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Were I to act now sensibly and as common reason demanded, I should send the child back whence he came, though I don’t know in the least where that is.... The child who has awakened the most sacred feeling in my poor, withered heart.... The child who is to blame for my having shed, for the first time in my life, tears of joy.
When I offered to take Jeanne’s child, I had my reasons at my fingers’ ends, but they were not honourable ones. I wanted to start for myself an interest in life. I started from the hypothesis that what filled the lives of so many women might equally well fill mine. I wanted to take Jeanne’s child, in the same way as five years before I had taken her ... as an experiment, a distraction.
But it was not so to-night. This small boy had kissed my hands, and I had blessed him.
I have heard somewhere of a holy man who met once a little child who was tired. He lifted him on to his shoulders and carried him over a river, but on the way the child grew and became heavier and heavier, while the man sank deeper and deeper.... All that, however, doesn’t matter.
I took him home with me. Here you can do what you like. My proceeding excited no remark. A stranger asked if he should fetch me a carriage, and we drove home.
I must, of course, make inquiries about his antecedents. He says nothing himself. He woke up when I struck a light, but he wouldn’t tell me his name even. The people in the train thought he was one of those outcast children without parents who live from hand to mouth by selling newspapers, and stealing from the banana carts, and who pass the night on the river’s bank or in empty wagons.
I haven’t succeeded yet in getting his boots off. Though they have evidently once belonged to a grown-up, they are so tightly laced on his little legs that they can only be moved by cutting. He must have worn them day and night for months.
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What will be the end of it? I daren’t think, and I daren’t act. I keep saying to myself without ceasing, the same thing, “Suppose he is taken away from me?” and I seem to see into the future, his life ending in crime, his death taking place in prison.