Chapter II: Part 2

What are the other images? A large space, with old trees in it, some children playing late on an autumn day; while others, who are not playing, but only look on, lean against the old brown tree-stems, or wander about like forsaken creatures. This is the playground of the Lycée at Versailles. The scholars who are playing are the "old" boys, the others, the shy exiles, are the "new," and I am one of the latter. It is just four short weeks since my aunt told me of my mother's marriage, and already my life is entirely changed. On my return from the holidays it was decided that I should enter the school as a boarder. My mother and my stepfather were about to travel in Italy until the summer, and the question of their taking me with them was not even mooted. My mother proposed to allow me to remain as a day-pupil, under the care of my aunt, who would come up to Paris; but my stepfather negatived the proposition at once by quite reasonable arguments. Why should so great a sacrifice of all her habits be imposed upon the old lady, and what was there to dread in the rough life of a boarding-school, which is the best means of forming a boy's character?

"And he needs that schooling," added my stepfather, directing the same cold glance towards me as on the day when he grasped my arm so roughly. In short, it was settled that I was to go to school, but not in Paris.

"The air is bad," said my stepfather.

Why am I not in the least obliged to him for his seeming solicitude for my health? It was not because I foresaw what he had foreseen already--he, the man who wanted to separate me from my mother for ever--that it would be easier for them to leave me at a school outside the city than at one nearer home, when they returned? What need has he of these calculations? Is it not enough that he should give utterance to a wish for Madame Termonde to obey him? How I suffer when I hear her say "thou" to him, just as she used to say it to my own father. And then I think of the days when I came home from my classes at the Lycée Bonaparte, and that dear father helped me with my lessons. My stepfather brought me to this school yesterday in the afternoon, and it was he who presented me to the head master, a tall thin personage with a bald head, who tapped me on the cheek and said:

"Ah, he comes from Bonaparte, the school of the 'Muscadins.'"

That same evening I had the curiosity to refer to the dictionary for this word "Muscadin," and I found the following definition: "A young man who studies personal adornment." It is true that I do not resemble the fellows in tunics among whom I am to live, for I am handsomely dressed, according to my mother's taste, and my costume includes a large white collar and smart English boots. The other boys have shapeless képis, coarse blue stockings which fall over their broken shoes, and their buttons are mostly torn off. They wear out the last year's outdoor costume in the house. During the first play-time on my first day, several of the boys eyed me curiously, and one of them asked me: "What does your father do?" I made no answer. What I dread, with unbearable misery, is that they may speak to me of it. Yesterday, while my stepfather and I were coming down to Versailles in the railway carriage, without exchanging a word, what would I have given to be able to tell him of this dread, to entreat him not to throw me among a number of boys, and leave me to their heedless rudeness and cruelty, to promise him that I would work harder and better than before, if I might but remain at home! But the look in his blue eyes is so sharp when they rest on me, it is so hard for me to say the word "Papa" to him--that word which I am always saying in my thoughts to the other; to him who lies, in the sleep that knows no waking, in the cemetery at Compiègne! And so I addressed no supplication to M. Termonde, and I allowed myself to be shut up in the Versailles Lycée without a word of protest. I preferred to wander about as I do among strangers, to uttering one complaint to him. Mamma is to come to-morrow; she is going away the next day, and the nearness of this interview prevents me from feeling the inevitable separation too keenly. If she will only come without my stepfather!

She came--and with him. She took her seat in the parlour, which is decorated with vile portraits of scholars who have taken prizes at the general examinations. My schoolfellows were also talking to their mothers, but none could boast a mother so worthy to be loved as mine! Never had she seemed to me so beautiful, with her slender and elegant figure, her graceful neck, her deep eyes, her fine smile. But I could not say a word to her, because my stepfather, "Jack," as she called him, with her pretty affectation of an English accent, was there between us. Ah! that antipathy which paralyses all the loving impulses of the heart, how intensely have I felt it, then and since! I thought I could perceive that my mother was surprised, almost saddened by my coldness when she bade me farewell; but ought she not to have known that I would never show my love for her in his presence? She is gone; she is on her travels, and I remain here.

Other images arise which recall our schoolroom in the evenings of that first winter of my imprisonment. The metal stove burns red in the middle of the gas-lit room. A bowl of water is placed upon the top lest the heat should affect our heads. All along the walls stretches the line of our desks, and behind each of us is a little cupboard in which we keep our books and papers. Silence reigns, and is rendered more perceptible by the scratching of pens, the turning over of leaves, and an occasional suppressed cough. The master is in his place, behind a desk which is raised above the others. His name is Rodolphe Sorbelle, and he is a poet. The other day he let fall out of his pocket a sheet of paper covered with writing and erasures, from which we managed to make out the following lines:

Je voudrais être oiseau des champs,
Avoir un bec,
Chanter avec:
Je voudrais être oiseau des champs,
Avoir des ailes,
Voler sur elles.
Mais je ne puis en faire autant,
Car j'ai le bec
beaucoup trop sec,
Et je suis pion,
'Cré nom de nom!

