrassed and displeased, played terribly. The Poyets, bored, waited for her to finish. Mme Poyet watched the girl with an ironic pursing of her lips; and, as the music went on too long, she resumed her conversation with Mme Jeannin about indifferent matters. At last, Antoinette, who had completely lost her footing in the piece and was realizing with terror that at a certain passage, instead of going on, she had gone back to the beginning, and that there was no reason she would ever get out of it, cut it short and ended with two chords that were off-key, and a third that was simply wrong. M. Poyet said:

--- Bravo!

And he called for coffee.

Mme Poyet said that her daughter was taking lessons with Pugno. The young lady “who was taking lessons with Pugno” said:

--- Very nice, my dear…

and asked where Antoinette had studied.

The conversation dragged. It had exhausted the interest of the drawing-room knickknacks and the ladies Poyet’s wardrobes. Mme Jeannin kept saying to herself:

--- This is the moment to speak, I must speak…

And she tensed herself. Just as she was making a great effort and was finally about to decide, Mme Poyet remarked casually, without any attempt to apologize, that they were terribly sorry, but they had to go out around half past nine — they had an engagement they hadn’t been able to cancel. The Jeannins, stung, rose at once to leave. There were gestures of protest. But a quarter of an hour later, someone rang at the door: the servant announced some friends of the Poyets, neighbors who lived on the floor below. Glances were exchanged between Poyet and his wife, and there were hurried whispers with the servants. Poyet, mumbling some excuse, led the Jeannins into an adjoining room. (He wanted to hide from his friends the existence — and above all the presence in his home — of his compromising relations.) The Jeannins were left alone in the unheated room. The children were beside themselves with humiliation. Antoinette had tears in her eyes; she wanted to leave. Her mother resisted at first; then, as the wait dragged on, she made up her mind. They left. In the front hall, Poyet, alerted by a servant, caught up with them, apologizing with a few bland words; he pretended to want them to stay, but it was plain he was eager for them to be gone. He helped them on with their coats, pushed them toward the door with smiles, handshakes, murmured pleasantries, and showed them out. --- Back at their hotel, the children wept with rage; Antoinette stamped her feet and swore she would never set foot in those people’s house again.

Mme Jeannin took an apartment on the fourth floor near the Jardin des Plantes. The bedrooms looked out onto the leprous walls of a dark courtyard; the dining room and the sitting room --- (for Mme Jeannin was determined to have a sitting room) --- faced a busy street. All day long, steam trams went past, and funeral processions whose lines disappeared into the cemetery at Ivry. Ragged Italians, trailing a rabble of children, lounged on the benches or quarreled bitterly. The windows couldn’t be left open because of the noise; and in the evenings, coming home, they had to push through the tide of a bustling, rank crowd, cross the congested streets with their muddy cobblestones, pass in front of a repulsive brasserie installed on the ground floor of the neighboring building, in whose doorway enormous, bloated women with yellow hair, plastered in heavy makeup, stared at passersby with sordid eyes.

The Jeannins’ meager funds drained away rapidly. Each evening they noted, with a tightening of the heart, the wider gap opening in their purse. They tried to economize; but they didn’t know how: it is a skill that takes years of hardship to learn, when one has not practiced it since childhood. Those who are not frugal by nature waste their time trying to be: whenever a new occasion to spend presents itself, they yield to it; economy is always for the next time; and when by chance they earn or think they have earned even the smallest sum, they hasten to put the gain toward expenses whose total ends up exceeding it tenfold.

After a few weeks, the Jeannins’ resources were exhausted. Mme Jeannin had to lay aside every remaining shred of pride, and without her children’s knowledge, she went to ask Poyet for money. She arranged to see him alone in his study, and she begged him to advance her a small sum while they found a situation that would allow them to live. The other man, who was weak and fairly decent at heart, after trying to put off his answer, gave in. In a moment of feeling he could not master --- and which he regretted immediately afterward --- he advanced two hundred francs, especially once he had to admit it to Mme Poyet, who was furious at her husband’s weakness and at her scheming sister.

The Jeannins spent their days running all over Paris in search of a position. Mme Jeannin, with the prejudices of a well-off provincial bourgeoise, could not entertain the idea, for herself or her children, of any profession except those called “liberal” --- no doubt because one starves in them. She would not even have allowed her daughter to take a position as a governess in someone’s household. Only official posts in the service of the state seemed to her not degrading. The question was how to find a way for Olivier to complete his education and become a teacher. As for Antoinette, Mme Jeannin would have liked her to enter some teaching institution to give lessons, or to go to the Conservatoire to win a prize in piano. But the institutions she approached were all fully supplied with teachers who had credentials far beyond her daughter’s modest elementary certificate; and as for music, it had to be admitted that Antoinette’s talent was quite ordinary compared to so many others who couldn’t even manage to break through. They discovered the appalling struggle for life, and the senseless consumption Paris makes of talents great and small, for which it has no use.

The two children fell into discouragement, into an exaggerated distrust of their own worth: they came to believe they were mediocre; they persisted in proving it to themselves, in proving it to their mother. Olivier, who in his provincial school had had no difficulty passing for a bright student, was crushed by these trials: he seemed to have lost possession of all his gifts. At the lycée where he was enrolled, and where he had managed to obtain a scholarship, his ranking in the first months was so disastrous that the scholarship was taken away. He concluded he was thoroughly stupid. At the same time, he was repelled by Paris, by that swarming of beings, by the disgusting immorality of his classmates, their vile conversations, the bestiality of some of them, who spared him nothing in the way of abominable propositions. He didn’t even have the strength to tell them his contempt. He felt degraded by the mere thought of their degradation. He took refuge with his mother and sister in the fervent prayers they said together each evening, after each new day of disappointments and private humiliations that seemed a defilement to these innocent hearts, and which they did not even dare recount to one another. But in contact with the spirit of latent atheism one breathes in Paris, Olivier’s faith was already beginning to crumble without his realizing it, like fresh plaster that falls from walls at the breath of rain. He continued to believe; but around him, God was dying.

His mother and sister kept on with their fruitless errands. Mme Jeannin had gone back to see the Poyets, who, eager to be rid of them, offered positions. For Mme Jeannin, there was a post as reader to an elderly woman who spent her winters in the south of France. For Antoinette, they had found a position as governess with a family in western France who lived in the country all year round. The terms were not too bad; but Mme Jeannin refused. Even more than the humiliation of serving herself, she opposed the idea of her daughter being reduced to it, and above all of Antoinette being sent away from her. However wretched they were, and precisely because they were wretched, they wanted to stay together. --- Mme Poyet took this very badly. She said that when one didn’t have the means to live, one had no right to be proud. Mme Jeannin could not help reproaching her for her heartlessness. Mme Poyet said wounding things about the bankruptcy, and about the money Mme Jeannin owed her. They parted, mortally at odds. All relations were broken off. Mme Jeannin had only one desire now: to repay what she had borrowed. But she could not.

The fruitless efforts continued. Mme Jeannin called on the deputy and the senator from her district, to whom M. Jeannin had rendered service on many occasions. Everywhere she ran into ingratitude and selfishness. The deputy didn’t even answer her letters, and when she came to ring at his door, had word sent that he was out. The senator spoke to her with a coarse condescension about her situation, which he attributed to “that miserable Jeannin,” whose suicide he denounced harshly. Mme Jeannin came to her husband’s defense. The senator said he was well aware that the banker had acted not from dishonesty but from stupidity, that he was a simpleton, a poor dupe who knew nothing and would never do anything but have his own way, asking no one’s advice and heeding no one’s warnings. If he had ruined himself alone, there would be nothing to say: it would serve him right. But --- leaving aside all the other ruin he had caused --- that he should have plunged his wife and children into misery and then abandoned them, leaving them to fend for themselves however they could… that was for Mme Jeannin to forgive him if she were a saint; but he, the senator, who was not a saint --- (s, a, i, n, t) --- who flattered himself that he was simply a sound man --- (s, a, i, n) --- a sound, sensible, reasonable man --- he had no reason whatever to forgive: a man who killed himself in such a case was a wretch. The only mitigating circumstance one could plead for Jeannin was that he was not entirely responsible. At that point he excused himself to Mme Jeannin for having expressed himself somewhat bluntly about her husband, giving as his reason the sympathy he felt for her; and, opening his desk drawer, he offered her a fifty-franc note --- an act of charity --- which she refused.

She looked for a position in the offices of a large government ministry. Her approaches were clumsy and without follow-through. She would summon all her courage to make one attempt; then she would come back so demoralized that for several days she had no strength to stir; and when she set out again, it was too late. She found no more help from church circles, either because they saw nothing in it for themselves, or because they had lost interest in a ruined family whose father was notoriously anticlerical. All that Mme Jeannin managed to find, after a thousand efforts, was a position teaching piano at a convent --- an thankless trade, ridiculously poorly paid. To earn a little more, she did copying work in the evenings for an agency. They were very hard on her. Her handwriting, and the carelessness that sometimes made her skip a word, a line, despite all her effort --- (she had so many other things on her mind!) --- earned her wounding remarks. It happened that after ruining her eyes and straining her back writing until the middle of the night, she saw her copy refused. She came home distraught. She would spend whole days lamenting without taking any action. She had long suffered from a heart condition that her hardships had aggravated and which inspired her with sinister forebodings. At times she had spells of anguish, of breathlessness, as if she were about to die. She no longer went out without carrying in her pocket her name and address written down, in case she should collapse in the street. What would happen if she were gone? Antoinette supported her as best she could, feigning a calm she did not feel; she begged her mother to take care of herself, to let her work in her place. But Mme Jeannin invested the last remnants of her pride in ensuring that at least her daughter should not know the humiliations she herself had to endure.

No matter how she wore herself out and cut their expenses still further, what she earned was not enough to keep them alive. They had to sell the few pieces of jewelry they had managed to keep. And the worst of it was that this money, which they needed so badly, was stolen from Mme Jeannin on the very day she had just received it. The poor woman, who was perpetually absentminded, had thought to make good use of her trip by stopping at the Bon Marché, which was on her way; the next day was Antoinette’s name day, and she wanted to buy her a small gift. She was carrying her purse in her hand so as not to lose it. She set it down automatically for a moment on a counter while she examined an item. When she reached for it again, the purse had vanished. --- That was the last blow for her.

A few days later, on a stifling evening at the end of August --- a thick, greasy vapor hung heavily over the city --- Mme Jeannin came home from her copying agency, where she had had urgent work to deliver. Already late for dinner, and wanting to save the three sous for the omnibus, she had worn herself out hurrying back too quickly, afraid her children would be worried. When she reached the fourth floor, she could neither speak nor breathe. It was not the first time she had come home in that state; the children had ended by ceasing to be alarmed by it. She forced herself to sit down at the table with them at once. Neither of them could eat, nauseated by the heat; they had to make an effort to force down a few mouthfuls of meat with disgust, a few sips of flat water. To give their mother time to recover, they didn’t talk --- (they had no desire to talk) --- they looked at the window.

Suddenly Mme Jeannin flailed her hands, clutched the table, looked at her children, gave a cry, and collapsed. Antoinette and Olivier rushed forward just in time to catch her in their arms. They were beside themselves, crying out, pleading:

--- Maman! My darling maman!

But she no longer answered. They lost their heads. Antoinette clutched her mother’s body convulsively, kissing her, calling to her. Olivier threw open the apartment door and cried:

--- Help!

The concierge climbed the stairs, and when she saw what had happened, she ran to fetch a doctor from the neighborhood. But when the doctor arrived, he could only confirm that it was over. Death had been instantaneous --- mercifully so, for Mme Jeannin --- though there was no knowing what she had still had time to think in those last seconds, seeing herself die, and leaving her children alone in such misery.

Alone to bear the horror of the catastrophe, alone to weep, alone to attend to the dreadful duties that follow death. The concierge, a kind woman, helped them a little; and from the convent where Mme Jeannin had given lessons, someone came as well; but there was no genuine sympathy in any of it.

The first moments were filled with a despair that nothing can express. The only thing that saved them was the very excess of that despair, which threw Olivier into what were genuine convulsions. Antoinette was drawn out of her own suffering by this; she thought of nothing but saving her brother; and her deep love penetrated Olivier, wrenched him away from the dangerous transports into which grief would have swept him. Clasped in each other’s arms, beside the bed where their mother lay, in the dim glow of a nightlight, Olivier kept saying that they must die, both of them die, die at once; and he pointed to the window. Antoinette felt that same fatal longing; but she fought against it: she wanted to live…

--- What for?

--- For her, said Antoinette --- (she gestured toward her mother). --- She is still with us. Think… After everything she suffered for us, we must spare her the worst grief of all, the grief of seeing us die unhappy… Ah! (she went on, with a burst of vehemence)… And besides, we must not resign ourselves like this! I refuse to! I revolt against it, in the end. I want you to be happy one day!

--- Never!

