Annette had established herself in a little apartment on the fifth floor on the populous Rue Monge. A steep stairway, small rooms, noise from without; but there was space above the roofs, and she needed this. The noise did not disturb her; she was a Parisian, accustomed to movement; it was almost necessary to her; she could think all the better in the midst of the hurly-burly. Perhaps her nature had also been transformed with maturity: the plenitude of physical life and regular work had given her a poise, a nervous solidity, which she had never known, but which would not endure forever.
The apartment consisted, on the street side, of Annette's bedroom, which served as a sitting-room (the bed formed a divan), Marc's little room, and a narrow recess, a sort of corner-closet. Across the passage, which was dark at midday, was the dining-room over the court and a kitchen that was practically filled by the stove and the sink.
Between the mother's room and that of the child the door remained open, and Marc was too small to protest. He was at the undecided age that floats between the sexlessness of early infancy and the first uncertain awakening of the little man. He was no longer in the one stage and not yet in the other. He would still run from his own bed to his mother's on Sunday morning; and on great days he would allow her to dress him from head to foot. On other days he would have fits of rudeness and shyness. And he was full of curiosity also. Especially he had attacks of secretiveness which he did not wish to have disturbed. He would slyly shut his door. Annette would open it again. He could not make a movement that she did not hear. It was unbearable! So he wouldn't move at all. Then she would forget him for a little while. Not for long! . . .
Happily, Annette was not always there. She had to go out. Marc went to his school, which was not far away. Annette took him there in the morning, and when she was free (rarely) in the afternoon. But she could not come for him to take him home again, for this was the hour of her lessons. He had to come home alone, and this made her anxious. She had tried to arrange with a neighboring family for the servant to bring Marc home when she brought their child. But this did not suit Marc, and he slipped away beforehand. So, proud and timorous, he would come back alone and all alone shut himself up in the apartment. Good times till his mother's return! Annette scolded him for his independence. But although she would never have admitted to herself that she had this evil feeling, she was not too sorry that he should be able to get along without comrades. She distrusted comrades. She did not want anyone to spoil her son. . . . Her son! Was she quite sure that he was hers? Of course she made an effort to repress her egotistical love. No longer, as in the days when he was very small, did she feel the blind, gluttonous need of absorbing the little being in her passion. She saw in him now a personality. But she persuaded herself that she had the key of this personality, that she knew better than he its laws and its happiness; she wanted to carve it in the image of her secret God. Believing, like most mothers, that she was incapable of creating what she desired herself, she dreamed of creating it through him who had sprung from her blood. (That eternal dream, eternally frustrated, of Wotan!)
But in order to shape him, she had to catch him. Not let him escape! She did everything to envelop him. Too much. Every day he escaped more. She had the discouraging impression that every day she knew him less. One thing she knew well: his body, his physical health, his illnesses, the least symptoms. She had an intuition that never deceived her. She would hold him before her, bathe him, touch him, care for him . . . this dear fragile body of the little hermaphrodite. He looked transparent. But what was inside him? She devoured him with her eyes and her hands; he was entirely at her mercy.
"Heavens, how I love you, little monster! And do you love me?"
"Yes, Mamma," he replied politely.
But what was he thinking in his heart?
At seven Marc had scarcely a feature of his family. In vain had Annette explored him, sought for some resemblance, tried to imagine one. . . . No, he was not like her, either in the shape of his forehead, or in his eyes, or in that swelling of the lips, so characteristic of the Rivières, and especially of Annette, as if the will, the inner ardor, had expanded them. The only point in common was the color of the iris, and this was lost in a strange world. . . . What world? . . . The father's? The Brissots'? Scarcely. At least, not yet. Jealously Annette said, "Never!"
And yet would she have been so displeased to find some trace of Roger in her son's features? Would it not have given her an obscure pleasure? She remembered the man to whom she had given herself with a mixture of bitterness and unconfessed attraction—an attraction less for the real Roger than for him of whom she had dreamed. In fact, it was to this dream that she had given herself. If she had seen him again in the image of her son, she would have had a strange feeling of victory, the feeling that she had wrested from him this form she loved in order to animate it with her own soul. Yes, as long as Marc's spirit was like her own, she would have been glad to find Roger's features in him.