Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
-BOOK EIGHTH. CHAPTER V.
THE MOTHER.
I do not believe that there is anything sweeter in the world than the ideas which
awake in a mother's heart at the sight of her child's tiny shoe; especially if it is
a shoe for festivals, for Sunday, for
baptism, the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the infant has not
yet taken a step.
That shoe has so much grace and daintiness, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it
seems to the mother as though she saw her child.
She smiles upon it, she kisses it, she talks to it; she asks herself whether there
can actually be a foot so tiny; and if the child be absent, the pretty shoe suffices
to place the sweet and fragile creature before her eyes.
She thinks she sees it, she does see it, complete, living, joyous, with its delicate
hands, its round head, its pure lips, its serene eyes whose white is blue.
If it is in winter, it is yonder, crawling on the carpet, it is laboriously climbing
upon an ottoman, and the mother trembles lest it should approach the fire.
If it is summer time, it crawls about the yard, in the garden, plucks up the grass
between the paving-stones, gazes innocently at the big dogs, the big horses, without
fear, plays with the shells, with the
flowers, and makes the gardener grumble because he finds sand in the flower-beds
and earth in the paths.
Everything laughs, and shines and plays around it, like it, even the breath of air
and the ray of sun which vie with each other in disporting among the silky
ringlets of its hair.
The shoe shows all this to the mother, and makes her heart melt as fire melts wax.
But when the child is lost, these thousand images of joy, of charms, of tenderness,
which throng around the little shoe, become so many horrible things.
The pretty broidered shoe is no longer anything but an instrument of torture which
eternally crushes the heart of the mother.
It is always the same fibre which vibrates, the tenderest and most sensitive; but
instead of an angel caressing it, it is a demon who is wrenching at it.
One May morning, when the sun was rising on one of those dark blue skies against which
Garofolo loves to place his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland
heard a sound of wheels, of horses and irons in the Place de Greve.
She was somewhat aroused by it, knotted her hair upon her ears in order to deafen
herself, and resumed her contemplation, on her knees, of the inanimate object which
she had adored for fifteen years.
This little shoe was the universe to her, as we have already said.
Her thought was shut up in it, and was destined never more to quit it except at
death.
The sombre cave of the Tour-Roland alone knew how many bitter imprecations, touching
complaints, prayers and sobs she had wafted to heaven in connection with that charming
bauble of rose-colored satin.
Never was more despair bestowed upon a prettier and more graceful thing.
It seemed as though her grief were breaking forth more violently than usual; and she
could be heard outside lamenting in a loud and monotonous voice which rent the heart.
"Oh my daughter!" she said, "my daughter, my poor, dear little child, so I shall
never see thee more! It is over!
It always seems to me that it happened yesterday!
My God! my God! it would have been better not to give her to me than to take her away
so soon.
Did you not know that our children are part of ourselves, and that a mother who has
lost her child no longer believes in God? Ah! wretch that I am to have gone out that
day!
Lord!
Lord! to have taken her from me thus; you could never have looked at me with her,
when I was joyously warming her at my fire, when she laughed as she suckled, when I
made her tiny feet creep up my breast to my lips?
Oh! if you had looked at that, my God, you would have taken pity on my joy; you would
not have taken from me the only love which lingered, in my heart!
Was I then, Lord, so miserable a creature, that you could not look at me before
condemning me?--Alas! Alas! here is the shoe; where is the foot?
where is the rest?
Where is the child? My daughter! my daughter! what did they do
with thee? Lord, give her back to me.
My knees have been worn for fifteen years in praying to thee, my God!
Is not that enough?
Give her back to me one day, one hour, one minute; one minute, Lord! and then cast me
to the demon for all eternity!
Oh! if I only knew where the skirt of your garment trails, I would cling to it with
both hands, and you would be obliged to give me back my child!
Have you no pity on her pretty little shoe?
Could you condemn a poor mother to this torture for fifteen years?
