“I grew up with the indistinct impression that I was carrying some burden
of shame.  One day the other children called me a ‘b-----’.  They
did not know the meaning of this word, which one of them had heard at
home.  I was also ignorant of its meaning, but I felt the sting all the
same.

“I was, I may say, one of the cleverest boys in the school.  I would have been a good man, your honor, perhaps a man of superior intellect, if my parents had not committed the crime of abandoning me.

“This crime was committed against me.  I was the victim, they were the guilty ones.  I was defenseless, they were pitiless.  Their duty was to love me, they rejected me.

“I owed them life—­but is life a boon?  To me, at any rate, it was a misfortune.  After their shameful desertion, I owed them only vengeance.  They committed against me the most inhuman, the most infamous, the most monstrous crime which can be committed against a human creature.

“A man who has been insulted, strikes; a man who has been robbed, takes back his own by force.  A man who has been deceived, played upon, tortured, kills; a man who has been slapped, kills; a man who has been dishonored, kills.  I have been robbed, deceived, tortured, morally slapped, dishonored, all this to a greater degree than those whose anger you excuse.

“I revenged myself, I killed.  It was my legitimate right.  I took their happy life in exchange for the terrible one which they had forced on me.

“You will call me parricide!  Were these people my parents, for whom I was an abominable burden, a terror, an infamous shame; for whom my birth was a calamity and my life a threat of disgrace?  They sought a selfish pleasure; they got an unexpected child.  They suppressed the child.  My turn came to do the same for them.

“And yet, up to quite recently, I was ready to love them.

“As I have said, this man, my father, came to me for the first time two years ago.  I suspected nothing.  He ordered two pieces of furniture.  I found out, later on, that, under the seal of secrecy, naturally, he had sought information from the priest.

“He returned often.  He gave me a lot of work and paid me well.  Sometimes he would even talk to me of one thing or another.  I felt a growing affection for him.

“At the beginning of this year he brought with him his wife, my mother.  When she entered she was trembling so that I thought her to be suffering from some nervous disease.  Then she asked for a seat and a glass of water.  She said nothing; she looked around abstractedly at my work and only answered ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ at random, to all the questions which he asked her.  When she had left I thought her a little unbalanced.

“The following month they returned.  She was calm, self-controlled.  That day they chattered for a long time, and they left me a rather large order.  I saw her three more times, without suspecting anything.  But one day she began to talk to me of my life, of my childhood, of my parents.  I answered:  ‘Madame, my parents were wretches who deserted me.’  Then she clutched at her heart and fell, unconscious.  I immediately thought:  ’She is my mother!’ but I took care not to let her notice anything.  I wished to observe her.