The Father
He was employed at the Ministry of Education, and as he lived in the Batignolles suburb he took the omnibus every morning in order to go to his office. And every morning he travelled to the centre of Paris facing a girl with whom he fell in love.
She went to her work in a shop at the same time every day. She was small and dark, one of those brunettes whose eyes are so dark that they are like pitch balls stuck in her face, and whose skin has the gleam of ivory. Every day he saw her appear at the corner of the same street; and she would start running to catch up the heavy vehicle. She ran with short, hurried steps, supple and graceful, and would jump on to the step before the horses had quite stopped. Then she would make her way into the inside, panting a little, and, sitting down, would glance all round her.
The first time that he saw her, François Tessier knew that her face gave him infinite pleasure. Sometimes we meet such women, women whom we desire to seize fiercely in our arms, at first sight, before we even know them. This girl answered all the intimate desires, the secret dreams, the very ideal of love, as it were, which we bear about with us in the subconscious depths of our hearts.
Against his will he stared obstinately at her. His gaze embarrassed her and she blushed. He noticed this, and tried to turn away his eyes, but time and again they returned to her in spite of his efforts to fix his gaze elsewhere.
At the end of a few days they were no longer strangers, although they had never spoken to each other. He gave her his seat when the omnibus was full and went up on the top, in spite of the torture of loss it inflicted upon him. She greeted him now with a little smile; and though she always lowered her eyes under his gaze, which she felt to be too eager, yet she no longer seemed angry at being watched.
At last they began to talk to each other. A sudden intimate friendship was established between them, an intimacy confined to half an hour each day. And certainly it was the most delightful half-hour of his day. He thought of her all the rest of the time, and never ceased to dwell on the vision of her during his long sojourns at the office, haunted, obsessed, and invaded by the changing, clinging image which the face of a beloved woman leaves with us. It seemed to him that complete possession of that little creature would be for him a wild happiness, almost beyond human realisation.
Every morning now she shook hands with him, and he retained until evening the sense of that contact, the memory in his flesh of the faint pressure of her small fingers; he imagined that he preserved the imprint of them on his skin.
Throughout the rest of his time he looked forward anxiously to the short omnibus journey. And his Sundays seemed heartbreaking.
Certainly she loved him, for one Saturday in the spring she consented to lunch with him the next day at Maisons-Laffitte.
She arrived first at the station, and was waiting for him. He was surprised; but she said to him:
“Before we go, I’ve something to say. We’ve twenty minutes; that’s more than long enough.”
She was trembling, leaning on his arm, her eyes lowered and her cheeks pale.
“You must make no mistake about me,” she continued. “I’m an honest girl, and I won’t come with you unless you promise, unless you’ll swear not to … not to do anything which isn’t … which isn’t … nice.”
She had suddenly gone more scarlet than a poppy. She was silent. He did not know what to reply, happy and disappointed at the same time. At the bottom of his heart he possibly preferred that it should be like this; yet … yet he had lulled himself to sleep, the night before, with dreams that had fired his pulses. Certainly he would have loved her less, had he known her to be of easy virtue; but then how charming, how delicious it would be for him if she were! His mind was racked by all the selfish calculations that men make over this business of love.
As he said nothing, she added in a voice shaken with emotion, and tears at the corners of her eyes:
“If you don’t promise to respect me, absolutely … I’m going back home.”
He squeezed her arm affectionately and replied:
“I promise; you shall do nothing you do not want to do.”
She seemed relieved, and asked with a smile:
“Is that really true?”
He looked into the depths of her eyes.
“I swear it!”
“Then let’s take the tickets,” she said.
They could hardly speak a word to one another on the way, as their compartment was full.
Having reached Maisons-Laffitte, they directed their steps towards the Seine.
The warm air quieted their thoughts and their senses. The sun fell full upon the river, the leaves, and the grass, and darted a thousand gleams of happiness into body and mind. Hand in hand they walked along the bank, watching the little fish that glided in shoals under the surface of the water. They wandered along, adrift in happiness, as though transported from the earth in an ecstasy of delight.
At last she said:
“You must think me mad.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Isn’t it mad of me to go all alone with you like this?” she went on.
“Why, no; it’s quite natural.”
“No, no! It’s not natural—for me—for I don’t want to do anything foolish—and this is just how one does come to do foolish things. But if you only knew! It’s so dull, every day the same thing, every day in the month and every month in the year. I live alone with my mother. And since she has had many sorrows in her life, she’s not very gay. As for me, I do what I can. I try to laugh, but I don’t always succeed. But all the same, it was wrong of me to come. But at least you don’t blame me for it?”