This prodigious poem gave us, cruel little wretches that we were, the greatest delight. We sang the verses perpetually, in the dormitory, out walking, in the playground, setting the last words to the classic music of "Les Lampions." But the old watch-dog has sharp teeth, and defends himself by "detentions," so none of us care to brave him to his face. The lamp hung over his head shows up his greenish-grey hair, his red forehead, and his threadbare coat, which once was blue. No doubt he is rhyming, for he is writing, and every now and then he raises that swollen brow, and his large blue eyes--which express such real kindness when we do not torment him with our tricks--search the room and observe in turn each of the thirty-five desks. I, too, take a prolonged survey of the companions of my slavery; I already know their faces. There is Rocquain, a little fellow, with a big red nose in a long white face; and Parizelle, a tall, stout boy, with an underhung jaw. He is fair-skinned, has green eyes and freckles, and for a wager ate a cockroach the other day. There is Gervais, a brown, curly-haired lad, who makes his will every week. He has communicated to me the latest of these documents, in which there is the following clause: "I leave to Leyreloup some good advice, contained in my letter to Cornélis." Leyreloup is his former friend, who played him the trick of rolling him in a heap of dead leaves last autumn, having been egged on to the deed by big Parizelle, whom the vengeful Gervais ever since regards as a rascal, and the advice contained in the posthumous letter is a warning to distrust the giant. All this small school-world is absorbed in countless interests which even at that time I held to be puerile, when compared with the thoughts that are in me. And my schoolfellows themselves seem to understand that there is something in my life which does not exist in theirs; they spare me the torments that are generally inflicted upon a new boy, but I am not the friend of any of them, except this same Gervais, who is my walking companion when we go out. Gervais is an imaginative lad, and when he is at home he devours a collection of the _Journal pour Tous_. He has found in it a series of romances called "L'Homme aux Figures de Cire," "Le Roi des Gabiers," "Le Chat du Bord," and Thursday after Thursday, when we go out walking, he relates these stories to me. The tragic strain of my own fate is the cause of my taking a grim pleasure in these narratives, in which crime plays the chief part. Unfortunately I have confided the secret of this questionable amusement to my good aunt, and the head master has separated the improvised feuilletoniste from his public. Gervais and I are forbidden to walk together. My aunt believed that the excess of sensitiveness in me, which alarmed her, would be corrected by this. Neither her solicitous tenderness, nor her pious care and foresight--she comes to Versailles from Compiègne every Sunday to take me out--nor my studies--for I redouble my efforts so that my stepfather should not triumph in my bad marks--nor my religious enthusiasm--for I have become the most fervent of us all at the chapel--no, nothing, nothing appeases the hidden demon which possesses and devours me. While the evening studies are going on, and in the interval between two tasks, I read a letter from Italy. This is my food for the week, conveyed in pages written by my mother. They give me details of her travels, which I do not understand very clearly; but I do understand that she is happy without me, outside of me--that the thought of my father and his mysterious death no longer haunts her; above all, that she loves her new husband, and I am jealous--miserably, basely jealous. My imagination, which has its strange lapses, has also a singular minuteness. I see my mother in a room in a foreign inn, and spread out upon the table are the various fittings of her travelling-bag, silver-mounted, with her cipher in relief, the Christian name in full, and encircling it the letter T. Marie T----. Well, had she not the right to make a new life for herself, honourably? Why should this mixture of her past with her present hurt me so much? So much, that just now, when stretched upon my narrow iron bed in the dormitory, I could not close my eyes.

How long those nights seemed to me, when I lay down oppressed by this thought, and strove in vain to lose it in the sweet oblivion of sleep! I prayed to God for sleep, with all the strength of my childlike piety. I said mentally twelve times twelve _Paters_ and _Aves_--and I did not sleep. I then tried to "form a chimera;" for thus I called a strange faculty with which I knew myself to be endowed. When I was quite a little boy, on an occasion when I was suffering from toothache, I had shut my eyes, forcibly abstracted my mind, and compelled it to represent a happy scene in which I was the chief actor. Thus I was enabled to overrule my sensations to the point of becoming insensible to the toothache. Now, whenever I suffer, I do the same, and the device is almost always successful. I employ it in vain when my mother is in question. Instead of the picture of felicity which I evoke, the other picture presents itself to me, that of the intimate life of the being whom in all the world I most love, with the man whom I most hate. For I hate him, with an implacable hatred, and without being able to assign any other motive than that he has taken the first place in the heart which was all my own. Ah, me! I shall hear the slow hours struck, first from the belfry of a church hard by, and then by the school-clock--a grave and sonorous chime, then a treble ringing. I shall hear old Sorbelle walk through the whole length of the dormitory, and then go into the room which he occupies at the far end. How dull is the spectacle of the two rows of our little beds, with their brass knobs shining in the dim light; and how odious it is to be listening to the snores of the sleepers! At measured intervals the watchman, an old soldier with a big face and thick black moustaches, passes. He is wrapped in a brown cloth cape, and carries a dark lantern. Can it be that he is not afraid, all alone, at night, in those long passages, and on the stone staircases, where the wind rushes about with a dismal noise? How I should hate to be obliged to go down those stairs, shuddering in that darkness with the fear of meeting a ghost! I try to drive away this new idea, but in vain, and then I think. . . . Where is he who killed my father? Is it with fear, is it with horror that I shudder at this question? And I go on thinking. . . . Does he know that I am here? Panic seizes upon me, with the idea that the assassin might be capable of assuming the disguise of a school servant, for the purpose of killing me also. I commend my soul to God, and in the midst of these awful thoughts I fall asleep at length, very late, to be awakened with a start at half-past five in the morning, with an aching head, shaken nerves, and an ailing mind, sick of a disease which is beyond cure.