--- Yes, you will be happy. We have had too much misery. It will change; it must. You will make a life for yourself, you will have a family, you will have happiness --- I want it, I want it!

--- How can we go on living? We will never be able to…

--- We will. What does it come down to? Living until you can earn your own living. I’ll manage it. You’ll see, I’ll find a way. Ah! if Maman had let me act sooner, I could have already…

--- What are you going to do? I don’t want you doing anything humiliating. You couldn’t, anyway.

--- I will be able to… And there is nothing humiliating --- provided it is honest --- in earning one’s living by working. Don’t worry, please. You’ll see, everything will work out, you will be happy, we will be happy, my dear Olivier, she will be happy through us…

The two children followed their mother’s coffin alone. By common accord, they had decided to say nothing to the Poyets: the Poyets no longer existed for them; they had been too cruel to their mother, they had contributed to her death. And when the concierge had asked whether they had no other family, they had answered:

--- No. No one.

Before the bare grave, they prayed, hand in hand. They held themselves rigid in a desperate intransigence and pride that made them prefer even this solitude to the presence of indifferent and hypocritical relatives. --- They walked back on foot through that crowd, foreign to their mourning, foreign to their thoughts, foreign to everything they were, having nothing in common with them but the language they spoke. Antoinette held Olivier’s arm.

In the same building they took a very small apartment at the top floor --- two attic rooms, a tiny entrance hall that would have to serve as their dining room, and a kitchen no bigger than a closet. They might have found better in another neighborhood; but here it seemed to them they were still with their mother. The concierge showed them some kindness; but soon she was absorbed again by her own affairs, and no one paid any more attention to them. Not one tenant in the building knew them; and they did not even know who lived next door.

Antoinette obtained her mother’s position as music teacher at the convent. She looked for other lessons. She had one idea only: to raise her brother until he could enter the École Normale. She had decided this on her own, after careful reflection: she had studied the programs, made inquiries, done her best to get Olivier’s opinion as well --- but he had none, so she chose for him. Once at the École Normale, he would have his bread secured for life and would be master of his own future. He had to get there; they had to live at any cost until then. It would be five or six terrible years: they would get through them. This idea took hold of Antoinette with a singular force, and in the end it filled her entirely. The life of solitude and poverty that lay before her, which she could see stretching out plainly ahead, was only possible thanks to the passionate exaltation that seized her: to save her brother, to ensure that her brother would be happy, since she herself could no longer be. This young girl of seventeen or eighteen, once frivolous and tender, was transformed by her heroic resolve: there was in her an ardor of devotion and a pride in the struggle that no one would have suspected, least of all herself. At that age of crisis in a woman’s life, those first feverish spring days when such forces of love swell within the being and wash over it, like a hidden stream murmuring beneath the earth --- enveloping it, flooding it, holding it in a state of perpetual obsession --- love takes every form; it asks only to give itself, to offer itself as nourishment: any pretext will do, and its innocent and profound sensuality is ready to transform itself into every sacrifice. Love made Antoinette the captive of devotion.

Her brother, less passionate, had no such resilience. Besides, he was the one being devoted to, not the one doing the devoting --- which is far easier and far sweeter, when one loves. On the contrary, he was weighed down by remorse at seeing his sister exhaust herself for him. He told her so. She answered:

--- Ah! my poor dear… But can’t you see that this is what keeps me alive! Without this trouble you give me, what other reason would I have?

He understood this well. He too, in Antoinette’s place, would have been jealous of this cherished burden; but to be the cause of it!… His pride and his heart suffered from it. And what a crushing weight for a creature as fragile as he was --- the responsibility heaped upon him, the obligation to succeed, since his sister had staked her entire life on this single card! Such a thought was unbearable to him, and, far from redoubling his strength, it overwhelmed him at times. And yet it compelled him all the same to resist, to work, to live: something he would not have been capable of without this constraint. There was in him a predisposition toward defeat --- toward suicide, perhaps: --- perhaps he would have sunk into it, had his sister not willed on his behalf that he be ambitious and happy. He suffered from having his nature opposed; and yet it was his salvation. He too was passing through an age of crisis, that terrible age in which thousands of young men go under, surrendering to the aberrations of their senses and their minds, sacrificing irremediably their whole lives for two or three years of madness. Had he had the time to give himself over to his thoughts, he would have fallen into discouragement or dissipation: every time he happened to look inward, he was seized again by his morbid reveries, by disgust with life, with Paris, with the foul fermentation of those millions of beings who mingle and rot together. But the sight of his sister dispelled that nightmare; and since she lived only so that he might live, he would live, yes, he would be happy, in spite of himself.

So their life was built on a burning faith, made of stoicism, religion, and noble ambition. Everything in the two children was bent toward a single goal: Olivier’s success. Antoinette accepted every task, every humiliation: she worked as a governess in households where she was treated almost like a servant; she had to escort her pupils on outings, like a nursemaid, trotting with them for hours through the streets under the pretext of teaching them German. Her love for her brother, and her very pride, found a kind of pleasure in these moral sufferings and these fatigues.

She came home exhausted, to take care of Olivier, who spent the day at the lycée as a half-boarder and returned only in the evening. She prepared dinner --- a meager dinner on the gas stove, or over a spirit lamp. Olivier was never hungry, and everything put him off; meat caused him an invincible revulsion; he had to be forced to eat, or she had to devise small dishes that pleased him, and poor Antoinette was not much of a cook. After going to great trouble, she had the mortification of hearing him declare that her cooking was inedible. It was only after many desperate moments at her kitchen stove --- those silent despairs that clumsy young housekeepers know, which can poison their lives and their sleep without anyone ever knowing --- that she came to understand it a little.

After dinner, when she had washed the few dishes they used --- (he wanted to help with this task, but she would not permit it), --- she devoted herself maternally to her brother’s schoolwork. She heard his lessons, read his exercises, even did certain research for him, always taking care not to bruise that sensitive creature. They spent the evening at their one table, which served them both for meals and for writing. He did his homework; she sewed, or did copying. Once he was in bed, she attended to his clothes, or worked on her own.

However great their difficulties already in making ends meet, they decided by common accord that all the money they managed to set aside would go first and foremost toward paying off the debt their mother had contracted with the Poyets. Not that those people were troublesome creditors: they had given no sign of life; they no longer thought about the money, which they had written off as lost for good; they counted themselves fortunate enough, at bottom, to be rid of their embarrassing relatives at that price. But the pride of the two children and their filial devotion suffered at the thought that their mother owed anything to people they despised. They deprived themselves; they scraped on every little pleasure, on their clothes, on their food, in order to accumulate those two hundred francs --- an enormous sum for them. Antoinette would have preferred to deprive herself alone. But when her brother learned what she intended to do, nothing could stop him from doing the same. They both wore themselves out at this task, happy when they could set aside a few sous each day.

Through privation, over three years, sou by sou, they managed to gather the sum. It was a great joy to them. One evening Antoinette went to the Poyets. She was received without warmth: they assumed she had come to ask for help. They thought it best to get ahead of things by sharply reproaching her for having sent no news, for not even having informed them of her mother’s death, and for coming to them only when she needed something. She interrupted them calmly, saying that she had no intention of troubling them: she had come simply to return the money she had borrowed from them; and, laying two banknotes on the table, she asked for a receipt. They changed their manner at once and pretended not to want to accept it: they felt for her that sudden affection a creditor feels for a debtor who brings back, after years, money from a debt he had long since given up on. They tried to find out where she was living with her brother, and how they were getting on. She avoided answering, asked again for the receipt, said she was in a hurry, gave a cool goodbye, and left. The Poyets were outraged at the ingratitude of that girl.

Then, freed from that obsession, Antoinette continued the same life of privations, but now for her brother alone. Only now she concealed it more, so that he would not know; she economized on her own clothes, and sometimes on her own food, for the sake of her brother’s clothes and his pleasures, to make his life softer and more enriched, to allow him to go now and then to a concert, or even to the opera --- Olivier’s greatest happiness. He did not want to go without her; but she found pretexts to excuse herself and relieve him of remorse: she claimed she was too tired, that she had no wish to go out; she even went so far as to say it bored her. He was not fooled by this lie of love; but his childlike selfishness got the better of him. He would go to the theater; and once he was there, his remorse returned; he thought of it throughout the performance: his happiness was spoiled. One Sunday she had sent him to the concert at the Châtelet; he came back after half an hour, telling Antoinette that when he had reached the Pont Saint-Michel he had not had the courage to go further: the concert no longer interested him, it hurt him too much to have pleasure without her. Nothing could have been sweeter to Antoinette, despite her grief that her brother had deprived himself of his Sunday entertainment on her account. But Olivier had no thought of regretting it: when he had come home and seen his sister’s face radiant with a joy she tried in vain to conceal, he had felt happier than the finest music in the world could have made him. They spent that Sunday afternoon sitting face to face near the window, he with a book in hand, she with her needlework, neither really sewing nor really reading, and talking of small nothings that held no interest for either of them. Never had a Sunday seemed more sweet. They agreed never again to be separated for a concert: they were no longer capable of being happy alone.

She managed to save enough in secret to surprise Olivier with a rented piano which, under the terms of the rental agreement, would become fully theirs after a certain number of months. Another heavy obligation she was taking on! Those payment deadlines were often a nightmare for her; she was ruining her health trying to scrape together the money. But this extravagance secured them such happiness, both of them! Music was their paradise in that hard life. It took up an immense place within them. They wrapped themselves in it to forget the rest of the world. This was not without its dangers. Music is one of the great modern solvents. Its warm languor --- like a hothouse or a deadening autumn --- overstimulates the senses and kills the will. But for a soul forced into excessive, joyless activity like Antoinette’s, it was a release. The Sunday concert was the only glimmer of light in the week of unrelenting work. They lived on the memory of the last concert and the hope of the next --- those two or three hours spent outside of Paris, outside of time. After a long wait in the open air, in rain or snow or wind and cold, pressed close together and trembling for fear there would be no seats left, they would plunge into the theater, where they were lost in a crush of people, wedged into narrow, dark seats. They were stifled, squeezed, sometimes on the verge of fainting from the heat and the discomfort; --- and they were happy, happy in their own joy and in each other’s joy, happy to feel flowing through their hearts the floods of goodness, light, and strength that poured from the great souls of Beethoven and Wagner, happy to see the dear, familiar face beside them grow bright --- that face gone pale from premature fatigue and worry. Antoinette felt so weary, and it was as though she were in the arms of a mother pressing her to her breast. She nestled into the warm, soft nest; and she wept quietly. Olivier held her hand. No one noticed them, in the shadows of that vast hall, where they were not the only bruised souls taking shelter under Music’s maternal wing.

Antoinette also had her religion, which continued to sustain her. She was deeply devout, and she never failed to say long, fervent prayers each day, nor to attend Mass every Sunday. In the midst of her life’s unjust misery, she could not help but believe in the love of the divine Friend, who suffers with you and who, one day, will console you. More than with God, even, she lived in intimate communion with her dead, and she drew them silently into all her trials. But she was independent in spirit, with a firm and clear mind; she kept apart from other Catholics and was not well regarded among them; they found a rebellious streak in her; they were not far from looking on her as a freethinker, or one well on her way to becoming one, because --- being a good little Frenchwoman --- she had no intention of surrendering her right to judge for herself: she believed not out of obedience, like dumb cattle, but out of love.

Olivier no longer believed. The slow work of erosion that had begun wearing away his faith in his first months in Paris had now destroyed it entirely. He had suffered cruelly for it; for he was not one of those people strong enough --- or mediocre enough --- to do without faith: he had passed through crises of mortal anguish. But he kept a mystical heart; and, however unbelieving he had become, no mind was closer to his own than his sister’s. They lived together in a religious atmosphere. When they came home each evening, each from their separate day, their little apartment was for them a harbor, an inviolable refuge --- poor, cold, but pure. How far they felt from the noise and corrupted thoughts of Paris!…

They did not talk much about what they had done during the day: for when you come home exhausted, you have little heart to relive a difficult day by recounting it. Instinctively they set about forgetting it together. Above all during that first hour, when they met again at the evening meal, they were careful not to question each other. They said good evening with their eyes; and sometimes they did not exchange a word for the entire dinner. Antoinette watched her brother, who sat daydreaming over his plate the way he used to when he was small. She gently stroked his hand:

--- Come now, she said with a smile. Courage!

He smiled too, and went back to eating. The meal passed that way, with neither of them making any effort at conversation. They were starved for silence. --- Only toward the end, as they felt themselves resting, and each of them, wrapped in the other’s quiet love, had wiped away from themselves the impure traces of the day, did they begin to speak a little.