For answer he kissed her eagerly upon the ear. But she drew away from him with a swift movement, and said, suddenly vexed:
“Oh, Monsieur François, after what you promised me!”
And they turned back towards Maisons-Laffitte.
They lunched at the Petit-Havre, a low house buried beneath four enormous poplars, and standing on the bank of the river.
The fresh air, the heat, the thin white wine, and the exciting sense of each other’s nearness made them flushed, troubled and silent. But after coffee, a sudden tide of joy welled up in them; they crossed the Seine and set off again along the bank towards the village of La Frette.
Suddenly he asked:
“What is your name?”
“Louise.”
“Louise,” he repeated, and said no more.
The river, describing a long curve, caressed a distant row of white houses mirrored head downwards in the water. The girl picked daisies and arranged them in a huge rustic sheaf; the man sang at the top of his voice, as lively as a colt just put out to grass.
To the left, a slope planted with vines followed the curve of the river. Suddenly François stopped and remained motionless with astonishment.
“Oh, look!” he said.
The vineyards had ceased, and all the hillside was now covered with flowering lilac. It was a violet-hued wood, a carpet spread upon the earth, reaching as far as the village two or three kilometres distant.
She too stood spellbound with delight.
“Oh! How lovely!” she murmured.
They crossed a field and ran towards this strange hill which every year supplies all the lilac trundled about Paris on the little barrows of the street sellers.
A narrow path lost itself among the shrubs. They took it, and, coming to a small clearing, there sat down.
Legions of flies murmured above their heads, filling the air with a soft, ceaseless drone. The sun, the fierce sun of an airless day, beat down upon the long slope of blossom, drawing from this flower-forest a powerful scent, great heady gusts of perfume, the exhalation of the flowers.
A church-bell rang in the distance.
Quietly they embraced, then drew each other closer, lying in the grass, conscious of nothing but their kisses. She had closed her eyes and held him in her open arms, clasping him tightly, all thought dismissed, all reason abandoned, every sense utterly suspended in passionate expectation. She gave herself utterly to him, without knowing what she was doing, without even realising that she was delivered into his hands.
She came to herself half mad, as from a dreadful disaster, and began to weep, moaning with grief, hiding her face in her hands.
He tried to console her. But she was anxious to leave, to get back, to go home at once. She walked up and down with desperate strides, ceaselessly repeating:
“My God! My God!”
“Louise,” he begged. “Please stay, Louise.”
Her cheeks were now burning and her eyes sunken. As soon as they arrived at the station in Paris, she left him without even bidding him goodbye.
When he met her next day in the omnibus, she seemed to him to have changed, to have grown thinner.
“I must speak to you,” she said to him. “We will get off at the boulevard.”
When they were alone on the pavement she said:
“We must say goodbye to one another. I cannot see you again after what has happened.”
“But why not?” he stammered.
“Because I cannot. I was to blame. I shall not be guilty a second time.”
At that he begged and implored her, tortured with desire, maddened with the need to possess her utterly, in the deep abandon of nights of love.
“No, I cannot,” she replied obstinately. “No, I cannot.”
He grew more and more eager and excited. He promised to marry her.
“No,” she said again, and left him.
He did not see her for eight days. He could not continue to meet her, and, as he did not know her address, he thought her lost forever.
On the evening of the ninth day his doorbell rang. He went to open the door. It was she. She flung herself into his arms and resisted no longer. For three months she was his mistress. He began to weary of her, when she told him that she was with child. At that he had only one idea left in his head: to break with her at all costs.
Unable to tell her frankly what he meant to do, not knowing how to deal with the situation or what to say, wild with apprehension, and with the fear of the growing child, he made a desperate move. He decamped one night and disappeared.
The blow was so cruel that she made no search for the man who had deserted her in this fashion. She flung herself at her mother’s knees and confessed her misfortune to her; a few months later she gave birth to a son.
The years slipped by. François Tessier grew old, without suffering any change in his manner of life. He led the monotonous and dismal existence of a bureaucrat, without hope or expectation. Every day he rose at the same hour, went down the same streets, walked through the same door past the same hall-porter, entered the same office, sat down on the same seat, and worked at the same task. He was alone in the world, alone by day in the midst of his indifferent colleagues, alone at night in his bachelor lodgings. Every month he saved up a hundred francs for his old age.
Every Sunday he went for a walk along the Champs-Élysées, to watch the world of fashion go by, the carriages and the pretty women.
Next day he would say to his comrades in duress:
“It was a wonderful sight outside the park yesterday.”
One Sunday it chanced that he took a new way and went into the Parc Monceau. It was a bright summer morning. Nurses and mothers, seated on the benches at the side of the paths, were watching the children playing in front of them.