VI

Three years have passed away since the autumnal evening on which a hackney-coach had set down my stepfather and myself in that corner of one of the gloomy avenues of Old Versailles, which is made more gloomy by the walls of the school. I was to have remained at this school for ten months only--the period of my mother's stay in Italy. That evening was in the autumn of 1866; we are now in the winter of 1870, and I have been all this time imprisoned in the Lycée, "where the air is so good, and I get on so well." These are the reasons assigned by my mother for not taking me back to her home. My schoolfellows pass before me in the twilight of remembrance of that distant time. Rocquain, more pasty-faced than ever, with his comic-actor-like red nose, sings café-concert songs, smokes cigarettes in secret places, and collects the photographs of actresses. Gervais, still brown and surly, has a passion for races, at which he is always playing, and is reconciled with Leyreloup, "the hedgehog," as we call him, whom he has infected with his dangerous mania. The two are constantly arranging insect or tortoise steeple-chases. They have even contrived a betting system, and ten of us have joined in it. The game is played by placing in front of a dictionary several bits of paper with the name of a horse written upon each of them. The dictionary is then opened and shut rapidly, and the bit of paper which is blown farthest away by the little breeze thus created, is the winner, and the boys who have backed it divide the stakes. Parizelle is bigger than ever; at sixteen he is already growing a beard, and has been entertained by some military acquaintances at a certain café, which he points out to us when we take our weekly walks. As for myself, I have a new friend, one Joseph Dediot, who has introduced me to some of the verses of De Musset. We go wild over this poet. Dediot's place in the schoolroom is by the side of Scelles, the bookseller's son, whom we call Bel-Œil, because he squints. Bel-Œil is as lazy as a lobster, and Dediot has made the oddest bargain with him. Dediot does all his exercises, and in return for each, Bel-Œil hands over to him a copy of twenty lines of Rolla. In exchange for I know not how many versions, themes, and Latin verses, my friend has at last secured the entire poem, and we spout its most characteristic lines enthusiastically.

We have become sceptics and misanthropes. We play at despairing Atheism just as Parizelle and Rocquain play at debauchery, Gervais and others at sport and fashion, politics and love. Old Sorbelle, having been dismissed from the Lycée, has just published a pamphlet in which he figures under the name of Lebros, and the Provost under that of M. Bifteck. This little book occupies our attention throughout the whole winter, and induces us to form a conspiracy which leads to nothing. Here we are, then, playing at revolution! What a strange discipline is that of those infamous schools, where young boys ruin their years of unhappy youth by the puerile and premature imitation of passions from which they will have to suffer in reality some day, just as children, who are destined to die in war as men, play at soldiers, with their flaxen curls and their ringing laughter! Alas! for me the game was over too soon.

