“Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth, wondering.
“Oh, if you did, you would!” the young man exclaimed, laughing again. Such a rejoinder, from any one else, would have irritated our sensitive hero, but it only made Hyacinth more curious about his interlocutor, whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.
“Mon ami, you ought to present ces messieurs,” Madame Poupin remarked.
“Ah ça, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband cried out, without heeding her. Then he went on, in a different tone: “ M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child, un enfant très-doué, in whom I take a tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping big one! Isn’t it so, mon petit?”
This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly, “Oh, I only want them to let me alone!”
“He is very young,” said Eustache Poupin.
“He is the person we have seen in this country whom we like the best,” his wife added.
“Perhaps you are French,” suggested the strange young man.
The trio seemed to Hyacinth to be waiting for his answer to this; it was as if a listening stillness had fallen upon them. He found it a difficult moment, partly because there was something exciting and embarrassing in the attention of the other visitor, and partly because he had never yet had to decide that important question. He didn’t really know whether he were French or English, or which of the two he should prefer to be. His mother’s blood, her suffering in an alien land, the unspeakable, irremediable misery that consumed her, in a place, among a people, she must have execrated—all this made him French; yet he was conscious at the same time of qualities that did not mix with it. He had evolved, long ago, a legend about his mother, built it up slowly, adding piece to piece, in passionate musings and broodings, when his cheeks burned and his eyes filled; but there were times when it wavered and faded, when it ceased to console him and he ceased to trust it. He had had a father too, and his father had suffered as well, and had fallen under a blow, and had paid with his life; and him also he felt in his mind and his body, when the effort to think it out did not simply end in darkness and confusion, challenging still even while they baffled, and inevitable freezing horror. At any rate, he seemed rooted in the place where his wretched parents had expiated, and he knew nothing about any other. Moreover, when old Poupin said, ‘M. Hyacinthe’, as he had often done before, he didn’t altogether enjoy it; he thought it made his name, which he liked well enough in English, sound like the name of a hairdresser. Our young friend was under a cloud and a stigma, but he was not yet prepared to admit that he was ridiculous. “Oh, I dare say I ain’t anything,” he replied in a moment.
“En v’là des bêtises!” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say you are not as good as any one in the world? I should like to see!”