My grandmother at these revelations wished to leave immediately for Verberie; my grandfather prevented her. He sent the commercial traveller to the proprietor of The Three Monarchs to assure him that he would be paid by Madame Lambert’s parents, but that he must say nothing of it to her, and must, on no account, acquaint her husband about it.
On the commercial traveller’s return my grandmother had all the details she desired, some of which were lamentable, others consoling.
My mother nursed me herself. I was a very healthy baby, but Madame Lambert, suffering from poverty and cold, for she often deprived herself of fire, the commercial traveller said, was evidently losing her health. But the hotel proprietor, reassured about his debt, would arrange things so that the young mother should suffer no longer.
My grandfather loved his daughter Olympe more than did my grandmother, because she resembled his own mother. She was submissive to her husband to the point of sacrificing her child to her wifely duties, and therefore he suffered about his child as well as his grandchild, while my grandmother suffered especially on my account.
Again, my grandmother wished to leave to come to us, but her husband calmed her with his oft-repeated words:
“You will only upset her, and, as she is nursing her child, she will give her fever and you will kill her. Wait at least for nine months, and then you can wean Juliette, and we will decide what to do according to circumstances.”
Hour by hour, day by day, week by week, the nine months, sadly counted, passed at last. At the end of the ninth month the commercial traveller received a letter from the proprietor of The Three Monarchs, saying that my father had gone to Brussels with Doctor Bernhardt, who went there ostensibly to make some final experiments, in reality to escape legal prosecution by flight, and that my mother and I were abandoned.
As soon as this letter was communicated to my grandparents there was no longer any hesitation, and my grandmother left for Verberie.
My mother, clad in a worn-out gown, was shivering over a small fire of shavings, thin, pale, her handsome face grown more sombre than ever. She welcomed her mother with a violent scene, but my grandmother had come with prepared resolutions which nothing could move.
“You have not the right, through fidelity to I know not what wifely duty and which your husband, it seems to me, is far from reciprocating, to live here in this wretchedness, and, above all, to impose it on your child. You shall leave this hotel to-morrow and return to your parents, and your husband, when he desires to do so, can come to find you as well at their home as here in this inn.”