Nevertheless, this shabby, dull, mean school was my home, the only place in which I felt myself really "at home," and I loved it. Yes, I loved that hulks which was also partly barracks and partly hospital, because there at all events I was not perpetually confronted with the evidence of my double misfortune. After all, the influence of my age made itself felt there, the nervous strain upon me was relaxed, and I escaped from the fixed idea of the murderer of my father to be discovered, and my stepfather to be detested. My half-holidays were such misery to me that they would have made me dread the termination of my school-time, only that I knew the same date would place me in possession of my fortune, enabling me to devote myself entirely to the supreme aim and purpose of my life. I had sworn to myself that the mysterious assassin whom justice had failed to discover should be unearthed by me, and I derived extraordinary moral strength from that resolution, which I kept strictly to myself, without ever speaking of it. This, however, did not prevent me from suffering from trifles, whenever those trifles were signs of my doubly-orphaned state. How clearly present to me now are the torments of those sortie days! When the servant who was to take me to my mother's abode comes to fetch me on those Sunday mornings at eight, his careless manner makes me feel that I am no longer the son of the house. This wretch, this François Niquet, with his shaven chin and his insolent eye, does not remove his hat when I come down into the parlour. Sometimes, when the weather is bad, he presumes to grumble, and, although the smell of tobacco makes me sick, he lights his pipe in the railway carriage, and smokes without asking my leave. I would rather die than make any observation upon this, because I had once complained of my stepfather's valet, a vile fellow whom they made out to be in the right as against me, and I then and there resolved that never again would I expose myself to a similar affront. Besides, I had already suffered too much, and thus to suffer teaches one to feel contempt. The train proceeds, and I do not exchange a dozen words with the fellow. I know that I am regarded as proud and unamiable; but the same bent of mind which made me sullen when quite a child, now makes me take a pleasure in displeasing those whom I dislike. Amid silence and the reek of coarse tobacco, we reach the Montparnasse Station, where no carriage ever awaits me, no matter how bad the weather may be. We take the Boulevard Latour-Maubourg, and pass by the long avenues lined with buildings, hospitals, and bric-à-brac shops, turn down by the Church of Saint François Xavier, cross the Place des Invalides, and reach the door of our hotel. I hate the concierge, also a creature of M. Termonde's, and his broad flat face, in which I read hostility which is no doubt absolute indifference. But everything transforms itself into a sign of enmity, to my mind, from the faces of the servants, even to the aspect of my own room. M. Termonde has taken my own dear old room from me; a large handsome room, which used to be flooded with sunshine, with a window opening on the garden, and a door communicating with my mother's apartment. I now occupy a sort of large closet, with a northern aspect and no view except that of a wood-stack. When I reach home on those Sunday mornings, I have to go straight to this room and wait there until my mother has risen and can receive me. No one has taken the trouble to light a fire; so I ask for one, and while the servant is blowing at the logs, I take a chair, and gaze at the portrait of my father, which is now banished to my quarters after having figured for so long upon an easel draped with black, in my mother's morning-room. The odour of damp wood in process of kindling is mingled with the musty flavour of the room, which has been shut up all the week. I have some bitter moments to pass there. These mean miseries make me feel the moral forsakenness of my position more keenly, more cruelly. And my mother lives, she breathes at the distance of a few steps from me; yes, and she loves me!

Now that I can cast a look back upon my unhappy youth, I am aware that my own temper had much to do with the misunderstanding between my poor mother and myself which has never ceased to exist. Yes, she loved me, and at the same time she loved her husband. It was for me to explain to her the sort of pain she caused me by uniting and mingling those two affections in her heart. She would have understood me, she would have spared me the series of small dumb troubles that ultimately made any explanation between us impossible. When at length I saw her on those "sortie" days, at about eleven, just before breakfast, she expected me to meet her with effusive delight; how should she know that the presence of her husband paralysed me, just as it had done when we parted before her journey to Italy? There was an incomprehensible mystery to her in that absolute incapacity for revealing my mind, that stony inertness which overwhelmed me so soon as we were not alone, she and I--and we were never alone. She used to come to see me at Versailles once a week, on Wednesday, and it hardly ever happened that she came without my stepfather. I never wrote a letter to her that she did not show to her husband; indeed, he saw every letter which she received. How well I knew this habit of hers, how she would say, "André has written to me," and then hand to him the sheet of paper on which I could not trace one sincere, heartfelt, trustful line, because of the idea that his eyes were to rest upon it! How many notes have I torn up in which I tried to tell her the story of the troubles amid which I lived! Yes, yes, I ought to have spoken to her, nevertheless, to have explained myself a little, confessed my sufferings, my wild jealousy, my brooding grief, my great need of having a corner in her thoughts for myself alone, were it only pity--but I dared not. It was in my nature to feel the pain that I must cause her by speaking thus, too strongly, and I was unable to bear it. All the various trouble of my heart then was bound up in a timid silence, in embarrassment in her presence which affected herself. Like many women she was unable to understand a disposition different from her own, a manner of feeling opposed to hers. She was happy in her second marriage, she loved, she was loved. In M. Termonde she had met a man to whom she had given her whole self, but she had also given to me freely, lavishly. I was her son, it seemed so natural to her that he whom she loved should also love her child. And, in fact, had not M. Termonde been to me a vigilant and irreproachable protector? Had he not carefully provided for every detail of my education? No doubt he had insisted upon my being sent to school as a boarder, but I had also been of his opinion as to that. He had chosen masters for me in all branches of instruction; I learned fencing, riding, dancing, music, foreign languages. He had attended to, and he continued to attend to, the smallest details, from the New Year's gift that I was to receive--it was always very handsome--to the fixing of my allowance, my "week," as we called it, which was paid on each Thursday, at the highest figure permitted by the rules of the Lycée. Never had this man, who was so imperious by nature, raised his voice in speaking to me. Never once since his marriage had he varied from the most perfect politeness towards me; a woman who was in love with him would naturally see in this a proof of exquisite tact and devoted affection. Put my grievances against my stepfather into words? No, I could not do it. And so I was silent, and how was my mother to explain my sullenness, the absence of any demonstrativeness on my part towards my stepfather otherwise than by my selfishness and want of feeling? She did believe me, in fact, to be a selfish and unfeeling boy, and I, owing to my unhealthy mood of mind, felt that when I was in her presence I really became what she believed me. I shrank into myself like a surly animal. But why did she not spare me those trials which completed our alienation from each other? Why, when we met on those wretched Sundays, did she not contrive that I should have the five minutes alone with her that would have enabled me, not to talk to her--I did not ask so much--but to embrace her, as I loved her, with all my heart? I came into the room which she had transformed into a private sitting-room--in every corner of it I had played at my free pleasure when I, the spoiled child whose lightest wish was a command, was the master--and there was M. Termonde in his morning costume, smoking cigarettes and reading newspapers. It needed nothing but the rustic of the sheet in his hand, the tone of his voice as he bade me good-day, the touch of his fingers--he merely gave me their tips--and I recoiled upon myself. So strong was my antipathy that I never remember to have eaten with a good appetite at the same table with him. My wretchedness was at its height during those Sunday breakfasts and dinners. Ah, I hated everything about him; his blue eyes, almost too far apart, which were sometimes fixed, and at others rolled slightly in their orbits, his high prominent forehead, and prematurely grey hair, the refinement of his features, and the elegance of his manners, such a contrast with my natural dulness and lack of ease--yes, I hated all these, and even to the finely-shaped foot which was set off by his perfect boots. I think that even now, at this present hour, I should recognise a coat he had worn, among a thousand, so living a thing has a garment of his seemed to me, under the influence of that aversion. Only too well did I, with my filial instinct, realise that he, with his slender graceful figure, his feline movements, his flattering voice, his native and acquired aristocratic ways, was the true husband of the lovely, highly-adorned, almost ideal creature whom I, her son, resembled as little as my poor father had resembled her. Ah, how bitter was that knowledge!

