His wife and children looked for a long time at this
fragment of their father, feeling the fingers, and
removing the grains of salt that were under the nails.
Then they sent for a carpenter to make a little coffin.
The next day the entire crew of the trawling smack
followed the funeral of the detached arm. The
two brothers, side by side, led the procession; the
parish beadle carried the corpse under his arm.
Javel, junior, gave up the sea. He obtained a
small position on the dock, and when he subsequently
talked about his accident, he would say confidentially
to his auditors:
“If my brother had been willing to cut away
the net, I should still have my arm, that is sure.
But he was thinking only of his property.”
Great misfortunes do not affect me very much, said
John Bridelle, an old bachelor who passed for a sceptic.
I have seen war at quite close quarters; I walked
across corpses without any feeling of pity. The
great brutal facts of nature, or of humanity, may
call forth cries of horror or indignation, but do
not cause us that tightening of the heart, that shudder
that goes down your spine at sight of certain little
heartrending episodes.
The greatest sorrow that anyone can experience is
certainly the loss of a child, to a mother; and the
loss of his mother, to a man. It is intense,
terrible, it rends your heart and upsets your mind;
but one is healed of these shocks, just as large bleeding
wounds become healed. Certain meetings, certain
things half perceived, or surmised, certain secret
sorrows, certain tricks of fate which awake in us a
whole world of painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose
to us the mysterious door of moral suffering, complicated,
incurable; all the deeper because they appear benign,
all the more bitter because they are intangible, all
the more tenacious because they appear almost factitious,
leave in our souls a sort of trail of sadness, a taste
of bitterness, a feeling of disenchantment, from which
it takes a long time to free ourselves.
I have always present to my mind two or three things
that others would surely not have noticed, but which
penetrated my being like fine, sharp incurable stings.
You might not perhaps understand the emotion that
I retained from these hasty impressions. I will
tell you one of them. She was very old, but as
lively as a young girl. It may be that my imagination
alone is responsible for my emotion.
I am fifty. I was young then and studying law.
I was rather sad, somewhat of a dreamer, full of a
pessimistic philosophy and did not care much for noisy
cafes, boisterous companions, or stupid girls.
I rose early and one of my chief enjoyments was to
walk alone about eight o’clock in the morning
in the nursery garden of the Luxembourg.
You people never knew that nursery garden. It
was like a forgotten garden of the last century, as
pretty as the gentle smile of an old lady. Thick
hedges divided the narrow regular paths,—peaceful
paths between two walls of carefully trimmed foliage.
The gardener’s great shears were pruning unceasingly
these leafy partitions, and here and there one came
across beds of flowers, lines of little trees looking
like schoolboys out for a walk, companies of magnificent
rose bushes, or regiments of fruit trees.
