Illusions, my friend told me, are perhaps as numberless as the
relations of men with one another, or of men to things. And when the
illusion disappears, that is, when we see the being or the fact as it
exists outside of us, we undergo a strange feeling, a complex half of
regret for the vanished phantom, half of agreeable surprise before
the novelty, before the real fact. If one phenomenon exists that is
trite, evident, always the same, concerning, the nature of which it is
impossible to be deceived, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to
imagine a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it
not then perfectly legitimate to attribute to maternal love all the
words and actions of a mother, relating to her child? None the less
hear this little story, in which I was singularly mystified by the most
natural illusion.
"My profession of painter drives me to regard attentively the visages,
the physiognomies, which present themselves on my way, and you know
what joy we derive from this faculty which renders life more vivid
and significant in our eyes than for other men. In the secluded
section where I live, and where great grassy spaces still separate
the buildings, I often observed a child whose ardent and roguish
countenance, more than all the rest, won me straightway. He posed for
me more than once, and I transformed him, now into a little gypsy, now
into an angel, now into mythological Love. I made him bear the violin
of the vagabond, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of the Passion,
and the Torch of Eros. At length, I took so lively a pleasure in all
the drollery of the youngster, that one day I begged his parents,
poor folk, to be kind enough to yield him to me, promising to clothe
him well, to give him money and not to impose on him any task beyond
cleaning my brushes and running my errands. The child, with his face
washed, became charming, and the life he led with me seemed a paradise,
compared to that he had undergone in the parental hovel. Only I must
say that the little fellow astonished me at times by singular spells
of precocious sadness, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste
for sugar and for liqueurs; so much so that one day when I found that,
despite my numerous warnings, he had again been doing some pilfering of
that sort, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I went
out, and my business kept me away for quite some time.
"What was my surprise and horror when, reëntering the house, the first
object that met my eyes was my little fellow, the frolicsome companion
of my life, hanging from the panel of the closet! His feet almost
touched the floor; a chair, which he had doubtless thrust back with his
foot, was overturned beside him; his head was bent convulsively over
one shoulder; his bloated face, and his eyes, quite wide open with a
fearful fixity, gave at first the illusion of life. To take him down
was not so easy a business as you might think. He was already quite
stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance to letting him fall heavily
to the floor. It was necessary to bear his whole weight on one arm,
and, with the free hand, to cut the rope. But that accomplished, all
was not yet done; the little monster had made use of a very slender
twine which had entered deep into his flesh, and I must now, with
delicate scissors, seek the cord between the two cushions of the
swelling, to disengage the neck.
"I have neglected to tell you that I called vigorously for help; but
all my neighbors refused to come to my assistance, faithful in that to
the habits of civilized man, who never wishes, I know not why, to mix
in the affairs of one that has been hanged. Finally a physician came,
who said that the child had been dead several hours. When, later, we
had to disrobe him for burial, the cadaverous rigidity was such that,
despairing of bending his limbs, we had to tear and cut the garments to
remove them."
"The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to announce the casualty,
looked at me askew and said to me: 'Here's something suspicious,'
moved doubtless by an inveterate desire and a professional habit of
frightening, at all events, the innocent as well as the guilty.
"There remained a supreme task to perform, the thought of which alone
gave me a terrible anguish: I had to notify the parents. My feet
refused to guide me to them. Finally, I had the courage. But, to my
great astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not a tear oozed from the
corner of her eye. I attributed that strangeness to the very horror
she must feel, and I recalled the well-known maxim: 'The most terrible
sorrows are silent ones.' As to the father, he contented himself with
saying with an air half brutalized, half pensive: 'After all, it is
perhaps for the best; he would always have come to a bad end!'
"However, the body was stretched out on my couch, and, assisted by a
servant, I was busying myself with the final preparations, when the
mother entered my studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of
her son. I could not, in truth, deny her the intoxication of her grief
and refuse her that supreme and somber consolation. Then she begged me
to show her the place where her little one had hanged himself. 'Oh no,
madam' I answered, 'that would be bad for you.' And as my eyes turned
involuntarily toward the fatal cupboard, I perceived, with disgust
mingled with horror and wrath, that the nail had remained driven in the
casing, with a long rope-end still hanging. I leapt rapidly to snatch
away the last traces of the misfortune, and as I was going to hurl them
out through the open window, the poor woman seized my arm and said in
an irresistible tone: 'Oh! sir! leave that for me! I beg you! I beseech
you.' Her despair had doubtless become, it seemed to me, so frantic
that she was now overcome with tenderness toward that which had served
her son as the instrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as a
dear and horrible relic.--And she took possession of the nail and of
the twine.
"At last! At last! all was accomplished. There remained only to set
myself back at work, even more strenuously than usual, to drive out
gradually the little corpse that haunted the recesses of my brain, the
phantom of which wore me out with its great fixed eyes. But the next
day I received a bundle of letters: some from lodgers in the house,
several others from neighboring houses; one from the first floor,
another from the second, another from the third, and so throughout!
some in semi-humorous style, as though seeking to disguise beneath
an apparent jocularity the sincerity of the request; others, grossly
shameless and without spelling; but all tending to the same goal,
namely, to securing from me a bit of the fatal and beatific rope. Among
the signers were, I must say, more women than men; but not all, I
assure you, belonged to the lowest class. I have kept the letters.
"And then, suddenly, a light glowed in my brain, and I understood why
the mother was so very anxious to wrest the twine from me, and by what
traffic she meant to be consoled."