Annette, like the young women of to-day, was a bad teacher who, as a girl, had heard a great deal of talk about teaching, and was not unwilling to talk about it as a matter of conscience. She attached more importance to the method of bringing up children than the mothers of former days who had gone about it blindly. But once the child was there, she had found herself helpless before the thousand and one surprises of life, incapable of playing her part, making up theories which she did not apply, or which she abandoned at the first attempt. In the end she had let them all go and fallen back upon instinct.
The religious problem was one of those that had troubled her, and she had not been able to reach any practical solution of it for the child. Most of the friends of her youth, in the rich, republican bourgeoisie, had been brought up with religion by their mothers, without religion by their fathers. They did not even feel the clash of the two conceptions. (The two get along together very well in the world, like many other contradictory facts, for neither feeling has a third dimension.) She herself had gone to church, as she had gone to school: she had taken her first communion, as she had taken her diploma, conscientiously, without emotion. The ceremonies at which she had been present in her wealthy parish seemed to her to belong to the order of the world. She had separated from them when she separated from the world.
Modern society—and the Church is one of its pillars—has succeeded so well in denaturing and weakening the great human forces that Annette, who bore within her a richer faith than that of a hundred devotees, imagined she was not religious. For she confounded religion with prayer-wheels and the ceremonies of an obsolete exoticism, a luxury of soul for the rich, a snare for the eyes and that consolation for the heart of the poor which assures the foundations of their poverty and of society.
Since she had given up her religious observances, she had never felt the need for them. It did not occur to her that when she had her fiery transports of conscience, her passionate monologues, she was really saying mass.
She did not think of giving her son what she had gone without herself. Perhaps the question would not even have occurred to her if, paradoxically, Sylvie had not brought it up. Sylvie, who had no more religion than a Parisian sparrow, would not have considered herself married without the concurrence of the Church; and it seemed to her indecent that Annette should not have her son baptised. Annette had not thought of this. But she had it done so that Sylvie might be the godmother. Then she thought no more of the matter, and things remained where they were until Julien's arrival. That Julien had a practical faith did not give Annette one, but it rendered the faith worthy of respect in her eyes and brought her attention back to the problem she had neglected. What was she to do for Marc? Send him to church? Teach him a religion in which she did not believe? She asked Julien, who was scandalized; he affirmed emphatically that the child had to be instructed in the divine truths.
"But if they are not truths for me? Must I tell lies when Marc asks me questions?"
"No, don't tell lies, but allow him to believe. It's for his good."
"No, it couldn't be for his good for me to be dishonest. And what authority would I have when he found it out? Wouldn't he have the right to reproach me for it? He would not believe in me any longer. And how do I know whether this faith he would learn would not thwart his real development later?"
Here Julien's brow darkened, and Annette hastened to change the subject. But what was she to do? She could not, as her Protestant friends advised, give her son a course in all the religions and leave him to choose for himself when he was sixteen years old. . . . Annette burst out laughing at this idea. What a strange conception of religion, as if it were a subject for an examination!
In the end Annette had done nothing. She walked about with Marc, went into churches, sat down in a corner, marvelled with him at the upspringing forest of these lofty trunks of stone, the underwood gleams that filtered through the stained-glass windows, enjoyed the flight of the vaults, the distant chanting, the vague accompaniment of the organ. It was a veritable bath of reverie and self-communion.