We pressed hands again.
"Mind you sleep, Michel."
"Good-night, Claude...."
He went away. I leaned my forehead on my arm, and tried to get to sleep, but my face was burning. What strange tumultuous thoughts besieged me.
I caught myself repeating: "Victor, my poor Victor!" But this time something was rent asunder. A veil fell. The artificial atmosphere in which all my joys and sorrows had been deadened for so long was dissipated.
My man's heart began to bleed. I became conscious of my grief. Without diminishing it I could now compare it, without blasphemy, with that other, into which the death of my mother had formerly plunged me. A double regret, identical, I felt in its essential point, for these two beings were of my blood, my nearest relations, a little of myself. Part of my life and future were buried with them. I understood now what an irrecoverable part my brother had played in my life. I had loved him when a child, and my childhood would never be renewed. Our gaze and our minds had awakened to the same things. A thousand memories were ours, ours alone. O Victor, I remembered the grace of your eighth, your tenth year. Our wild games in the big house at Tours, and in the summer holidays in the big garden at Emberménil. I admired you and adored you, my strong elder brother, who never abused your strength, who used to consent to being the "horse," out of your turn very often, so that I might hold the reins. When you brought friends home you did not like me, the youngest of the band, to be "ticked," and when I was "it" too long, you let yourself be caught on purpose.
I could remember my brother leaving for La Flêche as clearly as if it had been yesterday. I was inconsolable. I was seven years old, and in my unhappiness I refused to eat any pudding for a whole week!
I was just beginning to write. With a great effort I managed to cover a page for him every week. When he came back at Christmas, looking very smart in his new uniform, how delighted, how overjoyed I had been.
And then, little by little, we had drifted apart.