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By Root 1657 0

of an invalid: “You haven’t tried a little excursion . . . the change of air, you know . . . pick up an appetite . . . etc.,” she had added the almost unique idea, which she herself had thought up specially and which she repeated accordingly whenever we saw her, without fail, as though hoping by dint of reiteration to force it through the thickness of people’s heads: “She ought to have looked after herself radically from the first.” She did not recommend one particular kind of cure rather than another, provided it was “radical.” As to Françoise herself, she noticed that my grandmother was not being given many medicaments. Since, according to her, they only upset the stomach, she was quite glad of this, but at the same time even more humiliated. She had, in the South of France, some relatively well-to-do cousins whose daughter, after falling ill in her adolescence, had died at twenty-three; for several years the father and mother had ruined themselves on drugs and cures, on different doctors, on pilgrimages from one thermal spa to another, until her decease. Now all this seemed to Françoise, for the parents in question, a kind of luxury, as though they had owned racehorses or a place in the country. They themselves, in the midst of their affliction, derived a certain pride from such lavish expenditure. They had now nothing left, least of all their most precious possession, their child, but they enjoyed telling people how they had done as much for her and more than the richest in the land. The ultra-violet rays to which the poor girl had been subjected several times a day for months on end particularly gratified them. The father, elated in his grief by the glory of it all, was so carried away as to speak of his daughter at times as though she had been an opera star for whose sake he had ruined himself. Françoise was not insensible to such a wealth of scenic effect; that which framed my grandmother’s sickbed seemed to her a trifle meagre, suited rather to an illness on the stage of a small provincial theatre.

There was a moment when her uraemic trouble affected my grandmother’s eyes. For some days she could not see at all. Her eyes were not at all like those of a blind person, but remained just the same as before. And I gathered that she could see nothing only from the strangeness of a certain smile of welcome which she assumed the moment one opened the door, until one had come up to her and taken her hand, a smile which began too soon and remained stereotyped on her lips, fixed, but always full-faced, and endeavouring to be visible from every quarter, because it could no longer rely on the eyes to regulate it, to indicate the right moment, the proper direction, to focus it, to make it vary according to the change of position or of facial expression of the person who had come in; because it was left isolated, without the accompanying smile in her eyes which would have diverted the attention of the visitor from it for a while, it assumed in its awkwardness an undue importance, giving an impression of exaggerated amiability. Then her sight was completely restored, and from her eyes the wandering affliction passed to her ears. For several days my grandmother was deaf. And as she was afraid of being taken by surprise by the sudden entry of someone whom she would not have heard come in, all day long (although she was lying with her face to the wall) she kept turning her head sharply towards the door. But the movement of her neck was awkward, for one cannot adapt oneself in a few days to this transposition of faculties, so as, if not actually to see sounds, at least to listen with one’s eyes. Finally her pain grew less, but the impediment in her speech increased. We were obliged to ask her to repeat almost everything that she said.

And now my grandmother, realising that we could no longer understand her, gave up altogether the attempt to speak and lay perfectly still. When she caught sight of me she gave a sort of convulsive start like a person who suddenly finds himself unable to breathe, but could make no intelligible sound.