Olivier would go to the piano. Antoinette gradually stopped playing it herself, in order to leave it to him: for it was the only recreation he had, and he threw himself into it with his whole being. He was very gifted for music: his feminine nature, better made for loving than for doing, yielded lovingly to the thoughts of the composers he played, merged with them, rendered their slightest nuances with a passionate fidelity --- as much, at least, as his frail arms and breath allowed him, broken as they were by the titanic demands of Tristan or of Beethoven’s last sonatas. So he took refuge preferably in Mozart and Gluck; and that was the music she preferred as well.

Sometimes she sang too, but very simple songs, old melodies. She had a veiled mezzo voice, deep and fragile. So shy was she that she could not sing in front of anyone; barely in front of Olivier --- her throat would close up. There was a Beethoven air set to Scottish words that she was especially fond of: the Faithful Johnie: it was calm, calm… and with a tenderness beneath!… It was like her. Olivier could not hear her sing it without tears in his eyes.

But she preferred to listen to her brother. She hurried to finish the household chores, leaving the kitchen door open so she could hear Olivier better; but despite all her precautions, he would complain impatiently that she was making noise while putting away the dishes. Then she would close the door; and when she had finished, she would come settle in a low chair --- not beside the piano (for he could not bear having anyone near him when he played) --- but by the fireplace; and there, curled into herself like a little cat, her back to the piano, her eyes fixed on the golden eyes of the hearth where a coal briquette quietly burned away, she would drift into the images of the past. When nine o’clock struck, she had to make an effort to remind Olivier that it was time to stop. It was painful to pull him, and to pull herself, away from these reveries; but Olivier still had work to do that evening and must not go to bed too late. He did not obey at once; he always needed a certain time before he could come out of the music and return in earnest to his tasks. His thoughts were floating elsewhere. The half hour would often strike before he had shaken free of the fog. Antoinette, bent over her work on the other side of the table, knew he was doing nothing; but she did not dare look too often in his direction, for fear of annoying him by seeming to watch him.

He was at that unformed age --- the blessed age --- when the days slip by in idle drifting. He had a clear brow, a girl’s eyes at once knowing and naive, often ringed with shadow, a wide mouth with full lips that seemed made for suckling, and a smile slightly crooked, vague, distracted, mischievous; too much hair, falling down to his eyes and forming almost a bun at the nape of his neck, with a wayward lock that stuck up at the back; a loose tie around his neck --- (his sister knotted it carefully for him each morning); --- a jacket whose buttons never stayed put, though she was forever sewing them back on; no cuffs; large hands on bony wrists. With a look at once wry, drowsy, and sensual, he would sit indefinitely staring into space. His wandering eyes made a circuit of Antoinette’s room --- (it was at her place that the work table was set up); --- they drifted over the small iron bed above which hung an ivory crucifix with a sprig of boxwood, --- over the portraits of their father and mother, --- over an old photograph showing the little provincial town with its tower and the mirror of its waters. When they arrived at his sister’s pale face, bent silently over her work, he was seized by an immense pity for her and anger at himself: he would then rouse himself, irritated by his own idleness; and he would work with energy, trying to make up for lost time.

On days off, he read. They each read on their own. Despite all the love they had for each other, they could not read the same book aloud together. It felt like an intrusion, a breach of intimacy. A beautiful book seemed to them a secret, to be whispered only in the silence of the heart. When a page ravished one of them, instead of reading it aloud to the other, they would pass the book across with a finger on the passage; and they would say:

--- Read this.

Then, while the other read, the one who had already read would follow, eyes bright, the emotions crossing his companion’s face; and he would enjoy them all over again alongside him.

But often, propped over their books, they were not reading at all: they were talking. Especially as the evening wore on, they felt a growing need to confide in each other, and it became easier for them to speak. Olivier had dark thoughts; and this weak creature always needed to unburden himself of his troubles by pouring them into another’s breast. He was gnawed by doubt. Antoinette had to restore his courage, to defend him against himself --- an unceasing struggle, beginning again each day. Olivier would say bitter and gloomy things; and once he had said them, he felt relief; but he did not trouble himself to consider whether they now weighed upon his sister. He realized far too late how much he was draining her: he was drawing off her strength, and infusing her with his own doubts. Antoinette showed nothing of this. Brave and cheerful by nature, she forced herself to remain cheerful in appearance, even though her cheerfulness had long since been lost. She had moments of profound exhaustion, of revolt against the life of perpetual sacrifice to which she had devoted herself. But she condemned these thoughts, she refused to analyze them; they came over her against her will, she did not accept them. Prayer came to her aid, except when the heart could not pray --- (this happens) --- when it felt as though dried up. Then there was nothing to do but wait in silence, feverish and ashamed, for grace to return. Olivier never suspected these anguishes. In those moments, Antoinette would find a pretext to withdraw, or to shut herself in her room; and she would not reappear until the crisis had passed; then she would be smiling, aching, tenderer than before, as though remorseful for having suffered.

Their rooms were adjacent. Their beds were pressed against either side of the same wall: they could speak to each other in low voices through it; and when they lay awake, soft little knocks against the wall would say:

--- Are you asleep? I’m not asleep.

The partition was so thin that they were like two friends chastely lying side by side in the same bed. But the door between their rooms was always closed at night, by an instinctive and profound sense of modesty --- a sacred feeling; --- it was left open only when Olivier was ill: which happened too often.

His fragile health was not improving. It seemed to be deteriorating further. He suffered constantly --- from his throat, his chest, his head, his heart; the slightest cold in him risked turning into bronchitis; he caught scarlet fever and nearly died of it; even when he was not ill, he showed strange symptoms of serious diseases that fortunately never erupted: he had painful points in the lung, or in the heart. One day the doctor who examined him diagnosed pericarditis or peripneumonia; and the eminent specialist consulted afterward confirmed these apprehensions. Nothing of the sort, however, came to pass. At bottom, it was above all his nerves that were sick; and we know that this kind of suffering takes the most unexpected forms; one gets off with days of anxiety. But how cruel those days were for Antoinette! How many sleepless nights! Lying in her bed, from which she often rose to listen at the door for her brother’s breathing, she was seized with terror. She thought he was going to die, she knew it, she was certain of it: she would sit up, trembling, and clasp her hands, pressing them, clenching them against her mouth so as not to cry out:

--- My God! my God! she pleaded, do not take him from me! No, this… this, you have no right!… I beg you, I beg you!… Oh, dear Maman! Come to my aid! Save him, let him live!…

She strained with her whole body.

--- Ah! to die on the way, when so much had already been accomplished, when one was on the verge of arriving, when he was about to be happy… no, that could not be, it would be too cruel!…

Olivier was not long in giving her other causes for worry.

He was profoundly honest, as she was, but weak in will and with an intelligence too free and too complex not to be somewhat murky --- skeptical, indulgent toward what it knew badly, and drawn by pleasure. Antoinette was so pure that it was a long time before she understood what was happening in her brother’s mind. She discovered it abruptly, one day.

Olivier thought she had gone out. She usually had a lesson at that hour; but at the last moment she had received a note from her pupil, informing her that her services would not be needed that day. She had felt a secret pleasure in this, even though it meant a few less francs in her meager budget; but she was very tired, and she stretched out on her bed, enjoying the thought of resting for a day without remorse. Olivier came home from school with a classmate. They settled in the next room and began to talk. Everything they said was clearly audible: they weren’t bothering to keep quiet, thinking they were alone. Antoinette listened with a smile to her brother’s cheerful voice. But soon she stopped smiling, and her blood ran cold. They were talking about crude things, with a filthy vulgarity of expression: they seemed to relish it. She could hear Olivier laughing, her little Olivier; and from his lips, which she had believed innocent, came obscene words that froze her with horror. A sharp pain pierced her to the depths of her being. It went on a long time: they could not tire of talking, and she could not stop herself from listening. At last they went out; and Antoinette was left alone. Then she wept: something had died in her; the ideal image she had formed of her brother --- of her child --- had been defiled, and this was for her a mortal suffering. She said nothing to him when they met again that evening. He saw that she had been crying, and could not discover why. He could not understand why she had changed in her manner toward him. It took some time before she regained her composure.

But the most painful blow he dealt her came one evening when he did not come home. She waited for him all night without going to bed. She suffered not only in her moral purity; she suffered in the most mysterious recesses of her heart --- those deep recesses where fearful feelings stir, over which she cast a veil, so as not to see them, a veil one is not permitted to lift.

Olivier had wanted above all to assert his independence. He came back in the morning, composing himself into an attitude of defiance, ready to answer insolently if his sister said anything to him. He slipped into the apartment on tiptoe so as not to wake her. But when he saw her --- standing there, waiting for him, pale, her eyes red from weeping; when he saw that instead of reproaching him in the least, she busied herself with him in silence, prepared his breakfast before he left for school, and said nothing, though she seemed crushed, her whole being a living reproach --- he could not hold out: he threw himself to his knees, buried his face in her dress; and they wept together. He was ashamed of himself, sickened by the night he had just spent; he felt degraded. He tried to speak: she stopped him, placing her hand over his mouth; and he kissed that hand. They said nothing more: they understood each other.

Olivier swore to himself that he would never again make Antoinette suffer, and that he would be what she expected him to be. But she could not, do what she might, forget her wound so quickly: she was like a convalescent. There was a constraint between them. Her love was just as strong as before; but she had seen something in her brother’s soul that was now foreign to her, and that she feared.

She was all the more shaken by what she glimpsed in Olivier’s heart because, at the same period, she had to endure the pursuit of certain men. When she came home in the evening at nightfall, and especially when she was obliged to go out after dinner to pick up or return some copying work, the dread of being accosted, followed --- as would happen --- and of hearing coarse propositions made to her was an unbearable anguish. Whenever she could bring her brother with her, she did so, on the pretext of forcing him to take some air; but he was not willing, and she did not dare insist; she did not want to disturb his work. Her virginal, provincial soul could not reconcile itself to these ways. Paris at night was for her a dark forest where she felt hunted by vile beasts; and she trembled at the thought of leaving shelter. Yet she had to go out. It took her a long time to make her peace with it; and she always suffered from it. And when she thought that her little Olivier would be --- perhaps already was --- like one of those men who hunted her, she had difficulty, on returning home, in offering him her hand to wish him good night. He could not imagine what she might have against him, and she reproached herself for it.

Without being very pretty, she had great charm, and attracted notice, though she did nothing to seek it. Very simply dressed, almost always in mourning, not very tall, slight, with a delicate air, speaking little, gliding silently through crowds while trying to escape attention, she held it in spite of herself by the expression of deep sweetness in her tired gentle eyes and her small pure mouth. She sometimes perceived that she pleased people: it embarrassed her --- and pleased her all the same. Who can say how much that is gently, chastely coquettish may enter, without her knowing it, into a quiet soul that feels the sympathetic contact of other souls? It showed in a slight awkwardness of gesture, a timid sidelong glance; and it was at once charming and touching. This flutter was one more attraction. She stirred desires; and, since she was a poor girl with no protector in life, people did not hesitate to tell her so.

She sometimes went to the salon of wealthy Israelites, the Nathans, who had taken an interest in her after meeting her at the home of a mutual acquaintance where she gave lessons; and she had not even been able to avoid attending their evening gatherings once or twice, despite her shyness. Monsieur Alfred Nathan was a well-known professor in Paris, an eminent scholar who was at the same time very social, with that baroque mixture of learning and frivolity so common in Jewish society. In Madame Nathan’s home, genuine benevolence and excessive worldliness were blended in equal proportions. Both had lavished on Antoinette demonstrations of noisy sympathy --- sincere, though intermittent. --- Antoinette had generally found more kindness among Jews than among her own coreligionists. They have many faults; but they have one great quality --- perhaps the foremost of all: they are alive, they are human; nothing human is alien to them, they take an interest in those who live. Even when they lack a truly warm sympathy, they have a perpetual curiosity that leads them to seek out souls and minds of some worth, however different these may be from their own. Not that they generally do very much to help: for they are pulled by too many interests at once, and more given over than anyone to worldly vanities, while professing themselves free of them. At least they do something; and that is a great deal amid the apathy of contemporary society. They are a ferment of action within it, a leaven of life. --- Antoinette, who had run up against a wall of icy indifference among Catholics, felt more than anyone the value of the interest, however superficial, that the Nathans showed her. Madame Nathan had caught a glimpse of Antoinette’s life of devotion; she was sensitive to her physical and moral charm; and she had decided to take her under her wing. She had no children; but she loved youth, and she often gathered young people around her; she had insisted that Antoinette come too, that she emerge from her isolation and find some diversion. And since it was easy for her to guess that Antoinette’s shyness was in part due to the poverty she was in, she had even wanted to offer her some pretty dresses, which Antoinette’s pride had refused; but the kind protectress had managed it in such a way as to find a means of forcing her to accept a few of those small gifts that are so dear to innocent feminine vanity. Antoinette was at once grateful and embarrassed. She forced herself to come, from time to time, to Madame Nathan’s evenings; and, being young, she found pleasure in them, despite everything.

