“Has your grandmother ever told you she would find a husband for you and give you a great deal of money—a dot?” she asked me suddenly after a silence.
Having got up early, with my head drowsy, and having been tormented for half an hour, I answered unfortunately:
“Yes, grandmother will give me as large a dot as she can. Are you satisfied?”
My mother struck the donkey, which was also half asleep. I was jolted so unexpectedly that I fell off on the opposite side from my mother on a heap of stones.
The shock stunned me. I was blinded by blood. I called “Mamma!” and found she was no longer by me. I got up, took my handkerchief and tried to collect the blood on my forehead; my flowing tears enabled me to open my eyes. I looked for her, but a turn in the road prevented me from seeing how far away she might be. She had disappeared in order to punish me. I thought she had abandoned me, alone and bleeding.
I started to run as fast as I could. My mother was waiting for me. The sight of the blood which covered my face, and which came from a wound under my hair near my temple, and which grandfather said in the evening might have killed me, did not touch her heart. She raised me from the ground by my belt without getting off the donkey, which she had remounted, placed me on her lap without saying a word, holding me tightly with her left arm while she drove the donkey with her right hand, tapping its head with the reins.
I was very uncomfortably seated, and suffered much from my position, but I did not complain. I thought only of getting home, of seeing my grandmother, whom I would never leave again.
I did not cease sobbing, and the people who met us could not understand my evident despair nor my mother’s impassibility.
My grandmother, informed of my coming, was at the window with Arthémise. They ran to the door on seeing us. When my grandmother saw the state I was in, she took me into the drawing-room, overcome with grief. She could not kiss me, there was so much clotted blood on my face.
She had begun to question me, anxiously, when my mother, who had taken the donkey to the stable followed by Arthémise, came like a bomb into the drawing-room, and began again the eternal “family drama” so angrily that the quarrel became more and more passionate. Finally I, crying in despair, was taken with a nose-bleeding, which my handkerchief, already saturated with blood, could not stanch, and I was literally covered with blood.