3

MY MOTHER

I

WHEN I had finished my first studies, my mother thought it would be a good thing to introduce me to “society”. But aside from some not too distant cousins and the wives of a few of my father’s colleagues at the Faculty of Law, transplanted from Rouen to Paris, she had never tried to make any acquaintances. Furthermore, the world in which it seemed I was to be interested, that of men of letters or artists, was not “her” world; she would have felt herself out of place in it.

I no longer know to what drawing-room she took me that day. It must have been that of my cousin Saussine, at whose home, on the rue d’Athènes, I took tiresome dancing lessons twice a week. It was the day they received. There were numerous introductions, and the conversation was approximately what all society conversations are, made up of little nothings and affectations. I turned my attention less to the other ladies than to my mother. I scarcely recognized her. She, ordinarily so modest, so reserved, and seemingly, fearful of her own opinion, appeared in that social gathering, full of assurance and, without pushing herself forward at all, perfectly at her ease. One would have said that she was playing a role exactly as it should be, without, moreover, attaching any importance to it, but willingly consenting to mingle in the game of the society parade to which one contributes hardly anything but outward appearances. It even seemed to me that, in the twaddle and foolishness all about, a few particularly sensible sentences of hers, threw the general conversation into disorder; the ridiculous remarks immediately collapsed and disappeared into thin air, like ghosts at the crowing of the cock. I was amazed, and told her so, as soon as we escaped from that Vanity Fair, and found ourselves alone together.

For my part, I dined that evening with Pierre Louys, I believe. At any rate, I remember that I left her as we turned the corner of rue d’Athènes. But I came back to her almost immediately after dinner. I was in a hurry to see her. We were then living on the rue de Commaille. The windows of our apartment opened on a deep garden that no longer exists to-day. My mother was on the balcony. She had taken off her finery, and I rediscovered her in her simple, drab, everyday clothes. It was the season when the first acacias smell sweet. My mother seemed worried; she did not make confidences easily and doubtless the co-operation of springtime was needed to invite her to speak.

“Is what you said to me as we left our cousin’s true?” she began with a great effort. “You really think so? I was … well, as good as the others?”

And as I began to exclaim, she continued mournfully:

“If your father had told me so even once … I never dared ask him, and I needed so terribly to know, when we went out together, if he was …”

She was silent for a moment. I looked at her trying to hold back her tears. She finished in a lower tone of voice, hardly audible:

“… if he was pleased with me.”

I think that those were her exact words which suddenly let me understand how many worries, unasked questions and expectations could, under the appearance of happiness, still dwell in even the most united of couples. And such were my parents in the eyes of everyone and of their son. What my mother had vainly awaited was not a compliment from my father, but only the assurance that she had been able to prove herself worthy of him, that he had not been disappointed in her. But what my father thought, I knew no more than she; and I understood, that evening, that every soul carries to the tomb to hide it there, some secret.

II

Everything that was natural in my mother, I loved. But it happened that her impulses were checked by convention and the bent that a bourgeois education too often leaves behind it. (Not always; thus I remember that she dared brave the disapproval of all her family when she went to care for the farmers of La Roque attacked during a typhus epidemic.) That education, excellent, doubtless, when it is a question of curbing evil instincts, attacks equally, but then very unfortunately, the generous emotions of the heart; then a sort of calculation restrains or directs them. I should like to give an example of this:

My mother announced to me her intention of making a gift of Littré to Anna Shackelton, our poor friend, whom I loved as a son. I was bursting with joy, when she added:

“The one I gave your father is bound in morocco. I thought that, for Anna, a shagreen binding would be sufficient.”

I understood at once, what I had not known before, that shagreen costs much less. The joy suddenly left my heart. And without a doubt my mother noticed it, for she went on quickly:

“She won’t see the difference.”

No, that shabby cheating was not natural to her. To her, giving was natural. But I was irritated also by that sort of complicity to which she invited me.

I have lost the memory of a thousand more important things. Why did those few sentences of my mother’s engrave themselves so deeply on my heart? Perhaps because I felt myself capable of thinking and saying them myself, in spite of the violent reprobation they aroused in me. Perhaps because I became conscious of that bent against which I should have to struggle and that I was sadly amazed to discover in my mother. Everything else melted into the harmonious ensemble of her face; and it is perhaps just because I did not recognize her any more by that trait, truly unworthy of her, that my memory took possession of it. What a warning! What strength that educational bent had, then, to triumph in this way from time to time! But my mother remained too surrounded by beings deformed in the same way, to be able to sort out and recognize in herself, among all the acquired characteristics, those spontaneous to her nature; above all, she remained too fearful and unsure of herself to give them the upper hand. She remained worried about others and their opinions; always desirous of the best, but a best answering to accepted rules; always tending toward this best, and without even suspecting (and too modest to recognize it) that the best in her was exactly what she obtained with the least effort.