Out of the depths of the silence which I preserved on those wretched half-holidays, I followed with intense interest all the conversations that took place before me, especially during breakfast and dinner, in the dining-room--newly furnished, like all the rest of the house. The hours of those meals were no longer the hours of my father's time. This change, and the new furnishing of our dwelling, typified the newness of my mother's life. M. Termonde, who was the son of a stockbroker, and had been for some time in diplomacy, had kept up social relations of a kind quite different from our former ones. My mother and he went frequently into that mixed and cosmopolitan society which was then, and is now, called "smart." What had become of the familiar faces at the dinners, few and far between, which my father used to give at the Rue Tronchet? Those dinner parties consisted of three or four persons, the ladies in high gowns, and the gentlemen in morning dress. The talk was of politics and business; a former Minister of King Louis Philippe's, who had gone back to his practice at the bar, was the oracle of the little circle; and the dinner hour was half-past six, instead of seven, on those days, because the old statesman always retired to rest at ten o'clock. In the wealthy but plain bourgeois life of our home, to go to a theatre was an event, and a ball formed an epoch. Thus, at least, did things represent themselves to my childish mind. Now the old ex-Minister came to the house no more, nor Mdme. Largeyx, the engineer's widow, whom papa was always quoting to mamma as a model, and whom my mother laughingly called her "mother-in-law." Now, my mother and my stepfather went out almost every evening. They had horses and several carriages, instead of the coupé hired by the month with which the wife of the renowned lawyer had been content. All the men who came in after dinner, all the women whom I met at six o'clock in my mother's drawing-room, were young and full of life and spirits, and their talk was solely of amusements; new plays, fancy balls, races, and dress. My father, who was full of the ideas of the Monarchy of July, like his old political friend, used to speak severely of the imperial régime; but now, my mother was invited to the great receptions at the Tuileries. How could I have ventured to talk to her about the small miseries of my school life, which seemed to me so mean when I contrasted them with her brilliant and opulent existence? Formerly, when I was a day pupil at the Bonaparte, I used to relate to her every trifle concerning the school and my fellow pupils; but now, I should have been ashamed to bore her with Rocquain, Gervais, Leyreloup, and the rest. It seemed to me that she could not possibly be interested in the story of how Joseph Dediot had been traitorously deserted by his faithless cousin Cécile; and yet, how tragic the case was, to my mind! Notwithstanding that two locks of hair had been exchanged, a bouquet offered and accepted, a kiss snatched and returned, the false girl had married an apothecary at Avranches. Dediot had even written two poems, inspired by his misfortune, and one of them, dedicated to me, began thus:

Sèche ton cœur, André, ne sois jamais aimant.