But in this somewhat mixed society, where many young men came, Madame Nathan’s little protégée, poor and pretty, had at once become the target of two or three rogues who had set their sights on her with perfect assurance. They were counting in advance on her timidity. She had even become the subject of wagers among them.

One day she received anonymous letters --- or, more precisely, letters signed with a noble pseudonym --- that made a declaration to her: love letters at first, flattering, pressing, fixing an appointment; then, very quickly, bolder ones, attempting threats, and soon insults, base slanders: they stripped her bare, catalogued the secrets of her body, soiled them with their coarse lust; they tried to play on Antoinette’s naivety by making her fear a public scandal if she did not come to the appointed meeting. She wept with grief at having been able to attract such proposals; and these insults seared the pride of her body and her heart. She did not know how to get out of it. She did not want to speak of it to her brother: she knew he would suffer too much, and that he would give the affair an even graver character. She had no friends. Go to the police? She refused, out of fear of scandal. Yet it had to end. She felt that her silence would not be sufficient to defend her, that the wretch who was pursuing her would be tenacious, and that he would go right to the extreme limit where he sensed there was danger for him.

He had just sent her a kind of ultimatum, ordering her to be at the Musée du Luxembourg the following day. She went. --- By tormenting her mind at length, she had come to convince herself that her persecutor must have met her at Madame Nathan’s. Certain words in one of the letters alluded to something that could only have happened there. She asked Madame Nathan to do her a great service: to accompany her by carriage to the door of the museum and to wait for her a moment. She went in. Before the agreed-upon painting, the blackmailer approached her, triumphant, and began speaking to her with affected courtesy. She looked at him steadily, in silence. When he had finished, he asked her in a joking manner why she was looking at him like that. She replied:

--- I am looking at a coward.

He was not thrown off by so little, and began to become familiar. She said:

--- You wanted to threaten me with a scandal. I have come to offer you that scandal. Do you want it!

She was trembling all over, speaking loudly, and showed herself ready to draw attention to them both. People were looking at them. He sensed that she would stop at nothing. He lowered his tone. She flung at him, one last time:

--- You are a coward!

and turned her back on him.

Not wanting to appear beaten, he followed her. She left the museum with the man at her heels. She walked straight toward the waiting carriage, pulled open the door abruptly; and her pursuer found himself face to face with Madame Nathan, who recognized him and greeted him by name. He lost his composure and slipped away.

Antoinette had to tell the story to her companion. She did so reluctantly, and with extreme reserve. It was painful for her to let an outsider into the secret of her inner life and the sufferings of her wounded modesty. Madame Nathan reproached her for not having warned her sooner. Antoinette begged her to say nothing to anyone. The affair rested there; and Antoinette’s friend did not even need to close her salon to the individual: for he was careful not to come back.

At about the same time, Antoinette suffered another grief, of a very different kind.

A thoroughly decent man, somewhere in his forties, who held a consular post in the Far East and had returned to France for a few months’ leave, met Antoinette at the Nathans’ and fell in love with her. The meeting had been somewhat arranged in advance, without Antoinette’s knowledge, by Mme Nathan, who had taken it into her head to find her young friend a husband. He was Jewish as well. He was not handsome. He was no longer young. He was a little bald and slightly stooped; but he had kind eyes, an affectionate manner, and a heart that knew how to suffer alongside others, having suffered himself. Antoinette was no longer the romantic young girl she had once been, the pampered child who had dreamed of life as a pleasant walk taken on a fine day with a sweetheart; she saw it now as a hard battle that had to be fought anew each day, without ever resting, on pain of losing in an instant all the ground won inch by inch through years of exhaustion; and she thought how sweet it would be to lean on a friend’s arm, to share her burden with him, and to be able to close her eyes for a little while as he kept watch over her. She knew it was a dream; but she had not yet had the courage to give it up entirely. At bottom, she was not unaware that a girl without a dowry had nothing to hope for in the world where she lived. The old French bourgeoisie is known the world over for the sordid spirit of self-interest it brings to marriage. Jews are less basely greedy for money. It is not rare to see among them a wealthy young man who wants to choose a poor girl, or a young woman of means who passionately seeks a man of intelligence. But among the French Catholic provincial bourgeois, almost always the purse seeks the purse. And to what end, poor wretches? Their needs are modest; all they know how to do is eat, yawn, sleep --- and economize. Antoinette knew them well. She had watched them since childhood. She had seen them through the eyes of wealth, and through the eyes of poverty. She had no more illusions about them, or about what she could expect from them. And so the approach of the man who asked her to marry him came to her with an unexpected sweetness. Without at first thinking that she loved him, she felt herself gradually filled with a deep gratitude and tenderness toward him. She would have accepted his proposal, had it not meant following him to the colonies and thereby leaving her brother. She refused; and her suitor, though he understood the nobility of her reasons, did not forgive her for them: the selfishness of love does not allow that one should fail to sacrifice to it even the virtues it most prizes in the beloved. He stopped seeing her; after he had gone, he stopped writing; she had no further news of him, until the day she learned --- five or six months later --- from a wedding announcement, addressed in his own hand, that he had married another woman.

This was a great sorrow for Antoinette. Wounded once more, she offered up her suffering to God: she wished to persuade herself that she had been justly punished for having lost sight, for a moment, of her one true task, which was to devote herself to her brother; and she immersed herself in it more and more completely.

She withdrew entirely from society. She had even stopped going to the Nathans’, who were somewhat cool toward her since she had refused the match they had arranged: they too had not accepted her reasons. Mme Nathan, who had decreed in advance that this marriage would take place and that it would be perfect, had felt her pride wounded when it did not come to pass through Antoinette’s fault. She found her scruples entirely estimable, to be sure, but excessively sentimental; and from one day to the next she had lost interest in this little goose. Her need to do good for people with or without their consent had, besides, just fixed itself upon another protégée, who was for the time being absorbing all the interest and devotion she had to spend.

Olivier knew nothing of the painful dramas unfolding in his sister’s heart. He was a sentimental and light-natured boy who lived in his reveries. It was precarious to count on him for anything, despite his quick and charming mind and his heart, which was a treasury of tenderness, like Antoinette’s. Constantly, he compromised months of effort through inconsistencies, fits of discouragement, bouts of idleness, and infatuations of the mind in which he lost his time and his strength. He became smitten with pretty faces glimpsed in passing, with flirtatious young girls with whom he had spoken once at a gathering and who paid him no attention whatever. He would become infatuated with a book, a poet, a musician, and immerse himself in it for months at a time, exclusively and to the detriment of his studies. He had to be watched without cease, and with great care that he not notice, for fear of wounding him. Impetuous decisions were always to be feared. He had that feverish over-excitement, that lack of equilibrium, that restless trembling which one often finds in those whom tuberculosis has in its sights. The doctor had not concealed the danger from Antoinette. This already sickly plant, transplanted from the provinces to Paris, would have needed fresh air and light. Antoinette could not give these to him. They did not have enough money to leave Paris during the holidays. The rest of the year they were taken up, all week long, by their work; and on Sundays they were so tired that they had no desire to go out, except to the concert.

On certain summer Sundays, however, Antoinette would make the effort and drag Olivier out into the woods nearby, toward Chaville or Saint-Cloud. But the woods were full of noisy couples, café-concert songs, and greasy paper: this was not the divine solitude that restores and purifies. And in the evening, coming home, there was the crush of trains, the suffocating press in the wretched suburban carriages, low and narrow and dark, the coarseness of certain scenes, the noise, the laughter, the singing, the stench, the tobacco smoke. Antoinette and Olivier, neither of whom had popular souls, came back disgusted and demoralized. Olivier would beg Antoinette not to begin these outings again; and Antoinette no longer had the heart to do so, for a while. She persisted nevertheless, though it was even more disagreeable for her than for Olivier; but she believed it was necessary for her brother’s health. So she obliged him to go out walking again. These new attempts were no more successful; and Olivier reproached her bitterly for them. Then they would stay shut up in the stifling city; and from their prison yard they would sigh after the fields.

The final year of studies had arrived. The examinations for the École Normale were at the end of it. It was time. Antoinette felt deeply weary. She was counting on success: her brother had every advantage. At the lycée he was regarded as one of the best candidates; and all his professors agreed in praising his work and his intelligence, apart from a certain undisciplined quality of mind that made it difficult for him to submit to any plan whatsoever. But the burden of responsibility weighing on Olivier was so crushing that it robbed him of his faculties as the examination drew nearer. Extreme fatigue, the fear of failing, and a morbid timidity paralyzed him in advance. He trembled at the thought of appearing in public before his examiners. He had always suffered from his shyness: in class, he would blush and feel his throat tighten when he was called upon to speak; in the early days it was all he could do to answer when his name was called. It was even far easier for him to respond to an unexpected question than when he knew in advance that he was about to be called upon: then he would grow sick with dread; his mind would not stop working, rehearsing every detail of what was about to happen; and the longer he had to wait, the more completely it obsessed him. One might say that there was no examination he had not sat at least twice: for he would sit it in dreams, in the nights before, and expend all his energy there; so that none remained for the actual examination.

But he did not even reach that terrible oral, whose very thought gave him cold sweats in the night. For the written examination, given a philosophy topic that in ordinary times would have engrossed him, he could not manage to write even two pages in six hours. During the first hours his mind was a blank; he could think of nothing, nothing at all. It was like a black wall against which he kept throwing himself. Then, an hour before the end of the paper, the wall cracked, and a few rays of light broke through the fissures. He wrote a few excellent lines --- but not enough to place him. At the dejection he showed coming out of that ordeal, Antoinette foresaw the inevitable failure, and it crushed her as utterly as it crushed him; but she did not show it. She had, even in the most desperate situations, an inexhaustible power of hope.

Olivier failed.

He was devastated. Antoinette pretended to smile, as if it were nothing serious; but her lips were trembling. She consoled her brother, told him it was a stroke of bad luck easily remedied, that he would surely pass the following year, and with a better ranking. She did not tell him how much she had needed him to succeed this year, how worn out she felt in body and soul, how frightened she was of not being able to endure another year like this one. And yet it had to be endured. If she were to disappear before Olivier had passed, he would never have the courage to continue the struggle alone: life would devour him.

She concealed her fatigue from him. She even redoubled her efforts. She drew on her own reserves to provide him with a few diversions during the holidays, so that when classes resumed he might take up his work again with greater strength and confidence. But when the term began, her small reserve was depleted; and on top of everything, she lost certain lessons that had been her most reliable income.

Another year! The two of them were stretched to the breaking point in sight of the final trial. Above all, they had to live, and find other resources. Antoinette accepted a position as a governess being offered to her in Germany, through the Nathans. It was the last resort she would have chosen; but there was no other for the moment, and she could not wait. She had not left her brother for a single day in six years, and she could not even conceive what her life would be now without seeing and hearing him each day. Olivier could not think of it without terror; but he dared say nothing: this misery was his fault; had he passed, Antoinette would not have been reduced to this extremity; he had no right to oppose it, to weigh in his own grief: she alone must decide.

They spent the last days together in a mute sorrow, as though one of them were about to die; they would go and hide when their pain grew too strong. Antoinette sought guidance in Olivier’s eyes. Had he said to her:

--- Don’t go!

she would not have gone, even though she had to go. Until the very last moment, in the cab carrying them both to the Gare de l’Est, she was on the verge of abandoning her resolution: she felt she no longer had the strength to see it through. One word from him, one word!… But he did not say it. He braced himself as she did. --- She made him promise to write to her every day, to hide nothing from her, and to bring her back at the slightest alarm.

She left. While Olivier returned, his heart frozen, to the lycée dormitory where he had agreed to board, the train bore Antoinette away, aching and numb with cold. Eyes open in the night, they both felt with each passing minute the distance between them growing; and they called out to each other in whispers.

Antoinette was terrified of the world she was entering. She had changed greatly in six years. She who had once been so bold, whom nothing had intimidated, had grown so accustomed to silence and isolation that breaking out of them was a torment for her. The laughing, talkative, cheerful Antoinette of happier days was dead along with those days. Misfortune had made her wild. No doubt, from living with Olivier, she had in the end absorbed the contagion of his shyness. Except with her brother, she found it difficult to speak. Everything startled her: a visit filled her with apprehension. She felt a nervous anguish, then, at the thought that she must now live among strangers, converse with them, be constantly on stage. The poor girl had no more vocation for teaching than her brother: she carried it out conscientiously, but without belief in it, and she could not be sustained by any sense of the usefulness of her task. She had been made for loving, not for teaching. And of her love, no one took any notice.

