Chapter 5 - Page 2

little by little, had almost
forgotten it. Have not all women, all, this fault of prodigious
forgetfulness which enables them, after a few years, hardly to recognise
the man to whose kisses they have given their lips? The kiss strikes
like a thunderbolt, the love passes away like a storm, and then life,
like the sky, is calm once more, and begins again as it was before. Do
we ever remember a cloud?

Pierre could no longer endure to stay in the room! This house, his
father's house, crushed him. He felt the roof weigh on his head, and the
walls suffocate him. And as he was very thirsty he lighted his candle to
go to drink a glass of fresh water from the filter in the kitchen.

He went down the two flights of stairs; then, as he was coming up again
with the water-bottle filled, he sat down, in his night-shirt, on a step
of the stairs where there was a draught, and drank, without a tumbler,
in long pulls like a runner who is out of breath. When he ceased to
move the silence of the house touched his feelings; then, one by one,
he could distinguish the faintest sounds. First there was the ticking of
the clock in the dining-room which seemed to grow louder every second.
Then he heard another snore, an old man's snore, short, laboured, and
hard, his father beyond doubt; and he writhed at the idea, as if it had
but this moment sprung upon him, that these two men, sleeping under the
same room--father and son--were nothing to each other! Not a tie, not
the very slightest, bound them together, and they did not know it!
They spoke to each other affectionately, they embraced each other, they
rejoiced and lamented together over the same things, just as if the same
blood flowed in their veins. And two men born at opposite ends of the
earth could not be more alien to each other than this father and son.
They believed they loved each other, because a lie had grown up between
them. This paternal love, this filial love, were the outcome of a lie--a
lie which could not be unmasked, and which no one would ever know but
he, the true son.

But yet, but yet--if he were mistaken? How could he make sure? Oh, if
only some likeness, however slight, could be traced between his father
and Jean, one of those mysterious resemblances which run from an
ancestor to the great-great-grandson, showing that the whole race are
the offspring of the same embrace. To him, a medical man, so little
would suffice to enable him to discern this--the curve of a nostril, the
space between the eyes, the character of the teeth or hair; nay less--a
gesture, a trick, a habit, an inherited taste, any mark or token which a
practised eye might recognise as characteristic.

He thought long, but could remember nothing; no, nothing. But he had
looked