To be absolutely debarred from the books he was so fond of had been hard; but up to this time, being in a foreign land, amid foreign speech, he had always fallen back upon her.  Now he openly defied her.  He went straight off to the hotel and sought out Madame Mery and her daughter as though nothing had occurred.  This he did every day when he had finished his lessons.  Lucie had now become his sole romance; he gave all his leisure time to her, and not only that (for it no longer sufficed to see her at her mother’s), they met on the quay!  At times a maid-servant walked with them for appearance sake, at others she kept in the background.  Sometimes they would go on board a Norwegian ship, sometimes they wandered about or strolled beneath some great trees.  When he saw her in her short frock come out of the door, saw her quick movements, and her lively signals to him with parasol or hat or flowers, the quay, the ships, the bales, the barrels, the air, the noise, the crowd, all seemed to play and sing,

  “Enfant! si j’etais roi je donerais l’empire,
   Et mon char, et mon septre, et mon peuple a genoux,”

and he ran to meet her.

He never dared to do more than to take both her chubby brown hands, nor to say more than “You are very sweet, you are very very good.”  And she never went further than to look at him, walk with him, laugh with him, and say to him, “You are not like the others.”  What experiences there had been in the life of this girl of thirteen goodness alone knows.  He never asked her, he was too sure of her.

He learned French from her as one bird feeds from another’s bill, or as one who looks at his image in a fountain, as be drinks from it.

One day, as mother and son were at breakfast, she glanced quietly across at him.  “I heard of an excellent preparatory school of mechanics at Rouen,” she said, “so I wrote to inquire about it, and here is the answer.  I approve of it in all respects, as you will do when you read it.  I think that we shall go to Rouen; what do you say to it?”

He grew first red, then white; then put down his bread, his table napkin; got up and left the room.  Later in the day she asked him whether he would not read the letter; he left her without answering.  At last, just as he was going to meet Lucie on the quay, she said, and this time with determination, that they were to leave in the course of an hour.  She had already packed up; as they stood there the man came to fetch the luggage.  At that moment he felt that he could thoroughly understand why his father had beaten her.

As they sat in the carriage which took them to the station he suffered keenly.  It could not nave been worse, he thought, if his mother had stabbed him with a knife.  He did not sit beside her in the railway carriage.

During the first days at Rouen he would not answer when she spoke to him, nor ask a single question.  He had adopted her own tactics; he carried them through with a cruelty of which he was not aware.