So this is the maternal infatuation which is so sanctified and revered. "I don't know.—I don't know.—I don't know." And I presumptuously was going to commit the same folly, I, who knew no better than they, who had not learned the unknown love awaiting me....
Why doesn't that man, the doctor, who knows, arise and snatch away these lives contaminated by the fond ignorance of the mothers, and proclaim that the instinct is fallible, fatal, even criminal?
Most of the women met me again under the porte-cochère, because I walked with difficulty. The one with the drowned-corpse face gave me a friendly little nod.
"You will see," her nod said, "it will soon be your turn...."
Yes, I know.... To be a mother.... In return for the gift of life, to have the right of death over one's child. And to use that right.
XIII
A rending, moments repeated incessantly, torture indescribable, pain embedded in the body, battle, cruel cries....
I remember everything and every second. I remember the seconds when I gnawed at my bedclothes, when I howled like a wild beast. I remember all of them and others. I remember that none of them was ever the last, how the hours added themselves to the seconds in an excruciating, inhuman succession of throes in which my whole being set furiously upon itself, how I no longer had the strength to suffer.
I twisted my head from side to side like a dying animal in entreaty; I stifled it in the pillows; it was wet with perspiration; I felt a new convulsion begin and break like a wave. And when an infernal force tore me with a pang greater than all the others, I heard vaguely a cry that was no longer mine, a film passed over my pupils, I sank into an abyss sunlit and sultry. It was over ... it was over ... I fell asleep.