• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2012 0

by her outraged self-esteem. So that she might not feel herself despised, she despised us. Moreover she knew that we were masters, in other words capricious creatures, who, not being conspicuously intelligent, take pleasure in imposing by fear upon clever people, upon servants, in order to prove that they are the masters, absurd tasks such as boiling water in times of epidemic, washing down a room with a damp cloth, and leaving it at the very moment when you wanted to come into it. Mamma had placed the post by my side, so that I might not overlook it. I could see however that it consisted only of newspapers. No doubt there was some article by a writer whom I admired, which, as he wrote seldom, would be a surprise for me. I went to the window, and drew back the curtains. Above the pale and misty daylight, the sky glowed pink, like the stoves that are being lighted in kitchens at that hour, and the sight of it filled me with hope and with a longing to spend the night in a train and awake at the little country station where I had seen the milk-girl with the rosy cheeks.

I opened the Figaro. What a bore! The main article had the same title as the article which I had sent to the paper and which had not appeared. But not merely the same title … why, here were several words that were absolutely identical. This was really too bad. I must write and complain. Meanwhile I could hear Françoise who, indignant at having been banished from my room, into which she considered that she had the right of entry, was grumbling: “It’s a proper shame, a kid I saw brought into the world. I didn’t see him when his mother bore him, to be sure. But when I first knew him, to say the most, it wasn’t five years since he was birthed!” But it wasn’t merely a few words, it was the whole thing, and there was my signature … It was my article that had appeared at last! But my brain which, even at that period, had begun to show signs of age and to tire easily, continued for a moment longer to reason as though it had not understood that this was my article, like an old man who is obliged to complete a movement that he has begun even if it has become unnecessary, even if an unforeseen obstacle, in the face of which he ought at once to draw back, makes it dangerous. Then I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still warm and damp from the press and the morning fog in which it is distributed, at daybreak, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once.

What I was holding in my hand was not a particular copy of the newspaper, but one out of the ten thousand; it was not merely what had been written by me, but what had been written by me and read by everyone. To appreciate exactly the phenomenon which was occurring at this moment in other houses, it was essential that I read this article not as its author but as one of the readers of the paper; what I was holding in my hand was not only what I had written, it was the symbol of its incarnation in so many minds. But then came an initial anxiety. Would the reader who had not been forewarned see this article? I opened the paper carelessly as would such a reader, even assuming an air of not knowing what there was this morning in my paper, of being in a hurry to look at the social and political news. But my article was so long that my eye, which was avoiding it (in order to be absolutely fair and not load the dice in my favour, as a person who is waiting counts very slowly on purpose) picked up a fragment of it in passing. But many of those readers who notice the main article and even read it do not look at the signature; I myself would be quite incapable of saying who had written the main article of the day before. And I now made up my mind always to read them, and the author’s name too; but, like a jealous lover who refrains from being unfaithful to his mistress in order to believe in her fidelity,