He was born.  I set up housekeeping in my little bachelor apartment, an imitation home, with a horrible child.  He looked like all children; I did not care for him.  Fathers, you see, do not show affection until later.  They have not the instinctive and passionate tenderness of mothers; their affection has to be awakened gradually, their mind must become attached by bonds formed each day between beings that live in each other’s society.

A year passed.  I now avoided my home, which was too small, where soiled linen, baby-clothes and stockings the size of gloves were lying round, where a thousand articles of all descriptions lay on the furniture, on the arm of an easy-chair, everywhere.  I went out chiefly that I might not hear the child cry, for he cried on the slightest pretext, when he was bathed, when he was touched, when he was put to bed, when he was taken up in the morning, incessantly.

I had made a few acquaintances, and I met at a reception the woman who was to be your mother.  I fell in love with her and became desirous to marry her.  I courted her; I asked her parents’ consent to our marriage and it was granted.

I found myself in this dilemma:  I must either marry this young girl whom I adored, having a child already, or else tell the truth and renounce her, and happiness, my future, everything; for her parents, who were people of rigid principles, would not give her to me if they knew.

I passed a month of horrible anguish, of mortal torture, a month haunted by a thousand frightful thoughts; and I felt developing in me a hatred toward my son, toward that little morsel of living, screaming flesh, who blocked my path, interrupted my life, condemned me to an existence without hope, without all those vague expectations that make the charm of youth.

   But just then my companion’s mother became ill, and I was left alone
   with the child.

   It was in December, and the weather was terribly cold.  What a
   night!

   My companion had just left.  I had dined alone in my little
   dining-room and I went gently into the room where the little one was
   asleep.

I sat down in an armchair before the fire.  The wind was blowing, making the windows rattle, a dry, frosty wind; and I saw trough the window the stars shining with that piercing brightness that they have on frosty nights.

Then the idea that had obsessed me for a month rose again to the surface.  As soon as I was quiet it came to me and harassed me.  It ate into my mind like a fixed idea, just as cancers must eat into the flesh.  It was there, in my head, in my heart, in my whole body, it seemed to me; and it swallowed me up as a wild beast might have.  I endeavored to drive it away, to repulse it, to open my mind to other thoughts, as one opens a window to the fresh morning breeze to drive out