Nowhere did she find less use for it than in her new position, in Germany. The Grünebaums, in whose household she was tasked with teaching French to the children, showed her not the slightest interest. They were haughty and overly familiar at once, indifferent and intrusive; they paid reasonably well — and in return, they regarded anyone who received their money as beholden to them, and believed themselves entitled to do as they pleased with such a person. They treated Antoinette like a kind of servant, a slightly more elevated one, and allowed her almost no freedom. She did not even have a room of her own: she slept in a small cabinet adjoining the children’s bedroom, its door left open at night. She was never alone. No one respected her need to retreat into herself from time to time — that sacred right every human being has to an inner solitude. Her one happiness was to find herself again, in her mind, with her brother, to converse with him; she seized every spare moment she could. But even those were disputed. The instant she wrote a word, someone would hover around her in the room and question her about what she was writing. When she read a letter, they asked what was in it; with a mocking familiarity, they inquired after “the little brother.” She was forced to hide. One would blush to recount the expedients she was sometimes reduced to, and the cramped corners where she had to shut herself away, to read Olivier’s letters unseen. If she left a letter lying in her room, she could be certain it would be read; and since she had no furniture with a lock, apart from her trunk, she was obliged to carry on her person every paper she did not want read — they were forever rummaging through her belongings and into her heart, straining to pick the locks of her private thoughts. Not that the Grünebaums were genuinely curious about her. They simply felt she belonged to them, since they were paying her. There was no malice in it, really: indiscretion was with them an ingrained habit; they thought nothing of practicing it on one another.

Nothing could have been more intolerable to Antoinette than this surveillance, this absence of moral modesty, which allowed her not a single hour of the day to escape prying eyes. The slightly haughty reserve she opposed to the Grünebaums wounded them. Naturally, they found high-minded reasons to justify their coarse curiosity and to condemn Antoinette’s presumption in trying to evade it: “It was their duty, they thought, to know the private life of a young woman who lived under their roof, who was part of their household, and to whom they had entrusted the education of their children: they were responsible for her.” --- (This is what so many housemistresses say of their servants, whose “responsibility” never extends to sparing those poor souls a single hardship or indignity, but confines itself strictly to forbidding them any pleasure whatsoever.) --- “The fact that Antoinette refused to acknowledge this duty of conscience proved, they concluded, that she did not feel entirely above reproach: an honest girl has nothing to hide.”

And so there settled around Antoinette a persecution that never let up, against which she kept herself in constant defense, and which made her appear even more cold and self-contained than usual.

Her brother wrote to her every day, letters of twelve pages; and she managed, every day, to write to him as well, if only two or three lines. Olivier tried hard to be a brave little man and not to show too much of his grief. But he was dying of loneliness. His life had always been so inseparably bound to his sister’s that now that she had been torn away, he felt as if he had lost half of himself: he no longer knew what to do with his arms, his legs, his thoughts; he no longer knew how to take a walk, how to play the piano, how to work, or how to do anything, or even how to dream --- except of her. He would hurl himself at his books from morning to night; but nothing he did was any good: his mind was elsewhere; he was suffering, or he was thinking of her, thinking of yesterday’s letter; eyes fixed on the clock, he waited for today’s letter; and when it arrived, his fingers trembled with joy --- with fear, too --- as he tore open the envelope. No love letter ever caused in a lover’s hands such a trembling of anxious tenderness. He hid, as Antoinette did, to read those letters; he carried them all on his person; and at night, the most recent one lay under his pillow; he would touch it from time to time to make sure it was still there, during the long sleepless hours when he lay dreaming of his dear little sister. How far away from her he felt! The feeling weighed on him most heavily when a delay in the post brought him Antoinette’s letter two days after she had sent it. Two days, two nights between them!… He exaggerated both the time and the distance, all the more so because he had never traveled. His imagination ran: “God! If she fell ill! She could die before he could ever see her again… Why had she written only a few lines yesterday?… What if she were ill?… Yes, she was ill…” He could hardly breathe. --- More often still, he was seized with terror of dying far from her, alone, surrounded by these indifferent people, in this forbidding lycée, in this bleak Paris. He thought about it so much that he began to feel genuinely sick… “What if he wrote and asked her to come back?…” --- But he blushed at his own cowardice. Besides, the moment he sat down to write to her, it was such happiness to be with her again that for a moment he forgot what he was suffering. He had the illusion of seeing her, of hearing her: he told her everything; he had never spoken to her so intimately, so passionately, when they were together; he called her “my faithful one, my brave one, my dear good beloved little sister, whom I love so much.” They were true love letters.

They bathed Antoinette in their tenderness; they were the only breathable air of her days. When they did not arrive in the morning at the expected hour, she was miserable. It happened two or three times that the Grünebaums, whether from indifference or --- who knows? --- from a kind of petty malice, forgot to give them to her until evening, once even until the following morning: she came down with a fever each time. --- On New Year’s Day, both of the children had the same idea without having consulted each other: they surprised each other by each sending a long telegram --- (it cost quite a lot) --- which arrived for them both at the same hour. --- Olivier continued to consult Antoinette about his work and his doubts; Antoinette advised him, sustained him, breathed her own strength into him.

She had barely enough of it left for herself. She was suffocating in this foreign country where she knew no one, where no one took any interest in her, except for a professor’s wife who had recently settled in the town and who felt equally out of place there. The good woman was fairly maternal, and sympathized with the pain of these two children who loved each other and had been separated --- (for she had drawn part of Antoinette’s story out of her) --- ; but she was so loud, so commonplace, she lacked tact and discretion so entirely --- though quite innocently --- that Antoinette’s aristocratic little soul drew back, alarmed. Unable to confide in anyone, she stored up all her worries inside herself: it was a very heavy weight; at moments she felt she was about to fall; but she pressed her lips together and set herself walking again. Her health was suffering: she was growing very thin. Her brother’s letters grew more and more discouraged. In a moment of despair, he wrote:

“Come back, come back, come back!…”

But the letter was no sooner written than he was ashamed of it; and he wrote another, begging Antoinette to tear up the first and think no more about it. He even affected a cheerfulness, and pretended he had no need of his sister. His touchy pride suffered at the thought that anyone might believe him incapable of getting along without her.

Antoinette was not deceived; she read all his thoughts; but she did not know what to do. One day, she was on the point of leaving; she went to the station to find out the exact time of the train to Paris. And then she told herself it was madness: the money she was earning here was what paid for Olivier’s boarding school; as long as they could both hold on, they must hold on. She no longer had the energy to make a decision: in the mornings, her courage revived; but as the evening shadows drew near, her strength failed, and she thought of running away. She was homesick --- homesick for that country which had been so harsh to her, but where all the relics of her past lay buried --- she was nostalgic for the language her brother spoke, the language in which her love for him found expression.

It was then that a troupe of French actors passed through the small German town. Antoinette, who rarely went to the theater --- (she had neither the time nor the inclination) --- was seized this time by an irresistible need to hear her language spoken, to take refuge in France. The rest is known. There were no seats left at the theater; she encountered the young musician Jean-Christophe, whom she did not know, but who, seeing her disappointment, offered to share a box he had at his disposal: she accepted without thinking. Her presence with Christophe set the small town gossiping; and these malicious rumors promptly reached the ears of the Grünebaums, who were already disposed to entertain every unflattering assumption about the young Frenchwoman, and who were exasperated with Christophe on account of certain circumstances we have recounted elsewhere, and who gave Antoinette abrupt notice to leave.

This chaste and easily blushing soul, wholly wrapped and preserved from any soiling of thought by her fraternal love, felt she would die of shame when she understood what she was being accused of. Not for one instant did she hold it against Christophe. She knew he was as innocent as she, and that if he had done her harm, it was in meaning to do her good: she was grateful to him. She knew nothing about him, except that he was a musician, and that people spoke very ill of him; but in her inexperience of life and of men, she had a natural intuition of souls, sharpened by hardship, which had led her to recognize in her neighbor at the theater --- ill-mannered, a little mad --- a candor equal to her own, and a virile goodness whose mere memory did her good. The ill things she had heard said of him did not touch the trust Christophe had inspired in her. Herself a victim, she did not doubt that he was another victim, suffering as she did, and longer than she had, from the malice of these people who were now outraging her. And since she had formed the habit of forgetting herself in order to think of others, the thought of what Christophe must have suffered distracted her a little from her own grief. For nothing in the world would she have sought to see him again, or to write to him: a feeling of modesty and pride forbade it. She told herself he was unaware of the harm he had caused her, and in her goodness she hoped he would remain unaware of it always.

She left. As chance would have it, an hour outside the town, the train carrying her away crossed paths with the one bringing Christophe back from a neighboring town where he had spent the day.

From their carriages, which stood side by side for a few minutes, they saw each other in the silence of the night, and they did not speak. What could they have said, after all, but commonplace words? Such words would have profaned the indefinable feeling of shared compassion and mysterious sympathy that had arisen between them, resting on nothing but the certainty of their inner vision. In that last moment when, strangers to each other, they gazed across the gap, they each saw the other as none of those who lived alongside them had ever seen them. Everything passes: the memory of words, of kisses, of the embrace of bodies in love; but the contact of souls that have once touched and recognized each other amid the crowd of ephemeral forms is never effaced. Antoinette carried it away into the secret of her heart --- that heart wrapped in sadness, but at whose center smiled a veiled light that seemed to radiate softly from the earth, a pale and tender light, like the one that bathes the Elysian Shades of Gluck.

She saw Olivier again. It was time she came back. He had just fallen ill; and this nervous, tormented little being, who trembled at the thought of illness when she was not there --- now that he was genuinely suffering, refused to write it to his sister, so as not to worry her. But in his mind he called to her, he implored her as if she were a miracle.

When the miracle occurred, he was lying in the lycée infirmary, feverish and half-dreaming. He did not cry out when he saw her. How many times had he had the illusion of seeing her walk in!… He sat up in his bed, mouth open, trembling for fear it was yet another illusion. And when she was seated on the bed beside him, when she had taken him in her arms, when he had taken her in his arms, when he felt beneath his lips her delicate cheek, in his hands her hands chilled by the night journey, when at last he was certain that this was truly his sister, his little sister, he began to cry. It was all he ever knew how to do: he had always remained “the little canary” he had been as a child. He held her close, afraid she might slip away from him again. How changed they both were! What a sad look they both had!… No matter. They had found each other again: everything grew luminous once more, the infirmary, the lycée, the gray day; they held each other, and they would not let go. Before she could say a word, he made her swear she would not leave again. He had no need to make her swear it: no, she would not leave again, they had been too miserable apart from each other; their mother had been right: anything was better than separation. Even poverty, even death, as long as they were together.

They hastened to rent an apartment. They would have liked to take back their old one, as ugly as it was; but it was already occupied. The new lodging also looked out onto a courtyard; but over a wall one could make out the top of a small acacia, and they immediately attached themselves to it, as to a friend from the countryside, a prisoner like them among the cobblestones of the city. Olivier quickly recovered his health, or what one had grown accustomed to calling that in his case --- (for what counted as health in him would have seemed like illness in someone stronger.) --- Antoinette’s sad stay in Germany had at least brought her some money; and the translation of a German book, which a publisher agreed to take on, provided more. Their material worries were set aside for a time; and everything would be fine, as long as Olivier passed his exam at the end of the year. --- But what if he didn’t?

The obsession with the exam returned as soon as they had grown used again to the sweetness of being together. They avoided talking about it; but try as they might, they always came back to it. The fixed idea pursued them everywhere, even when they tried to distract themselves: at a concert, it would surge up abruptly in the middle of a piece; at night, when they woke, it opened inside them like an abyss. To Olivier’s burning desire to relieve his sister and to respond to the sacrifice she had made of her youth for him was added his terror of military service, which he could not avoid if he failed --- (this was at a time when admission to the grandes Écoles still served as an exemption.) --- He felt an invincible revulsion at the physical and moral promiscuity, at the kind of intellectual degradation he saw, rightly or wrongly, in barracks life. Everything in him that was aristocratic and virginal rebelled against this obligation: he was not sure he would not have preferred death. This is a feeling one may be permitted to mock, or even to condemn, in the name of a social morality that has become a faith for the time being; but those who deny it are blind: there is nothing more profound than this suffering of moral solitude violated by the generous and coarse communism of today.

The examination came around again. Olivier nearly could not take part: he was unwell, and he was so afraid of the anguish through which he would have to pass, admitted or not, that he had almost wished to fall completely ill. He did reasonably well this time in the written portion. But it was hard to wait for the results of the admissibility round. Following the time-honored customs of the country of the Revolution --- which is the most hidebound country in the world --- the examinations took place in July, during the most torrid days of the year: as if there were a settled intention to finish off the unfortunate candidates, already crushed by the preparation of monstrous syllabuses of which not one of their judges knew a tenth part. The results of the written work were announced on the day after the fourteenth of July, with its popular tumult and its gaiety so painful for those who are not in a festive mood and who need silence. On the square beside the house, fairground stalls had been set up; shooting galleries crackled; steam merry-go-rounds bellowed; barrel organs brayed from noon to midnight. The imbecile din lasted eight days. Then a president of the Republic, to maintain his popularity, granted the revelers an additional half week. It cost him nothing: he could not hear them. But Olivier and Antoinette, their minds hammered and bruised by the noise, forced to keep their windows shut and to stifle in their rooms, stopping their ears, trying in vain to escape the throbbing obsession of those idiotic refrains, ground out from morning to night, which entered their heads like knife blows, writhed in pain.

