#1873

One evening he told her about the woman in the Boulevard Montmartre, the woman in the pink bonnet whose blood had run onto his hands. He still often thought about that poor creature. In his nights of anguish in Cayenne her image had often appeared before him; and he had returned to France with the mad notion of seeing her walking down the street in broad daylight, although he had never stopped feeling the weight of her body across his legs. And yet, he thought, she might perhaps have recovered. Sometimes, when he was walking in the street, he had the sudden impression that he had seen her, and his heart almost stopped; and he sometimes followed pink bonnets and shawl-draped shoulders with a wildly beating heart. When he closed his eyes, he could see her walking towards him; but she would let her shawl slip, showing the two red stains on her bodice; and then he saw her waxen face, her empty eyes, and her mouth twisted in pain. For a long time his great sorrow had been not to know her name, and being forced to see her as a mere shadow.

She laughed her lovely laugh, and Quenu was quite convinced by what she had said. Yes, she was right; and she looked very beautiful, he thought, as she sat there on the edge of the bed, even at this early hour so near and clean in her white linen. As he listened to her, his eyes fell on their portraits on either side of the mantelpiece. Yes, it was true that they were decent and honest; they looked most respectable in their black clothes and gilded frames. The room itself now seemed the bedchamber of people who were of some account in the world. The lace squares seemed to give a dignified appearance to the chairs, and the carpet, the curtains, and the vases decorated with painted landscapes—all spoke of their hard work and their love of comfort. He wriggled further down under the eiderdown, where he lay as if in a hot bath. He began to realise that at Monsieur Lebrigre’s he had only just managed to avoid losing all this—his enormous bed, his cosy room, his charcuterie. He was now filled with remorse. And from Lisa, from the furniture, from everything around him, he derived a sense of well-being that seemed a little claustrophobic, but delightfully so.

Never, however, was there so much harmony in a household marked by such contrasts. The elder brother grew thinner and thinner, consumed by the same inner fires as his father, while the younger one grew fatter and fatter, like a true son of Normandy; and they loved each other in the brotherhood they derived from their mother—a woman of infinite devotion.