I WAS ailing all winter. I had attacks of intermittent fever, followed by the measles, with delirium.
My father and mother came in turn to help my grandparents take care of me. For a week they all feared not only for my life, but for my sanity—fears which re-established for a while perfect accord between them.
My father, talking one day at my bedside to grandmother, who was accusing her daughter of being responsible for my illness, said:
“It seems to me, mother, that you, too, deserve reproach in this respect, from what my father-in-law tells me. As to Olympe, I assure you she is more unhappy from her suspicions than those whom she suspects. Her jealousy is not her own fault; it is a malady. If you will look at her during her fits of anger, you will see that she has already certain tremblings of her head, too characteristic, alas! Do not forget that her paternal grandfather died of paralysis, which is, perhaps, the explanation of her unconscious cruelties. You must take care of Olympe, mother, rather than blame her. I, also, have a great defect in being too violent, and it comes to me from an affection of my heart, an inheritance from my father.”
My father expressed these words so gently, so sadly, that I at once forgave my mother, with whom I had until that moment still been angry, and I was most unhappy to hear that my father had a disease of the heart.
During my delirium my grandfather had no difficulty in discovering the cause of the tension of my little brain, overheated by the struggle to understand the contradictions between my father’s and grandmother’s ideas. I was endeavouring with all my might to make the ideas agree, and could not succeed, which tormented me. In my fever I did nothing but talk of politics and socialism.
“She must escape from both of you for a time,” he said to my father and grandmother, “and I am going to accept her great-aunt’s invitation to her.”
My grandmother’s half-sisters, Sophie, Constance, and Anastasie, lived with her mother at a country-seat in the environs of Soissons, at Chivres. They led a monastic life, having, all three, refused to marry.
Since their father’s death they had, no one knew why, desired to know me, and this seemed all the more extraordinary to my grandparents because they had never taken any interest in my mother.
A friend of my grandmother’s having spoken to them about me, they said to this friend that if grandmother desired me to be their heiress, instead of one of their mother’s cousins, to whom they were somewhat attached, she must let me go and visit them alone every year during the vacation season, in July and August.