The oral examinations began almost immediately after the admissibility results. Olivier begged Antoinette not to attend. She waited at the door --- more nervous than he was. Naturally, he never told her when he felt he had done well. He would torment her with what he had said, or with what he had not said.

The day of the final result arrived. The names of successful candidates were posted in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. Antoinette refused to let Olivier go alone. As they left their building, they thought, without saying so, that when they returned they would know, and that perhaps they would then regret this moment of fear, in which at least they still had hope. When they caught sight of the Sorbonne, they felt their legs give way. Antoinette, who was so brave, said to her brother:

--- Not so fast, I beg you…

Olivier looked at his sister, who was trying to smile. He said to her:

--- Do you want us to sit for a moment on that bench?

He would have liked not to go through with it. But after a moment she squeezed his hand and said:

--- It’s nothing, my dear, let’s go on.

They did not find the list right away. They read through several on which the name Jeannin did not appear. When they finally saw it, they did not understand at first; they read it again several times, they could not believe it. Then, when they were quite sure it was true, that Jeannin was him, that Jeannin had passed, they had not a single word; they bolted for home: she had seized his arm, she held him by the wrist, he leaned on her; they were almost running, seeing nothing around them; crossing the boulevard, they nearly got run over. They kept saying to each other:

--- My dear!… My darling!…

They rushed up their stairs four at a time. Back in their room, they threw themselves into each other’s arms. Antoinette took her brother by the hand and led him before the photographs of their father and mother, which she kept near her bed, in a corner of her room that was like a sanctuary; she knelt with him before the photographs; and they prayed and wept quietly.

Antoinette wanted to have a nice little dinner brought in; but they could not touch it: they were not hungry. They spent the evening with Olivier at his sister’s feet, or in her lap, letting himself be coddled like a small child. They said almost nothing. They no longer even had the strength to be happy; they were both shattered. They went to bed before nine o’clock and slept a leaden sleep.

The next morning, Antoinette felt cruelly ill in her head, but such a weight had been lifted from her heart! It seemed to Olivier that he was breathing freely, for the first time. He had been saved; she had saved him; she had accomplished her task; and he had not been unworthy of what his sister had expected of him!… --- For the first time in years, years, they gave themselves up to idleness. Until noon they stayed in bed, talking to each other from one bed to the other, the door between their rooms open; they could see each other in a mirror, could see their happy faces, swollen with exhaustion; they smiled at each other, blew kisses, dozed off again, watched each other sleep, aching in every limb, barely able to exchange more than tender monosyllables.

Antoinette had never stopped saving penny by penny, so as to have a small reserve in case of illness. She had not told her brother about the surprise she had in store for him. The day after his admission, she announced that they were going to spend a month in Switzerland, to reward themselves both for their years of hardship. Now that Olivier was assured of spending three years at the École Normale at the state’s expense, and of finding a position when he came out, they could afford to be extravagant and spend everything they had set aside. Olivier cried out with joy at the news. Antoinette was even happier than he was --- happy in her brother’s happiness --- happy to think that she was at last going to see the countryside again, for which she had been longing.

The preparations for the journey were a great undertaking but a pleasure at every moment. August was already well advanced when they left. They were unaccustomed to traveling. Olivier could not sleep the night before. And he did not sleep on the train either. All day long he had been afraid of missing it. They had hurried feverishly, had been jostled in the station, and were packed into a second-class compartment where they could not even lean on the armrests to sleep --- (this being one of those privileges of which the French railway companies, so eminently democratic, take pains to deprive travelers who are not rich, so that travelers who are rich may have the pleasure of thinking they alone enjoy it.) --- Olivier did not close his eyes for an instant: he was still not entirely sure he was on the right train, and he kept watch for the name of every station. Antoinette dozed fitfully and kept waking; the jolting of the carriage made her head roll. Olivier looked at her by the light of the funereal lamp that glows at the top of those traveling sarcophagi; and he was suddenly struck by how drawn her features had become. The hollows around her eyes had deepened; her mouth, with its childlike curve, was parted in weariness; her complexion had turned sallow, and small creases furrowed her cheeks here and there, where the marks of sorrowful days of mourning and disillusionment were visible. She looked older, and ill. --- And indeed she was so tired! If she had dared, she would have put off their departure. But she had not wanted to spoil her brother’s pleasure; she wanted to persuade herself that her malaise was merely fatigue, and that the countryside would restore her. Ah, how she dreaded falling ill along the way! --- She became aware that he was watching her; and, tearing herself painfully from the torpor that overwhelmed her, she opened her eyes --- those eyes always so young, so clear, so limpid, across which from time to time an involuntary anguish passed, like clouds over a small lake. He asked her very quietly, with a tender concern, how she was: she squeezed his hand and assured him she was well. A loving word revived her.

As it happened, from the reddening dawn over the pale countryside, between Dôle and Pontarlier, the sight of the fields awakening, the cheerful sun rising from the earth --- the sun escaped, like them, from the prison of streets, dusty houses, and the thick fumes of Paris --- the shivering meadows wrapped in the light mist of their own white breath; the smallest details of the route: a little village steeple, a glimpse of water, a blue line of hills floating on the horizon; the thin, touching angelus that the wind carried from far away during a stop in the drowsing countryside; the grave silhouettes of a herd of cows dreaming on an embankment above the road --- all of it absorbed Antoinette’s attention as much as her brother’s, all of it seemed new to them. They were like two parched trees drinking in the rain from the sky with delight.

Then came, in the morning, the Swiss customs post, where they had to get off. A small station in open countryside. One felt slightly queasy from the bad night, and shivered in the damp freshness of the dawn; but it was calm, the sky was clear, the breath of the meadows rose all around, flowed into your mouth, over your tongue, down your throat, to the depths of your chest, like a little stream; and one took, standing at a table out of doors, the hot coffee that revives you, with the creamy milk, mild as the sky, smelling sweetly of grass and wildflowers.

They boarded the Swiss carriages, whose arrangement, new to them, gave them a childlike pleasure. But how tired Antoinette was! She could not account for the malaise that held her. Why did she see that everything around her was so lovely, so interesting, and yet find so little pleasure in it deep down? Was this not everything she had dreamed of for years: a beautiful journey, her brother at her side, the worries about the future banished, the dear countryside?… What was wrong with her? She reproached herself for it and forced herself to admire, to share in her brother’s naive joy.

They stopped at Thun. They were to leave the next day for the mountains. But during the night at the hotel, Antoinette was seized by a severe fever, with vomiting and headaches. Olivier panicked at once and spent a night of anxious watching. A doctor had to be called in the morning --- (an unforeseen added expense, and not a negligible one for their small purse.) --- The doctor found nothing grave for the moment, but extreme fatigue and a ruined constitution. There was no question of continuing the journey right away. The doctor forbade Antoinette to get up for the entire day; and he hinted that they might have to stay in Thun longer still. They were devastated --- all the same, glad to have gotten off so lightly, after what they had been afraid of. But it was hard to have come so far only to remain shut up in a poor hotel room, into which the burning sun blazed as in a greenhouse. Antoinette insisted that her brother go for a walk. He took a few steps outside the hotel; he saw the Aar in its beautiful green dress, and in the distant sky a white summit floating there: it overwhelmed him with joy; but that joy, he could not bear it alone. He hurried back to his sister’s room and told her with emotion what he had just seen; and when she expressed surprise that he had come back so soon, and encouraged him to go out again, he said, as he had once said on returning from the concert at the Châtelet:

--- No, no, it is too beautiful: it hurts me to see it without you.

This feeling was nothing new to them: they knew they needed both of them together in order to be wholly themselves. But it was always good to hear it said. That tender word did Antoinette more good than all the medicines. She was smiling now, happy and languid. --- And, after a good night’s sleep, though it was not very prudent to set off already, she decided they would slip away early, without telling the doctor, who would only try to keep them longer. The pure air and the pleasure of seeing all these beautiful things together meant she suffered no ill effects from this rashness, and they arrived, without further mishap, at the destination of their journey --- a village in the mountains, above the lake, some distance from Spiez.

They spent three or four weeks there, in a small hotel. Antoinette had no new attacks of fever; but she never really recovered. She always felt a heaviness in her head, an unbearable weight, and constant malaise. Olivier often questioned her about her health: he would have liked to see her less pale; but he was intoxicated by the beauty of the countryside, and, instinctively, he kept all sad thoughts at bay; when she assured him that she was perfectly well, he wanted to believe it was true --- even though he knew otherwise. Besides, she took deep pleasure in her brother’s exuberance, in the air, and above all in the rest. How good it was to rest at last, after those terrible years!

Olivier wanted to draw her along on his walks; she would have been happy to share his rambles; but several times, after setting bravely off, she had been forced to stop after twenty minutes, breathless and with her heart failing. So he would make his excursions alone --- harmless ascents, but ones that kept her in anguish until he returned. Or else they went for short walks together: she leaning on his arm, walking in small steps, talking as they went, he especially having grown very talkative, laughing, sharing his plans, telling funny stories. From the path halfway up the slope above the valley, they watched the white clouds mirroring themselves in the motionless lake, and the boats gliding like insects across the surface of a pond; they breathed in the warm air and the music of cowbells that the wind carried from very far away, in gusts, along with the smell of cut hay and warm resin. And they dreamed together of the past, and of the future, and of the present, which seemed to them the most unreal and most intoxicating of all their dreams. Antoinette sometimes let herself be carried along by her brother’s childlike good humor: they played at chasing each other, at throwing handfuls of grass. And one day he saw her laugh the way she used to when they were children --- that wholehearted, wild girl’s laugh, carefree and transparent as a spring, which he had not heard in years.

But more often than not, Olivier could not resist the pleasure of going on long rambles. He felt a little guilty about it afterward, and would later have to reproach himself for not making better use of those precious conversations with his sister. Even at the hotel, he often left her alone. There was a small circle of young men and young women there, from whom they had kept their distance at first. Then Olivier, shy and yet drawn to them, had joined their group. He had been starved of friends; beyond his sister, he had known little but his coarse schoolmates and their mistresses, who filled him with disgust. It was a great comfort to find himself among young men and women his own age, well-bred, pleasant, and cheerful. Though very unsociable by nature, he had a naïve curiosity, a sentimental and chastely sensual heart, hypnotized by all the faint and flickering little flames that shine in feminine eyes. He was capable of pleasing others, in spite of his shyness. The candid need he had to love and be loved gave him, without his knowing it, a youthful grace, and led him to find words, gestures, and attentive kindnesses whose very awkwardness made them more attractive. He had the gift of sympathy. Whatever his intelligence --- grown very ironic in solitude --- might reveal to him of people’s vulgarity and their faults, which he often hated, when he was face to face with them he could see nothing but their eyes, where a being was expressed who would die one day, a being who had only one life, like him, and who would lose it soon, like him: and then he felt an involuntary affection for that being; for nothing in the world could he have caused them pain in that moment; whether he wished it or not, he had to be kind to them. He was weak --- and by that very weakness, made to please “society,” which forgives all vices, and even all virtues, save one alone: strength, which is the condition of all the others.

Antoinette did not mix with that company, though they were her age. Her health, her fatigue, a moral exhaustion with no apparent cause, paralyzed her. During those long years of worry and relentless work that wear down body and soul alike, the roles between her brother and herself had been reversed: she now felt far from the world, far from everything, so very far!… She could no longer re-enter it: all those conversations, that noise, those laughs, those small preoccupations wearied her, fatigued her, almost wounded her. She suffered at being so: she would have liked to resemble those other young women, to be interested in what interested them, to laugh at what made them laugh… She could no longer!… Her heart was tight, it seemed to her that she was dead. In the evenings she shut herself in her room; and often she did not even light her lamp; she remained seated in the darkness while Olivier amused himself downstairs in the salon, abandoning himself to the sweetness of one of those little romantic loves that were his habit. She stirred from her numbness only when she heard him come back up to his floor, still laughing and chatting with his friends, exchanging interminable good-nights at the threshold of their doors, unable to bring himself to part from them. Then Antoinette smiled in her darkness, and she rose to switch on the electric light. Her brother’s laughter revived her.

Autumn was advancing. The sun was fading. Nature was withering. Beneath the cotton-wool of October mists and clouds, the colors dulled; snow came to the heights, and fog to the plain. Travelers departed one by one, then in groups. And there was the sadness of watching friends leave, even the indifferent ones, and above all else the summer, that time of calm and happiness that had been an oasis in their lives. They took a last walk together, on a veiled autumn day, in the forest along the mountain. They did not speak; they were dreaming, a little melancholy, pressing close to each other against the chill, wrapped in their coats with collars turned up; their fingers were intertwined. The damp woods were silent, weeping quietly. From somewhere deep below came the soft, plaintive cry of a solitary bird that felt winter approaching. A crystalline cowbell rang in the fog, distant, almost extinguished, as though it echoed from deep within their chests…

They returned to Paris. Both were sad. Antoinette had not recovered her health.

