“I will go in,” she said, “when that little boat disappears behind the jetty.”
The boat disappeared and she rose to her feet. As she went up the stairs, a childish idea came into her head, an idea which she was destined long to remember, together with the smallest details of that terrible minute:
“If mother is still asleep,” she thought, “I will blow on her forehead to wake her.”
She listened at the door. Not a sound. She laughed roguishly. Then, slowly, cautiously, she opened the door. Mme. Armand lay stretched on the bed. Gilberte went up to her. For some indefinable reason, she forgot her intended joke and simply kissed her mother on the forehead.
A cry escaped her lips. Terror-stricken, she flung herself upon her mother, caught her desperately in her arms and fell fainting beside the bed.
Mme. Armand was dead.
* * *
A room in which she sobs for hours on end, heedless of all things, huddled in a little chair, or on her knees before a white-curtained bed; people who come and go; a doctor who certifies the cause of death; aneurism of the heart, beyond a doubt; the lady of the house, who tries to comfort her; a commissary of police who puts questions which she is unable to answer and who makes her look in her mother’s trunks for papers that are not there: these are Gilberte’s lasting memories of those two dreadful days.
Then came the singing in the church, a long road between bare, wind-stripped trees, the graveyard and the final and irrevocable parting from her who, until now, was all her life, her soul, her light....
Oh, the first night spent in solitude and those first meals taken with no one opposite her and those long interminable days during which she never stopped weeping the big tears that come welling up from the heart as from a spring which nothing can dry up! Alone, knowing nobody, what was she to do? Where could she go? To whom could she turn?