How could I have talked of all these small things to a lady who dined with the Duchesse d'Arcole, whose intimate friends were a Maréchale and two Marquises, and whose entertainments were described in the society journals? My mother was now the beautiful Madame Termonde, and so completely had her new name replaced the old, that I was almost the only person who remembered she was also the widow of M. Cornélis, he whose tragical death had been related in the very same newspapers. Had she herself forgotten it?

"Forgetfulness! Is this then in all reality the world's law?" I asked myself, with the indignant revolt of a young heart, which does not admit the inevitable compromises of feeling. And I made answer to myself, No! There was one person who remembered as well as I did, one person to whom my father's death still remained a hideous nightmare, one person to whom I could tell all my thoughts and all my grief--my dear, good, kind aunt. In her case at least all the fond and tender things of the past remained unchanged. When August came, and I went to Compiègne for a portion of my holidays, I found everything in its place, both in the house and in the heart of the dear old maid.

For my sake, I knew it well, she had consented to keep up her former relations with my mother, and she dined with her three or four times a year. Dear Aunt Louise! She would listen with the utmost kindness to all my childish complaints, and she always sent me home softened, almost appeased; more indulgent towards my mother, and convinced that I was wrong in my judgment of M. Termonde.

Nevertheless, I did not tell Aunt Louise anything about my reprisals upon the man whom I accused of having stolen my mother's heart from me. I had perceived, very soon, certain signs of an antipathy towards myself on the part of my stepfather, similar to that which I entertained towards him. When I came rather suddenly into the salon, and he was engaged in a conversation either with my mother or one of his friends, my presence sufficed to cause a slight alteration in his voice; a change which, most likely, no one else would have perceived, but which did not escape me, for did not my own throat contract, and my lips quiver with sheer abhorrence?

I should not have been the sullen and resentful boy I then was, if I had not planned how to utilise my strange power of disturbing the man whom I execrated, in the interest of my enmity. My system was to force him to feel the acute sensation which my presence inflicted on him, by keeping silence, and steadily pursuing him with my gaze. Great as his self-control was, I never fixed my eyes upon him from the far end of the room, but, after a while, he would turn his eyes towards me. Then his glance avoided mine, and he would go on talking; but still he was looking at me, and presently our eyes would meet, and his would shift away again. I knew, by a frown which gathered on his forehead, that he was on the point of forbidding me to look at him in that way; but then he would put strong restraint upon himself, and sometimes he would leave the room.

That abstention from any kind of struggle with me was a fixed resolution on his part, I guessed, because I knew him to be very determined by nature, and especially incapable of enduring that any one should brave him. He was fond of relating how, in his youth, when he was attached to the Embassy at Madrid, he had killed a bull at an amateur "ring," on being "dared" to do it by a young Spaniard. It must have hurt his pride severely to permit me the silent insolence of my eyes; he did allow me to indulge it, however, and I did not acknowledge that petty triumph to Aunt Louise. I must set down everything here, and the truth is I was most unhappy; I knew myself to be so, and I did not lessen my trouble in the least in dilating upon it; on the contrary, I rather exaggerated it so as to win that tender sympathy which did my sore heart good.

I once spoke to her of the vow I had taken, the solemn promise I had made to myself that I would discover the murderer of my father, and take vengeance upon him, and she laid her hand upon my mouth. She was a pious woman, and she repeated the words of the gospel: "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Then she added: "We must leave the punishment of the crime to Him; His will is hidden from us. Remember the divine precept and promise, 'Forgive and you shall be forgiven.' Never say: 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' Ah, no; drive this enmity out of your heart, Cornélis; yes, even this." And there were tears in her eyes.

VII

My poor aunt! She thought me made of stronger stuff than I really was. There was no need of her advice to prevent my being consumed by the desire for vengeance which had been the fixed star of my early youth, the blood-coloured beacon aflame in my night. Ah! the resolutions of boyhood, the "oaths of Hannibal" taken to ourselves, the dream of devoting all our strength to one single and unchanging aim--life sweeps all that away, together with our generous illusions, ardent enthusiasm, and noble hopes. What a difference there is between the boy of fifteen, unhappy indeed, but so bold and proud in 1870, and the young man of eight years later, in 1878! And to think, only to think, that but for chance occurrences, impossible to foresee, I should still be, at this hour, the young man whose portrait hangs upon the wall above the table at which I am writing. Of a surety, the visitors to the Salon of that year (1878) who looked at this portrait among so many others, had no suspicion that it represented the son of a father who had come to so tragic an end. And I, when I look at that commonplace image of an ordinary Parisian, with eyes unlit by any fire or force of will, complexion paled by senseless dissipation, hair cut in the fashion of the day, strictly correct dress and attitude, I am astonished to think that I could have lived as I actually did live at that period. Between the misfortunes that saddened my childhood, and those of quite recent date which have finally laid waste my life, the course of my existence was colourless, monotonous, vulgar, just like that of anybody else. I shall merely note the stages of it.