They had to see to the trousseau that Olivier would need to bring to the École. Antoinette spent her last savings on it; she even secretly sold a few pieces of jewelry. What did it matter? Would he not repay her later? --- And besides, she had so few needs now that he would no longer be there!… She kept herself from thinking about what would happen when he was no longer there; she worked on the trousseau, pouring into the work all the ardent tenderness she had for her brother, and the premonition that this would be the last thing she would do for him.

They were inseparable during the last days they had to spend together; they were afraid of losing the smallest moment of it. On the last evening, they stayed up very late by the fireside --- Antoinette seated in the one armchair in the apartment, Olivier on a footstool at her feet, letting himself be coddled, as was his habit as a great spoiled child. He was anxious --- curious, nonetheless --- about the new life that was about to begin. Antoinette’s thoughts never ceased to dwell on the fact that their dear intimacy was over, and she asked herself with terror what would become of her. As though wishing to make that thought more piercing, he was never more tender than on that last evening, with the instinctive and innocent coquetry of those who wait for the hour of departure to show everything finest and most charming in themselves. He sat down at the piano and played at length the passages they loved best from Mozart and Gluck --- those visions of tender happiness and serene sadness with which so much of their shared past was bound.

When the hour of parting came, Antoinette accompanied Olivier as far as the gate of the École. She returned home. She was alone, once again. But it was no longer like the journey to Germany --- a separation she could end herself whenever she could no longer bear it. This time, she was the one who remained: it was he who was leaving, it was he who had left, for a long time, for life. Yet she was so maternal that in those first moments, she thought less of herself than of him; she was preoccupied with these first days of a life so very different for him, with the hazing at the École, with those small harmless annoyances that so easily take on alarming proportions in the mind of people who live alone and are accustomed to tormenting themselves over those they love. This worry had at least the benefit of distracting her a little from her loneliness. She was already thinking about the half-hour when she would be able to see him, the next day, in the parlor. She arrived a quarter of an hour early. He was very sweet to her, but wholly occupied and amused by all he had seen. In the days that followed, when she always came full of anxious tenderness, the contrast sharpened between what those moments of conversation were for him and what they were for her. For her, this was now all of her life. He loved Antoinette tenderly, without doubt; but one could not ask him to think only of her, as she thought of him. Once or twice he arrived late at the parlor. One day, when she asked whether he was bored, he answered that he was not. These were small stabs to Antoinette’s heart. --- She blamed herself for being this way; she called herself selfish; she knew perfectly well that it would be absurd, even wrong and unnatural, for him to be unable to do without her, or she without him, for her to have no other purpose in life. Yes, she knew all of that. But what good did it do her to know it? She could not help it if, for ten years, she had put her entire life into this single thought: her brother. Now that this one interest of her life had been taken from her, she had nothing left.

She tried bravely to take up her occupations again, her reading, her music, her beloved books… God! how empty Shakespeare, how empty Beethoven were, without him!… --- Yes, it was beautiful, no doubt… But he was no longer there. What use are beautiful things if one does not have the eyes of the one one loves to see them through? What can one do with beauty --- what can one do even with joy --- if one cannot taste it in another heart?

Had she been stronger, she would have sought to rebuild her life entirely, to give it another aim. But she was at the end of her tether. Now that nothing forced her to hold on at any cost, the effort of will she had imposed on herself gave way: she fell. The illness that had been preparing itself within her for more than a year, and that her energy had kept at bay, now had free rein.

Alone in her room, she spent her evenings gnawing at herself beside the dead fire; she had not the courage to relight it, not the strength to go to bed; she sat until the middle of the night, dozing, dreaming, and shivering. She relived her life, she was with her beloved dead, with her shattered illusions; and a terrible sadness came over her for her youth that had passed, without love, without hope of love. A dull, obscure, unconfessed ache… The laugh of a child in the street, the hesitant patter of small feet on the floor below… Those little feet walked through her heart… Doubts besieged her, dark thoughts, the contagion of the soul of this city of selfishness and pleasure upon her weakened soul. --- She fought against these regrets, she was ashamed of certain desires that she found criminal; she could not understand what was making her suffer: she attributed it to her bad instincts. The poor little Ophélie, gnawed by a mysterious ill, felt with horror the troubled and brutal breath that rises from the depths of life welling up from within her. She no longer worked; she had given up most of her lessons; she who had been so valiant, so early-rising, sometimes stayed in bed until the afternoon --- she had no more reason to get up than to stay lying down; she ate almost nothing, or nothing at all. Only on the days when her brother had leave --- Thursday afternoons, and Sundays from the morning onward --- she forced herself to be with him as she used to be.

He noticed nothing. He was too amused or distracted by his new life to observe his sister closely. He was at that period of youth when one has difficulty opening up, when one seems indifferent to things that had once touched you and will move you again later. Older people sometimes seem to have fresher impressions and more naïve pleasures of nature and life than young people between twenty and thirty. One says then that young people are less young at heart and more jaded. More often than not, that is a mistake. It is not because they are jaded that they appear insensible. It is that their souls are absorbed by passions, ambitions, desires, fixed ideas. When the body is worn out and there is nothing more to expect from life, disinterested emotions reclaim their place; and the spring of childlike tears reopens. Olivier was caught up in a thousand small preoccupations, the most important of which was an absurd little infatuation --- (he always had one) --- that obsessed him to the point of making him blind and indifferent to everything else. --- Antoinette had no idea what was happening inside her brother; she saw only that he was withdrawing from her. It was not entirely Olivier’s fault. Sometimes, coming to see her, he would look forward to talking with her. He would arrive. Immediately, he felt chilled. The anxious affection, the fever with which she clung to him, hanging on his every word, overwhelming him with attentions --- that excess of trembling tenderness immediately stripped away any desire to open up. He ought to have told himself that Antoinette was not in her normal state. Nothing could have been further from the delicate discretion she ordinarily kept. But he never reflected on it. To her questions he opposed a very dry yes or no. He stiffened into his silence, all the more so as she tried to draw him out; or he would even wound her with an abrupt reply. Then she too fell silent, crushed. Their day would pass, wasted. --- Scarcely had he crossed the threshold to return to the École when he was inconsolable over his behavior. He tormented himself at night thinking of the hurt he had caused. It even happened that, as soon as he was back at the École, he would write his sister a letter full of warmth. --- But the next morning, when he had reread it, he tore it up. And Antoinette knew none of this. She believed he no longer loved her.

She experienced still --- if not a final joy --- a last stirring of youthful tenderness in which her heart caught itself once more, a desperate awakening of her capacity for love and her hope for happiness, hope in life. It was an absurd thing, so contrary to her calm nature! For it to be possible, it required the turmoil she was in, that state of torpor and overexcitement that heralds illness.

She was at a concert at the Châtelet with her brother. Since he had just been assigned music criticism for a small literary review, they were somewhat better placed than before, though surrounded by a far less sympathetic audience. They had orchestra stalls near the stage. Christophe Krafft was to perform. Neither of them knew this German musician. When she saw him appear, all the blood rushed back to her heart. Though her tired eyes saw him only through a haze, she had no doubt when he entered: she recognized the unknown friend of those dark days in Germany. She had never spoken of him to her brother; and she had barely been able to speak of him to herself: all her thought had since been absorbed by the cares of life. And besides, she was a sensible little Frenchwoman who refused to acknowledge an obscure feeling whose source eluded her and which had no future. There was in her a whole province of the soul, of unsuspected depths, where many other feelings lay sleeping that she would have been ashamed to see: she knew they were there; but she averted her eyes from them, out of a kind of religious terror before that Being who eludes the mind’s control.

When she had recovered a little from her agitation, she borrowed her brother’s opera glasses to look at Christophe; she saw him in profile at the conductor’s podium, and she recognized his violent, concentrated expression. He wore a worn dress coat that fit him very badly. --- Antoinette sat through the vicissitudes of that lamentable concert, mute and frozen, as Christophe ran into the undisguised hostility of an audience that was at that moment ill-disposed toward German artists and that found his music oppressive. When, after a symphony that had seemed too long, he reappeared to play a few pieces for piano, he was greeted with mocking exclamations that left no doubt as to how little pleasure there was in seeing him again. He began to play nonetheless, amid the resigned boredom of the audience; but the discourteous remarks exchanged in loud voices between two listeners in the upper galleries continued to run their course, to the delight of the rest of the hall. Then he stopped; in a fit of enfant terrible mischief, he played with one finger the tune: Malborough s’en va-t-en guerre, then, rising from the piano, he said straight to the audience’s face:

--- That’s what you want!

The audience, for a moment uncertain about the musician’s intentions, erupted in shouts. An unbelievable scene of uproar followed. They whistled, they cried:

--- An apology! Make him come and apologize!

The people, red with anger, egged each other on, tried to convince themselves they were genuinely outraged; and perhaps they were, but above all they were delighted at this opportunity to make noise and let off steam: like schoolboys after two hours of class.

Antoinette had not the strength to move; she was as if turned to stone; her clenched fingers silently tore apart one of her gloves. From the first notes of the symphony, she had had a clear sense of what was going to happen; she felt the audience’s muffled hostility, she felt it growing, she was reading Christophe, she was certain he would not get through to the end without an outburst; she had waited for that outburst with mounting anguish; she had strained to prevent it; and when it came, it was so exactly as she had foreseen it that she was crushed as by a fatality against which nothing could be done. And as she still watched Christophe, who was staring insolently at the audience booing him, their eyes met. Christophe’s eyes recognized her, perhaps, for a second; but in the storm sweeping him along, his mind did not recognize her: (he had long since stopped thinking of her). He disappeared, amid the whistles.

She would have liked to cry out, to say something, to do something: she was bound hand and foot, as in a nightmare. It was a relief to hear beside her her brave little brother, who, without suspecting what was happening inside her, had shared her anguish and her indignation. Olivier was profoundly musical, and he had an independence of taste that nothing could have shaken: when he loved something, he would have loved it against the whole world. From the very first measures of the symphony, he had felt something great, something he had never yet encountered in life. He repeated under his breath, with deep ardor:

--- How beautiful it is! How beautiful! while his sister pressed herself instinctively against him, with gratitude. After the symphony, he had applauded furiously, in protest against the public’s ironic indifference. When the great uproar came, he was beside himself: he stood up, he cried that Christophe was right, he harangued the whistlers, he wanted to fight: this shy young man was unrecognizable. His voice was lost in the noise; he was addressed rudely: he was called a brat and told to go home to bed. Antoinette, knowing the futility of all revolt, took him by the arm, saying:

--- Be quiet, I beg you, be quiet!

He sat back down, in despair; he kept on lamenting:

--- It’s disgraceful, it’s disgraceful! The wretches!…

She said nothing, she suffered in silence; he thought her insensible to the music; he said to her:

--- Antoinette, but don’t you find it beautiful?

She nodded yes. She remained rigid, unable to revive. But when the orchestra was on the verge of beginning another piece, she abruptly stood up, breathing to her brother with a kind of hatred:

--- Come, come, I cannot bear to look at these people any longer!

They left in haste. In the street, arm in arm, Olivier spoke with vehemence. Antoinette was silent.

That day, and the days that followed, alone in her room, she sank into a feeling she avoided looking at directly, but which persisted through all her thoughts, like the dull beating of blood in her temples, which ached.

Some time later, Olivier brought her the collection of Christophe’s Lieder, which he had just discovered at a publisher’s. She opened it at random. On the first page she looked at, she read at the head of a piece this dedication in German:

To my poor dear little victim.

and a date beneath it.

She knew that date well. --- She was seized by such agitation that she could not go on. She set down the songbook, and, asking her brother to play, she went to her room and locked herself in. Olivier, wholly absorbed in the pleasure of this new music, began to play, without noticing his sister’s emotion. Antoinette, seated in the room next door, pressed down the beating of her heart. Suddenly she rose and searched in her armoire for a small notebook of household expenses, to find the date of her departure from Germany and the mysterious date. She knew it in advance: yes, it was indeed the evening of the performance she had attended with Christophe. She lay down on her bed and closed her eyes, flushing, her hands clasped over her breast, listening to the beloved music. Her heart was flooded with gratitude… Ah! why did her head hurt so terribly?

Olivier, seeing his sister fail to reappear, went to her room when he had finished playing, and found her lying down. He asked whether she was feeling unwell. She spoke of a little fatigue, and got up to keep him company. They talked; but she did not answer his questions at once: she had the air of returning from very far away; she smiled, blushed, apologized, blaming a severe headache that was making her quite dull. At last Olivier left. She had asked him to leave the book of songs. She stayed a long time alone, in the night, reading them at the piano, without playing, barely touching a note here and there, very softly, for fear her neighbors would complain. She was not even reading, most of the time; she was dreaming, she was carried away by a surge of gratitude and tenderness toward that soul which had taken pity on her, which had read her, with the mysterious intuition of goodness. She could not fix her thoughts. She was happy and sad --- sad!… Ah! how her head ached!