François Tessier shivered suddenly. A woman passed him, holding two children by the hand, a little boy of about ten, and a little girl of four. It was she.
He walked on for another hundred yards, and then sank into a chair, choked with emotion. She had not recognised him. Then he went back, trying to see her again. She was sitting down now. The boy was standing beside her, charmingly decorous, and the little girl was making mud pies. It was she, it was certainly she. She had the grave demeanour of a lady; her dress was simple, her bearing full of dignity and assurance.
He watched her from a distance, not daring to come close. The little boy raised his head. François Tessier felt himself trembling. This was his son, past all manner of doubt. He gazed at him, and fancied that he recognised himself as he might look in an old photograph.
He stayed hidden behind a tree, waiting for her to go, so that he might follow.
He did not sleep that night. The thought of the child racked him more than any other. His son! Oh! if he could only know, be sure! But what would he have done?
He had seen her house, he made inquiries, he learnt that she was married to a neighbour, a good man of high moral principles, touched by her misery. Knowing her sin and forgiving it, he had even acknowledged the child, his, François Tessier’s child.
Every Sunday he revisited the Parc Monceau. Every Sunday he saw her, and each time the mad, irresistible longing came to him to take his son in his arms, cover him with kisses, and carry him off, steal him.
He suffered terribly in his wretched loneliness, an old bachelor with nothing to love; he suffered a frightful anguish, torn by a fatherly love made up of remorse, longing, jealousy, and that need of small creatures to love which nature has implanted in the secret depths of every human being.
At last he decided to make a desperate effort, and, going up to her one day as she was entering the park, stood in her way, and said, with livid face and quivering lips:
“Don’t you recognise me?”
She raised her eyes, looked at him, uttered a scream of fear and horror, and, seizing her two children by the hand, fled, dragging them after her.
He went home to weep.
More months went by. He saw her no more. But he suffered day and night, gnawed and devoured by love for his child.
To embrace his son he would have died, would have committed murder, accomplished any task, braved any danger, attempted any perilous enterprise.
He wrote to her. She did not answer. After twenty letters he realised that he could not hope to move her. Then he took a desperate resolution; ready to receive a pistol bullet in his heart if he failed, he wrote a short note to her husband:
“Sir,
“My name must be an abhorred one to you. But I am so wretched, so tortured with remorse, that I have no hope except in you.
“I ask only for ten minutes’ talk with you.
Next day he received the answer:
“Sir,
“I shall expect you at five o’clock on Tuesday.”
As he mounted the staircase, François Tessier paused on every step, so furious was the beating of his heart. It was a hurrying clamour within his chest, a galloping animal, a dull and violent thudding. He could not breathe without an effort, and clung to the banisters to keep himself from falling.
At the third floor he rang. A servant opened the door.
“Monsieur Flamel?” he inquired.
“Yes, sir. Will you come in?”
He entered a middle-class drawing room. He was alone, and he waited in agony like a man in the grip of disaster.
A door opened. A man appeared. He was tall, grave, and rather stout, and wore a black frock-coat. He pointed to a chair.
François Tessier sat down, then said in a breathless voice:
“Monsieur … Monsieur … I don’t know if you know my name … if you know …”
Monsieur Flamel cut him short.
“Do not trouble to explain, monsieur. I know. My wife has spoken of you.”
He had the forthright aspect of a kindly man trying to be severe; and the upstanding dignity of a sober, middle-class citizen.
“You see, monsieur, it’s like this,” continued François Tessier. “I am dying of grief, remorse, and shame. All that I long for is that I may once, just once, kiss … the child.”
Monsieur Flamel rose, went to the fireplace, and rang. The servant appeared.
“Fetch Louis,” he said.
She went out. They remained facing one another, silent, having nothing else to say, waiting.
Suddenly a little boy of ten dashed into the room and ran to kiss the man he thought to be his father. But he stopped in confusion when he saw the stranger.
Monsieur Flamel kissed him on the forehead, and then said:
“Now, kiss this gentleman, darling.”
The child advanced obediently, looking at the stranger.
François Tessier had risen; he let his hat fall and was himself ready to collapse.
Monsieur Flamel had tactfully turned his back and was looking out of the window at the street.
The child waited in great astonishment. He picked up the hat and restored it to the stranger. Then François, taking the little boy in his arms, began to cover his face with furious kisses, upon eyes, cheeks, mouth, and hair.
The child was frightened by the storm of kisses and tried to avoid them, turning away his head, and with his little hands thrust away the man’s greedy lips.
Abruptly François Tessier set him down again.
“Goodbye! Goodbye!” he cried.
And he fled like a thief.