Then she began prowling about the great empty dwelling. She even stopt to look at the discolorations on the walls; spots familiar to her eyes. Once she stood before a little hole crusht in the plaster by the baron; who had often amused himself, when he was young, with making passages at arms, cane in hand, against the partition wall, when he happened to be passing this spot.
She went down-stairs to the drawing-room. It was somber behind the closed shutters: for some time she could not distinguish anything; then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Little by little she recognized the wide tapestries with their patterns of birds flitting about. Two settees were set before the chimney as if people had just quitted them; and the very odor of the room, an odor which it had always kept—that old, vague, sweet odor belonging to some old houses—entered Jeanne's very being, enwrapt her in souvenirs, intoxicated her memory. She remained gasping, breathing in that breath of the past, her eyes fixt upon those two chairs; for suddenly she saw—as she had so often seen them—her father and her mother, sitting there warming their feet by the fire. She started back terrified, struck her back against the edge of the door, caught at it to keep herself from falling, but kept her eyes still fixt upon the chairs.
The vision disappeared. For some moments she remained forgetful of everything; then slowly she recovered her self-possession, and would have fled from the room, fearful of losing her self-control. Her glance fell by chance on the door-post on which she was leaning; and there before her eyes were the marks that had been made to keep track of Poulet's height as he was growing up!
The little marks climbed the painted wood at irregular intervals; figures traced with the penknife noted down the different ages with the month of the boy's life. Sometimes the jottings were in the handwriting of the baron, a large hand; sometimes they were in her own smaller hand; sometimes in that of Aunt Lison, a little shaky. It seemed to her that the child of other days was actually there, before her, with his blond hair, pressing his little forehead against the wall so that his height could be measured. The baron was crying, "Jeanne! he has grown a whole centimeter in the last six weeks!" She began to kiss the piece of wood in a frenzy of love.
But some one was calling her from outside. It was Rosalie's voice: "Madame Jeanne, Madame Jeanne, we are waiting for you, to have luncheon." She went out in a trance. She hardly understood anything that the other said to her. She ate the things that they put on her plate; she listened without knowing what she heard, talking mechanically with the farming-women, who inquired about her health; she let them embrace her, and herself kissed the cheeks offered to her; and then got into the wagon again.
When she caught her last glimpse of the high roof of the château across the trees, she felt a terrible sinking in her heart. It seemed to her in her innermost being that she had said farewell forever to her old home!
FOOTNOTES:
[12] From the last chapter of "A Life." Translated for this collection by Eric Arthur Bell.