In the second half of 1870 the Franco-Prussian war takes place. The invasion finds me at Compiègne, where I am passing my holidays with my aunt. My stepfather and my mother remain in Paris during the siege. I go on with my studies under the tuition of an old priest belonging to the little town, who prepared my father for his first communion. In the autumn of 1871 I return to Versailles; in August, 1873, I take my bachelor's degree, and then I do my one year's voluntary service in the army at Angers under the easiest possible conditions. My colonel was the father of my old schoolfellow, Rocquain. In 1874 I am set free from tutelage by my stepfather's advice. This was the moment at which my task was to have been begun, the time appointed with my own soul; yet, four years afterwards, in 1878, not only was the vengeance that had been the tragic romance, and, so to speak, the religion of my childhood, unfulfilled, but I did not trouble myself about it.

I was cruelly ashamed of my indifference when I thought about it; but I am now satisfied that it was not so much the result of weakness of character as of causes apart from myself which would have acted in the same way upon any young man placed in my situation. From the first, and when I faced my task of vengeance, an insurmountable obstacle arose before me. It is equally easy and sublime to strike an attitude and exclaim: "I swear that I will never rest until I have punished the guilty one." In reality, one never acts except in detail, and what could I do? I had to proceed in the same way as justice had proceeded, to reopen the inquiry which had been pushed to its extremity without any result.

I began with the Judge of Instruction, who had had the carriage of the matter, and who was now a Counsellor of the Court. He was a man of fifty, very quiet and plain in his way, and he lived in the Ile de Paris, on the first floor of an ancient house, from whose windows he could see Nôtre Dame, primitive Paris, and the Seine, which is as narrow as a canal at that place.

M. Massol, so he was named, was quite willing to resume with me the analysis of the data which had been furnished by the Instruction. No doubt existed either as to the personality of the assassin, or the hour at which the crime was committed. My father had been killed between two and three o'clock in the day, without a struggle, by that tall, broad-shouldered personage whose extraordinary disguise indicated, according to the magistrate, "an amateur." Excess of complication is always an imprudence, for it multiplies the chances of failure. Had the assassin dyed his skin and worn a wig because my father knew him by sight? To this M. Massol said "No; for M. Cornélis, who was very observant, and who, besides, was on his guard--this is evident from his last words when he left you--would have recognised him by his voice, his glance, and his attitude. A man cannot change his height and his figure, although he may change his face." M. Massol's theory of this disguise was that the wearer had adopted it in order to gain time to get out of France, should the corpse be discovered on the day of the murder. Supposing that a description of a man with a very brown complexion and a black beard had been telegraphed in every direction, the assassin, having washed off his paint, laid aside his wig and beard, and put on other clothes, might have crossed the frontier without arousing the slightest suspicion. There was reason to believe that the pretended Rochdale lived abroad. He had spoken in English at the hotel, and the people there had taken him for an American; it was therefore presumable either that he was a native of the United States, or that he habitually resided there. The criminal was, then, a foreigner, American or English, or perhaps a Frenchman settled in America. As for the motive of so complicated a crime, it was difficult to admit that it could be robbery alone. "And yet," observed the Judge of Instruction, "we do not know what the note-case carried off by the assassin contained. But," he added, "the hypothesis of robbery seems to me to be utterly routed by the fact that, while Rochdale stripped the dead man of his watch, he left a ring, which was much more valuable, on his finger. From this I conclude that he took the watch merely as a precaution to throw the police off the scent. My supposition is that the man killed M. Cornélis for revenge."

Then the former Judge of Instruction gave me some singular examples of the resentment cherished against medical experts employed in legal cases, Procureurs of the Republic, and Presidents of Assize. His theory was, that in the course of his practice at the bar my father might have excited resentment of a fierce and implacable kind; for he had won many suits of importance, and no doubt had made enemies of those against whom he employed his great powers. Supposing one of those persons, being ruined by the result, had attributed that ruin to my father, there would be an explanation of all the apparatus of this deadly vengeance. M. Massol begged me to observe that the assassin, whether he were a foreigner or not, was known in Paris. Why, if this were not so, should the man have so carefully avoided being seen in the street? He had been traced out during his first stay in Paris, when he bought the wig and the beard, and that time he put up at a small hotel in the Rue d'Aboukir under the name of Rochdale, and invariably went out in a cab. "Observe also," said the Judge, "that he kept his room on the day before the murder, and on the morning of the actual day. He breakfasted in his apartment, having breakfasted and dined there the day before. But, when he was in London, and when he lived at the hotel to which your father addressed his first letters, he came and went without any precautions."

And this was all. The addresses of three hotels--such were the meagre particulars that formed the whole of the information to which I listened with passionate eagerness; the magistrate had no more to tell me. He had small, twinkling, very light eyes, and his smooth face wore an expression of extreme keenness. His language was measured, his general demeanour was cold, obliging, and mild, he was always closely shaven, and in him one recognised at once the well-balanced and methodical mind which had given him great professional weight. He acknowledged that he had been unable to discover anything, even after a close analysis of the whole existing situation of my father, as well as his past.

