“To the Café of the Navigators.”
And turning to me father added in a tone which admitted of no reply, “Go away!”
So that I did not hear the reply.
I have forgotten no incident of that scene and am certain of having reconstructed it in its integrity, and if not in the same words at least in equivalent ones. As I had been successively born into a mysterious longing by a word of the shepherd who was leading his sheep to the mountain, into the knowledge of liberty by a walk with grandfather in the wild forest, into the sense of beauty by having met the lady in white, into the disquietude of love because Nazzarena had told me with a laugh that I was her little lover, so now I was born into a knowledge of human wickedness, to which all my childhood had been a stranger. Aunt Deen’s famous they, at whom I scoffed after having vainly sought them around me, did then exist, and Martinod was one of them, and the gentle and gay Casenave, whom my father had cured, and the old photographer Galurin, and the two artists!
This unexpected revelation completely upset me. People went to the café to enjoy themselves and not to hatch plots. They drank vari-coloured drinks and made jokes the while. No, it could not be possible! A doubt swept over me, both because of grandfather’s calmness, and because the “go away” which dismissed me had been somewhat brusque and aroused in me a desire to take the other side. Perhaps that scrap of paper was indeed not worth reading.
The next day I was in mother’s room when father came in with his hat on, coming straight in from outside without stopping in the vestibule. He took off his hat hastily, and we saw that his face was animated and suffused with colour. He had his grand air of a battle, and he laughed as if pleased.
“I have slapped Martinod’s face,” he said simply, as if he had said, “I have been to see such and such a patient.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” murmured my mother; “what will he invent against you now?”
I heard Aunt Deen running heavily, shaking the floor, rushing in like a whirlwind. She had heard my father’s words from a distance.
“Well done, Michel; well done!” she cried, all out of breath. “They are beaten; well done!”