Good ***! good *** of heaven! my infant Jesus has been taken from me, has
been stolen from me; they devoured her on a heath, they drank her blood, they cracked
her bones!
Good ***, have pity upon me. My daughter, I want my daughter!
What is it to me that she is in paradise? I do not want your angel, I want my child!
I am a lioness, I want my whelp.
Oh! I will writhe on the earth, I will break the stones with my forehead, and I
will damn myself, and I will curse you, Lord, if you keep my child from me! you see
plainly that my arms are all bitten, Lord!
Has the good God no mercy?--Oh! give me only salt and black bread, only let me have
my daughter to warm me like a sun! Alas!
Lord my God.
Alas! Lord my God, I am only a vile sinner; but
my daughter made me pious.
I was full of religion for the love of her, and I beheld you through her smile as
through an opening into heaven.
Oh! if I could only once, just once more, a single time, put this shoe on her pretty
little pink foot, I would die blessing you, good ***.
Ah! fifteen years! she will be grown up now!--Unhappy child! what! it is really
true then I shall never see her more, not even in heaven, for I shall not go there
myself.
Oh! what misery to think that here is her shoe, and that that is all!"
The unhappy woman flung herself upon that shoe; her consolation and her despair for
so many years, and her vitals were rent with sobs as on the first day; because, for
a mother who has lost her child, it is always the first day.
That grief never grows old. The mourning garments may grow white and
threadbare, the heart remains dark.
At that moment, the fresh and joyous cries of children passed in front of the cell.
Every time that children crossed her vision or struck her ear, the poor mother flung
herself into the darkest corner of her sepulchre, and one would have said, that
she sought to plunge her head into the stone in order not to hear them.
This time, on the contrary, she drew herself upright with a start, and listened
eagerly.
One of the little boys had just said,-- "They are going to hang a gypsy to-day."
With the abrupt leap of that spider which we have seen fling itself upon a fly at the
trembling of its web, she rushed to her air-hole, which opened as the reader knows,
on the Place de Greve.
A ladder had, in fact, been raised up against the permanent gibbet, and the
hangman's assistant was busying himself with adjusting the chains which had been
rusted by the rain.
There were some people standing about. The laughing group of children was already
far away. The sacked nun sought with her eyes some
passer-by whom she might question.
All at once, beside her cell, she perceived a priest making a pretext of reading the
public breviary, but who was much less occupied with the "lectern of latticed
iron," than with the gallows, toward which
he cast a fierce and gloomy glance from time to time.
She recognized monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a holy man.
"Father," she inquired, "whom are they about to hang yonder?"
The priest looked at her and made no reply; she repeated her question.
Then he said,--
"I know not." "Some children said that it was a gypsy,"
went on the recluse. "I believe so," said the priest.
Then Paquette la Chantefleurie burst into hyena-like laughter.
"Sister," said the archdeacon, "do you then hate the gypsies heartily?"
"Do I hate them!" exclaimed the recluse, "they are vampires, stealers of children!
They devoured my little daughter, my child, my only child!
I have no longer any heart, they devoured it!"
She was frightful. The priest looked at her coldly.
"There is one in particular whom I hate, and whom I have cursed," she resumed; "it
is a young one, of the age which my daughter would be if her mother had not
eaten my daughter.
Every time that that young viper passes in front of my cell, she sets my blood in a
ferment."
"Well, sister, rejoice," said the priest, icy as a sepulchral statue; "that is the
one whom you are about to see die." His head fell upon his *** and he moved
slowly away.
The recluse writhed her arms with joy. "I predicted it for her, that she would
ascend thither! Thanks, priest!" she cried.
And she began to pace up and down with long strides before the grating of her window,
her hair dishevelled, her eyes flashing, with her shoulder striking against the
wall, with the wild air of a female wolf in
a cage, who has long been famished, and who feels the hour for her repast drawing near.