She spent the night in sweet and painful dreams, an oppressive melancholy. During the day, to shake off her torpor, she wanted to go out for a little while. Though her head continued to hurt --- to give herself a purpose, she went to do some shopping at a large department store. She scarcely thought about what she was doing. The whole time, without admitting it to herself, she was thinking of Christophe. As she was leaving, exhausted and sad beyond words, amid the crowd, she caught sight of Christophe on the pavement across the street. He saw her at the same moment. At once --- (it was unthinking and sudden) --- she reached her hands out toward him. Christophe stopped: he recognized her this time. Already he was jumping down onto the roadway to come to Antoinette; and Antoinette was struggling to go toward him. But the brutal flood of the crowd carried her off like a wisp of straw, while a coach horse, falling on the slippery asphalt, formed a dam before Christophe against which the double current of vehicles immediately broke, piling up for a few moments an inextricable barrier. Christophe, despite everything, persisted in trying to pass: he found himself caught in the middle of the carriages, unable to move forward or back. When he finally managed to free himself and reach the spot where he had seen Antoinette, she was already far away: she had made vain efforts to struggle against the human torrent; then she had resigned herself, had stopped trying to fight; she had the sense of a fatality weighing upon her, opposing her meeting with Christophe: one could do nothing against fatality. And when she had managed to extricate herself from the crowd, she had not tried to retrace her steps; a shame had come over her: what would she dare say to him? What had she dared do? What could he have thought? --- She fled home.

She did not feel at ease until she was back inside. But once in her room, in the darkness, she sat down at her table without the courage to remove her hat or her gloves. She was unhappy not to have been able to speak with him; and at the same time there was a light in her heart; she could no longer see the shadow, could no longer see the illness eating at her. She replayed endlessly every detail of the scene that had just taken place; and she changed them, she imagined what would have happened if this or that circumstance had been different. She saw herself reaching her arms out toward Christophe, she saw the expression of joy on Christophe’s face as he recognized her, and she laughed, and she blushed. She blushed; and, alone in the darkness of her room, where no one could see her, where she could barely see herself, she reached her arms out to him, again. Ah! it was stronger than she was: she felt herself disappearing, and she instinctively sought to cling to the powerful life passing beside her, which had cast upon her a glance of kindness. Her heart, full of tenderness and anguish, cried out to her in the night:

--- Help! Save me!

Feverish, she raised herself to light the lamp, to find paper and a pen. She wrote to Christophe. Never would this proud and self-conscious girl have thought of writing to him, had she not been in the grip of illness. She did not know what she was writing. She was no longer her own mistress. She called out to him, she told him that she loved him… In the middle of her letter she stopped, horrified. She wanted to begin it again: her momentum was broken; her head was empty and burning; she struggled terribly to find words; exhaustion crushed her. She felt ashamed… What was the use of any of it? She knew very well she was trying to deceive herself, that she would never send this letter… Even if she had wanted to, how would she have managed it? She did not have Christophe’s address… Poor Christophe! And what could he do for her, even if he knew everything, even if he were kind to her?… Too late! No, no, it was all in vain --- a last desperate fluttering of a bird that was suffocating, beating its wings in a frenzy. She had to resign herself…

She stayed a long while longer at her table, absorbed, unable to pull herself from her stillness. It was past midnight when she rose painfully --- courageously. By a mechanical habit, she tucked the drafts of her letter into a book on her small shelf, having neither the courage to file them away nor to tear them up. Then she lay down, shivering with fever. The answer to the riddle was revealing itself: she felt the will of God being accomplished. --- And a great peace descended upon her.

On Sunday morning, Olivier, coming from the École, found Antoinette in bed, in a mild delirium. A doctor was called. He confirmed acute consumption.

Antoinette had become aware of her condition in those last few days; she had finally discovered the reason for the moral disturbance that had frightened her. For the poor girl, who had been so ashamed of herself, it was almost a relief to think that she had nothing to do with it, that illness was the cause. She had found the strength to take a few precautions, to burn her papers, to prepare a letter for Mme Nathan: she asked her to please watch over her brother in the first weeks after her “death” --- (she could not bring herself to write that word…)

The doctor could do nothing: the illness was too powerful, and Antoinette’s constitution had been worn to the bone by years of excessive fatigue.

Antoinette was calm. Since she had felt herself lost, she had been freed from her anxieties. She passed through in her mind all the trials she had endured; she saw again her completed work, her dear Olivier saved; and an ineffable joy filled her. She said to herself:

--- It is I who did this.

Then she reproached herself for her pride:

--- Alone, I could have done nothing. It is God who helped me.

And she thanked God for having allowed her to live until she had accomplished her task. Her heart was a little heavy at having to go now; but she did not dare to complain: that would have been ungrateful to God, who could have called her back sooner. And what would have happened if she had gone a year earlier? --- She sighed, and bowed her head in grateful humility.

Despite her labored breathing, she did not complain --- except in heavy sleep, where she sometimes moaned like a small child. She looked at things and people with a resigned smile. The sight of Olivier was a constant joy to her. She called to him with her lips, without speaking; she wanted to hold his hand in hers; she wanted him to lay his head on the pillow beside her; and, her eyes close to his eyes, she looked at him long and silently. Then she would raise herself, holding his head between her hands, and say:

--- Ah! Olivier!… Olivier!…

She took from her neck the medal she wore and put it around her brother’s neck. She commended her dear Olivier to her confessor, to her doctor, to everyone. One felt that she now lived in him, that on the point of dying she was taking refuge in that life, as in an island. At moments she was as if intoxicated by a mystical exaltation of tenderness and faith; she no longer felt her illness, and sadness had become joy --- a truly divine joy that radiated from her lips and her eyes. She kept saying:

--- I am happy…

Torpor was overtaking her. In her last moments of consciousness her lips were moving; one could see she was reciting something to herself. Olivier came to her bedside and leaned over her. She recognized him still, and she smiled at him faintly; her lips went on moving, and her eyes were full of tears. One could not make out what she was trying to say… But Olivier finally caught, like a breath, these words from the old and beloved song they had loved so well, that she had sung to him so many times:

I will come again, my sweet and bonny, I will come again,

(“Je reviendrai, bien-aimé, je reviendrai.”)

Then she sank back into her torpor. And she slipped away.

Without knowing it, she had inspired a deep sympathy in many people who did not even know her: in her own building, for instance, whose tenants she did not know by name. Olivier received expressions of compassion from people who were strangers to him. Antoinette’s funeral was not the deserted affair her mother’s had been. Friends, classmates of her brother, families where she had given lessons, people she had passed in silence, saying nothing of her life and they nothing of theirs, but who had admired her in secret, knowing of her devotion --- even poor people, the cleaning woman who helped her at the end, small shopkeepers from the neighborhood --- followed her to the cemetery. Olivier had been taken in, the very evening of his sister’s death, by Mme Nathan, carried off in spite of himself, forcibly distracted from his grief.

It was truly the only moment in his life when it was possible for him to withstand such a catastrophe --- the only moment when he was not permitted to give himself over entirely to his despair. He had just begun a new life; he was part of a circle; he was swept along by the current whether he would or not. The duties and anxieties of his École, the intellectual fever, the examinations, the struggle to live --- all of it kept him from shutting himself away: he could not be alone. He suffered for it; but it was his salvation. A year earlier, or a few years later, he would have been lost.

Yet he withdrew as much as he could into the memory of his sister. He had the grief of being unable to keep the apartment where they had lived together: he had no money. He hoped that those who seemed to take an interest in him would understand his anguish at being unable to preserve what had been hers. But no one seemed to understand. With money partly borrowed and partly earned through tutoring, he rented a garret room where he crowded as much of his sister’s furniture as he could fit: her bed, her table, her armchair. He made it a sanctuary of her memory. He would go there to take refuge on days when he was overcome. His classmates thought he had a mistress. He would stay there for hours, dreaming of her with his forehead in his hands --- for he had the misfortune of owning no portrait of her but a small photograph taken when she was a child, which showed them both together. He spoke to her. He wept… Where was she? Ah! if she had only been at the other end of the world, in some place however inaccessible --- with what joy, what invincible ardor, he would have set out in search of her, through a thousand sufferings, though he must walk barefoot, though he must walk for centuries, if only each step had brought him closer to her!… Yes, even if he had had but one chance in a thousand of reaching her… But nothing… Nowhere… No way of ever rejoining her… What solitude surrounded him now! How helpless he was, how clumsy, how childlike in life, now that she was no longer there to love him, advise him, console him!… The one who has had the happiness of knowing, even once in the world, the complete and boundless intimacy of a kindred soul has known the most divine joy --- a joy that will make him wretched for the rest of his life…

Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria…

The worst of all misfortunes, for tender and fragile hearts, is to have known once the greatest of all happiness.

Yet as sad as it may seem to lose, at the beginning of life, those we love, it is still less terrible than it would be later, when the springs of life have run dry. Olivier was young; and despite his native pessimism, despite his misfortune, he had a need to live. As is often observed after the loss of a beloved person, it seemed as though Antoinette, in dying, had breathed a portion of her soul into her brother. He believed it. Without having her faith, he obscurely persuaded himself that his sister was not entirely dead, that she was living within him, as she had promised. A Breton belief holds that the young dead are not dead: they continue to hover near the places where they lived, until they have fulfilled the normal span of their existence. --- So Antoinette continued to grow alongside Olivier.

He reread the papers he had found of hers. Unhappily, she had burned almost everything. Besides, she was not a woman to keep a register of her inner life. She would have blushed to undress her thoughts through some indiscreet and unwholesome curiosity. She had only a small notebook of notes, almost incomprehensible to anyone but herself --- a tiny diary in which she had recorded, without any comment, certain dates and small events from her daily life that had been for her the occasion for joys and emotions she had no need to note in detail in order to relive them. Nearly all these dates referred to some fact in Olivier’s life. She had kept, without losing a single one, every letter he had ever written her. --- Alas! he had not been so careful: he had let nearly all those he had received from her be lost. What need had he of letters? He thought he would always have his sister with him: the dear spring of tenderness seemed inexhaustible; he believed he could always come to cool his lips and his heart at it; he had spent carelessly the love he had received from it, of which he would now have wished to gather up every last drop… What emotion he felt when, leafing through one of Antoinette’s books of poetry, he found on a scrap of paper these words written in pencil:

--- “Olivier, my dear Olivier!…”

He nearly fainted. He sobbed, pressing to his lips the invisible mouth that spoke to him from the grave. --- From that day on, he took up each of her books and searched page by page to see if she had not left behind some other confidence. He found the draft of the letter to Christophe. He learned then of the silent romance that had begun to take shape within her; he entered for the first time into her emotional life, which he had not known until then and had not sought to know; he relived those last troubled days in which, abandoned by him, she had stretched out her arms toward the unknown friend. She had never told him that she had already met Christophe. A few lines of her letter revealed that they had encountered each other some time ago in Germany. He understood that Christophe had been kind to Antoinette in a circumstance whose details he did not know, and that from that time dated the feeling Antoinette had kept secret until the end.

Christophe, whom he already loved for the beauty of his art, became at once inexpressibly dear to him. She had loved him: it seemed to Olivier that it was still her he was loving in Christophe. He did everything to draw closer to him. It was not easy to find his whereabouts. Christophe had disappeared, after his failure, into the immensity of Paris; he had withdrawn from everyone, and no one paid any attention to him any longer. --- After months, chance brought it about that Olivier encountered Christophe in the street, pale and hollowed by the illness from which he was barely recovering. But he did not have the courage to stop him. He followed him from a distance, all the way to his house. He wanted to write to him: he could not bring himself to do it. What was there to write? Olivier was not alone --- Antoinette was with him: her love, her modesty had passed into him; the thought that his sister had loved Christophe made him blush before Christophe, as though he had been her. And yet how he longed to speak of her with him! --- But he could not. His secret sealed his lips.

He sought ways to meet Christophe. He went everywhere he thought Christophe might go. He burned with the desire to reach out his hand to him. And the moment he saw him, he hid himself so as not to be seen.

At last, Christophe noticed him, at a friendly gathering where they found themselves one evening. Olivier kept his distance and said nothing; but he was watching him. And no doubt Antoinette was hovering around Olivier that evening: for Christophe saw her in Olivier’s eyes; and it was her image, suddenly evoked, that drew him across the entire room toward the unknown messenger who was bringing him, like a young Hermes, the melancholy greeting of the blessed shade.

1. ↑ See Jean-Christophe, iv. La Révolte/II L’Enlisement.
2. ↑ See Jean-Christophe à Paris, I. La Foire sur la Place.