While he was looking at the tortoise, his mother said to him, with the glimmer of a smile:
"She is as old as you are. I was carrying you when it was given to me."
With the same imperceptible smile, she added: "She was quite small. The shell was almost transparent; she resembled a toy. She has lived in our house ever since, growing bigger every year."
She took an apple paring and offered it to the tortoise. She looked for a moment at the poor animal, which moved its yellowish, old, serpent-like head with a kind of dazed trembling. Then dreamily she began to peel an orange for George.
"She remembers," thought George, seeing his mother so absorbed. He guessed the inexpressible sadness which, without any doubt, entered her soul at the recollection of the happy days, now that the ruin was complete, now that, after so many treasons, after so many infamies, all was irreparably lost. "She was loved by him formerly; she was young; perhaps she had not yet suffered! How her heart must sigh! What regret, what hopelessness must well up from her entrails!" The son suffered from the maternal suffering—reproduced in himself his mother's anguish. And he dwelt so long, savoring the supreme delicacy of his emotion, that his eyes became veiled in tears. He repressed the tears by an effort, and felt them fall, very softly, within himself. "Oh! mother, if you only knew."
On turning round, he saw that Christine was smiling at him over the roses.
Camille's fiancé was just saying:
"That is what one might call being ignorant of the first word of the Code. When one claims to——"
The baron approved the young doctor's arguments, and repeated after each sentence:
"Assuredly, assuredly."