this brilliant assemblage, and got up to make her escape. But suddenly the thought came to her that she might meet Paul in this place; and she began to wander about, looking into the faces, going and coming incessantly with her quick step from one end of the garden to the other.
People turned round to look at her, others laughed as they pointed her out. She noticed it and fled, thinking that they were doubtless amused at her appearance and at her dress of green plaid, selected by Rosalie, and made according to her ideas by the dressmaker at Goderville.
She no longer dared even to ask her way of passersby, but at last she ventured to do so and found her way back to the hotel.
The following day she went to the police department to ask them to look for her child. They could promise her nothing, but said they would do all they could. She wandered about the streets hoping that she might come across him. And she felt more alone in this bustling crowd, more lost, more wretched than in the lonely country.
That evening when she came back to the hotel she was informed that a man had come to see her from M. Paul, and that he would come back again the following day. Her heart began to beat violently and she never closed her eyes that night. If it should be he! Yes, it assuredly was, although she would not have recognized him from the description they gave her.
About nine o’clock the following morning there was a knock at the door. She cried: “Come in!” ready to throw herself into certain outstretched arms. But an unknown person appeared; and while he excused himself for disturbing her, and explained his business, which was to collect a debt of Paul’s, she felt the tears beginning to overflow, and wiped them away with her finger before they fell on her cheeks.
He had learned of her arrival through the janitor of the Rue Sauvage, and as he could not find the young man, he had come to see his mother. He handed her a paper, which she took without knowing what she was doing and read the figures — ninety francs — which she paid without a word.
She did not go out that day.
The next day other creditors came. She gave them all that she had left except twenty francs and then wrote to Rosalie to explain matters to her.
She passed her days wandering about, waiting for Rosalie’s answer, not knowing what to do, how to kill the melancholy, interminable hours, having no one to whom she could say an affectionate word, no one who knew her sorrow. She now longed to return home to her little house at the side of the lonely high road. A few days before she thought she could not live there, she was so overcome with grief, and now she felt that she could never live anywhere else but there where her serious character had been formed.
One evening the letter at last came, enclosing two hundred francs. Rosalie wrote:
“Madame Jeanne: Come back at once, for I shall not send you any more. As for M. Paul, it is I who will go and get him when we know where he is.
“With respect, your servant,
“Rosalie.”
Jeanne set out for Batteville one very cold, snowy morning.
French
XIV
Jeanne never went out now, never stirred about. She rose at the same hour every day, looked out at the weather and then went downstairs and sat before the parlor fire.
She would remain for days motionless, gazing into the fire, thinking of nothing in particular. It would grow dark before she stirred, except to put a fresh log on the fire. Rosalie would then bring in the lamp and exclaim: “Come, Madame Jeanne, you must stir about or you will have no appetite again this evening.”
She lived over the past, haunted by memories of her early life and her wedding journey down yonder in Corsica. Forgotten landscapes in that isle now rose before her in the blaze of the fire, and she recalled all the little details, all the little incidents, the faces she had seen down there. The head of the guide, Jean Ravoli, haunted her, and she sometimes seemed to hear his voice.
Then she remembered the sweet years of Paul’s childhood, when they planted salad together and when she knelt in the thick grass beside Aunt Lison, each trying what they could do to please the child, and her lips murmured: “Poulet, my little Poulet,” as though she were talking to him. Stopping at this word, she would try to trace it, letter by letter, in space, sometimes for hours at a time, until she became confused and mixed up the letters and formed other words, and she became so nervous that she was almost crazy.
She had all the peculiarities of those who live a solitary life. The least thing out of its usual place irritated her.
Rosalie often obliged her to walk and took her on the high road, but at the end of twenty minutes she declared she could not take another step and sat down on the side of the road.
She soon became averse to all movement and stayed in bed as late as possible. Since her childhood she had retained one custom, that of rising the instant she had drunk her café au lait in the morning. But now she would lie down again and begin to dream, and as she was daily growing more lazy, Rosalie would come and oblige her to get up and almost force her to get dressed.
She seemed no longer to have any will power, and each time the maid asked her a question or wanted her advice or opinion she would say: “Do as you think best, my girl.”
She imagined herself pursued by some persistent ill luck and was like an oriental fatalist, and having seen her dreams all fade away and her hopes crushed, she would sometimes hesitate a whole day or longer before undertaking the simplest thing, for fear she might be on the wrong road and it would turn out badly. She kept repeating: “Talk of bad luck — I have never had any luck in life.”
Then Rosalie would say: “What would you do if you had to work for your living, if you were obliged to get up every morning at six o’clock to go out to your work? Many people have to do that, nevertheless, and when they grow too old they die of want.”
Jeanne replied: “Remember that I am all alone; that my son has deserted me.” And Rosalie would get very angry: “That’s another thing! Well, how about the sons who are drafted into the army and those who go to America?”
America to her was an undefined country, where one went to make a fortune and whence one never returned. She continued: “There always comes a time when people have to part, for old people and young people are not made to live together.” And she added fiercely: “Well, what would you say if he were dead?”
Jeanne had nothing more to say.
One day in spring she had gone up to the loft to look for something and by chance opened a box containing old calendars which had been preserved after the manner of some country folks.
She took them up and carried them downstairs. They were of all sizes, and she laid them out on the table in the parlor in regular order. Suddenly she spied the earliest, the one she had brought with her to “The Poplars.” She gazed at it for some time, at the days crossed off by her the morning she left Rouen, the day after she left the convent, and she wept slow, sorrowful tears, the tears of an old woman at sight of her wretched life spread out before her on this table.
One morning the maid came into her room earlier