"Ah, I have thought a great deal about this affair," said he, adding that before he resigned his post as Judge of Instruction he had carefully reperused the notes of the case. He had again questioned the concierge of the Imperial Hotel and other persons. Since he had become Counsellor to the Court, he had indicated to his successor what he believed to be a clue; a robbery committed by a carefully made up Englishman had led him to believe the thief to be identical with the pretended Rochdale. Then there was nothing more. These steps had, however, been of use inasmuch as they barred the rule of limitation, and he laid stress on that fact. I consulted him then as to how much time still remained for me to seek out the truth on my own account. The last Act of Instruction dated from 1873, so that I had until 1883 to discover the criminal and deliver him up to public justice. What madness! Ten years had already elapsed since the crime, and I, all alone, insignificant, not possessed of the vast resources at the disposal of the police, I presumed to imagine that I should triumph, where so skilful a ferret as he had failed! Folly! Yes; it was so. Nevertheless, I tried.

I began a thorough and searching investigation of all the dead man's papers. With that unbounded tenderness of hers for my stepfather, which made me so miserable, my mother had placed all these papers in M. Termonde's keeping. Alas! Why should she have understood those niceties of feeling on my part, which rendered the fusion of her present with her past so repugnant to me, any more clearly on this point than on any other? M. Termonde had at least scrupulously respected the whole of those papers, from plans of association and prospectuses to private letters. Among the latter were several from M. Termonde himself, which bore testimony to the friendship that had formerly subsisted between my mother's first husband and her second. Had I not known this always? Why should I suffer from the knowledge? And still there was nothing, no indication whatever to put me on the track of a suspicion.

I evoked the image of my father as he lived, just as I had seen him for the last time; I heard him replying to M. Termonde's question in the dining-room of the Rue Tronchet, and speaking of the man who awaited him to kill him: "A singular man whom I shall not be sorry to observe more closely." And then he had gone out and was walking towards his death while I was playing in the little salon, and my mother was talking to the friend who was one day to be her master and mine. What a happy home-picture, while in that hotel room---- Ah! was I never to find the key of the terrible enigma? Where was I to go? What was I to do? At what door was I to knock?

At the same time that a sense of the responsibility of my task disheartened me, the novel facilities of my new way of life contributed to relax the tension of my will. During my school days, the sufferings I underwent from jealousy of my stepfather, the disappointment of my repressed affections, the meanness and penury of my surroundings, many grievous influences, had maintained the restless ardour of my feelings; but this also had undergone a change. No doubt I still continued to love my mother deeply and painfully, but I now no longer asked her for what I knew she would not give me, my unshared place, a separate shrine in her heart. I accepted her nature instead of rebelling against it. Neither had I ceased to regard my stepfather with morose antipathy; but I no longer hated him with the old vehemence. Mis conduct to me after I had left school was irreproachable. Just as in my childhood, he had made it a point of honour never to raise his voice in speaking to me, so he now seemed to pique himself upon an entire absence of interference in my life as a young man. When, having passed my baccalaureate, I announced that I did not wish to adopt any profession, but without a reason--the true one was my resolution to devote myself entirely to the fulfilment of my task of justice--he had not a word to say against that strange decision; nay, more, he brought my mother to consent to it. When my fortune was handed over to me, I found that my mother, who had acted as my guardian, and my stepfather, her co-trustee, had agreed not to touch my funds during the whole period of my education; the interest had been re-invested, and I came into possession, not of 750,000 francs, but of more than a million. Painful as I felt the obligation of gratitude towards the man whom I had for years regarded as my enemy, I was bound to acknowledge that he had acted an honourable part towards me. I was well aware that no real contradiction existed between these high-minded actions and the harshness with which he had imprisoned me at school, and, so to speak, relegated me to exile. Provided that I renounced all attempts to form a third between him and his wife, he would have no relations with me but those of perfect courtesy; but I must not be in my mother's house. His will was to reign entirely alone over the heart and life of the woman who bore his name. How could I have contended with him? Why, too, should I have blamed him, since I knew so well that in his place, jealous as I was, my own conduct would have been exactly similar? I yielded, therefore, because I was powerless to contend with a love which made my mother happy; because I was weary of keeping up the daily constraint of my relations with her and him, and also because I hoped that when once I was free I should be better fitted for my task as a doer of justice. I myself asked to be permitted to leave the house, so that at nineteen I possessed absolute independence, an apartment of my own in the Avenue Montaigne, close to the round-point in the Champs Élysées, a yearly income of 50,000 francs, the entrée to all the salons frequented by my mother, and the entrée, too, to all the places at which one may amuse one's self. How could I have resisted the influences of such a position?