might be in store for her later on. Every now and then a shudder chilled
her to the very heart. She felt herself growing old, while intense
melancholy upset her, an unreasoning longing to weep, which she
satisfied in the gloomy studio for hours together, when she was alone
there.

At that period her heart expanded, as it were, and a mother sprang from
the loving woman. That motherly feeling for her big artist child was
made up of all the vague infinite pity which filled her with tenderness,
of the illogical fits of weakness into which she saw him fall each
hour, of the constant pardons which she was obliged to grant him. He was
beginning to make her unhappy, his caresses were few and far between, a
look of weariness constantly overspread his features. How could she love
him then if not with that other affection of every moment, remaining in
adoration before him, and unceasingly sacrificing herself? In her inmost
being insatiable passion still lingered; she was still the sensuous
woman with thick lips set in obstinately prominent jaws. Yet there was
a gentle melancholy, in being merely a mother to him, in trying to make
him happy amid that life of theirs which now was spoilt.

Little Jacques was the only one to suffer from that transfer of
tenderness. She neglected him more; the man, his father, became her
child, and the poor little fellow remained as mere testimony of their
great passion of yore. As she saw him grow up, and no longer require so
much care, she began to sacrifice him, without intentional harshness,
but merely because she felt like that. At meal-times she only gave
him the inferior bits; the cosiest nook near the stove was not for his
little chair; if ever the fear of an accident made her tremble now
and then, her first cry, her first protecting movement was not for her
helpless child. She ever relegated him to the background, suppressed
him, as it were: 'Jacques, be quiet; you tire your father. Jacques, keep
still; don't you see that your father is at work?'

The urchin suffered from being cooped up in Paris. He, who had had the
whole country-side to roll about in, felt stifled in the narrow space
where he now had to keep quiet. His rosy cheeks became pale, he grew up
puny, serious, like a little man, with eyes which stared at things in
wonder. He was five by now, and his head by a singular phenomenon had
become disproportionately large, in such wise as to make his father say,
'He has a great man's nu