He was relieved at the approach of the days when he would spend twelve hours at the lycée, at the same time that he was increasingly embarrassed at having to inform the office that he was leaving. The hardware store was the hardest. He would cravenly have preferred that he not go to the office and that his grandmother go and give whatever explanation. But the grandmother thought it was easy enough to skip the formalities: all he had to do was collect his pay and never go back, with no further explanation. Jacques, who would have found it quite natural to send his grandmother to endure the manager’s thunder—and in a sense it is true she was responsible for the situation and the lie it entailed—was nonetheless indignant at the idea of this evasion, without being able to explain why; in addition, he found the clinching argument: “But the boss will send someone here.”
“That’s true,” the grandmother said. “Well then, you’ll just have to tell him you’re going to work at your uncle’s.” Jacques was already leaving with damnation in his heart when his grandmother told him: “And above all collect your pay first. Then talk to him.”
That evening the manager called each employee to his lair to give him his pay. “Here, kid,” he said to Jacques, offering him his envelope. Jacques was reaching out a hesitant hand when the manager smiled at him. “You’re doing very well, you know. You can tell your parents that.” Jacques was already speaking, saying he would not be coming back. The manager looked at him, amazed, his hand still outstretched to him. “Why?” He had to lie, and the lie would not come out. Jacques remained silent, and with so woeful an air that the manager understood. “You’re going back to the lycée?”
“Yes,” said Jacques, and in the midst of his fear and distress a sudden feeling of relief brought tears to his eyes. Furious, the manager got to his feet. “And you knew it when you came here. And your grandmother knew it too.” Jacques could only say yes with a nod. Vocal thunderclaps filled the room: they were dishonest, and he, the manager, hated dishonesty. Did he know that he had the right not to pay him, and he’d be pretty foolish, no he wouldn’t pay him, let his grandmother come, she’d get a warm reception all right, if they’d told him the truth, he might have hired him anyway, but oh! that lie—“he can’t stay at the lycée, we’re too poor”—and he’d let himself be had.
“It was because of that,” the bewildered Jacques suddenly said.
“Why because of that?”
“Because we’re poor”; then he was silent, and it was the manager who went on after looking at him: “… that you did that, that you made up that story?” Jacques, teeth clenched, stared at his feet. The silence was interminable. Then the manager took the envelope from the table and held it out: “Take your money. Get out,” he said harshly.
“No,” said Jacques.
The manager stuffed the envelope into Jacques’s pocket: “Get out.” In the street Jacques was running, and now he was crying and gripping his collar with both hands to avoid touching the money that was burning in his pocket.
To lie for the right to have no vacation, to work far from the summer sky and the sea he so loved, and to lie again for the right to return to his work at the lycée—this injustice made him desperately unhappy. For the worst of it was not the lies that after all he was unable to utter, ready as he always was to lie for pleasure but incapable of doing so out of necessity, the worst of it was the delights he had lost, the season’s light and the time off that had been taken away from him, and now the year consisted of nothing but a series of hasty awakenings and hurried dismal days.
He had to lose what was royal in his life of poverty, the irreplaceable riches that he so greatly and gluttonously enjoyed, to earn a little bit of money that would not buy one-millionth of those treasures. And yet he understood that he had to do it, and there was even something in him that, at the very time he was most rebellious, was proud of having done it.
For he had found the sole compensation for those summers sacrificed to the misery of the lie on his first payday when—entering the dining room where his grandmother was peeling potatoes that she then tossed in a basin of water; Uncle Ernest, seated, was picking fleas off the patient Brillant whom he held between his legs; and his mother, who had just arrived, was at the buffet opening a small bundle of dirty laundry she had been given to wash—Jacques had stepped forward and, without a word, placed on the table the 100-franc bill and the large coins he had been clutching in his hand all the way home.
Without a word, the grandmother pushed a 20-franc piece back toward him and picked up the rest. With her hand she touched Catherine Cormery on the side to get her attention and showed her the money: “That’s your son.”
“Yes,” his mother said, and her sorrowful eyes briefly caressed the child.
The uncle nodded while holding on to Brillant, who had thought his ordeal was over. “Good, good,” he said. “You a man.”
Yes, he was a man, he had paid a bit of what he owed, and the idea of having diminished the poverty of this household by a little filled him with that almost wicked pride that comes to men when they begin to feel themselves free and subject to nothing. And in fact, when he entered the fifth-year courtyard at the start of the next school year, he was no longer the disoriented child who four years earlier had left Belcourt in the early morning—unsteady on his studded shoes, anxious at the thought of the strange world awaiting him—and his expression as he looked at his classmates had lost some of its innocence.
Besides, by that time many things were beginning to pull him away from the child he had been. And if one day he who till then had patiently accepted being beaten by his grandmother as if it were one of the inevitable obligations of childhood, if he tore the leather whip out of her hands, suddenly crazed, in a furious rage, so determined to strike that white head whose bright cold eyes were driving him out of his mind that the grandmother understood him—she recoiled and went to close herself in her room, sobbing certainly over the misfortune of having raised unnatural children but already knowing she would never beat Jacques again, and in fact never again did she beat him—it was because the child had indeed died in this thin muscular adolescent, with his brush-cut hair and his fiery expression, this youth who had worked all summer to bring home wages, who had just been named first-string goalie on the lycée team, and who, three days earlier, had had his first faltering taste of a girl’s lips.
a. At the lycée it was called a castagne not a donnade.
- The reference is to Jacques.
b. Is that its name?
c. the fire.
- the children
d. the other big trees.
e. put back in chronological order.
f. separate them from their environment.
g. Author of the Pardaillan stories—Trans.
- An illegible word.
h. Actually they were fighting over who would be D’Artagnan or Passepoil. No one wanted to be Aramis or Athos, Porthos if necessary. [All characters in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, except Passepoil, who is from Le Bossu by Paul Feval—Trans.]
i. Pages of Quillet’s dictionary, smell of the plates.
j. Mademoiselle, Jack London, is that good? - A series of classics—Trans.
k. to develop.
l. They made him (Uncle Ernest) a small desk of blond wood.
m. and those whom fate has poorly endowed cannot help thinking somewhere inside that they are responsible and they feel they must not add to this general culpability by any small failings …
† bouncing off
n. Les Travailleurs de la mer. [By Victor Hugo—Trans.]
o. She had never seen the lycée nor anything of its daily life. She had attended a program arranged for the relatives. That was not the lycée, it was …
‡ the sidewalks.
p. above toys carousel useful presents.
q. wild
r. Sablettes? and other summer activities.
§ rains.
s. in the lycée—subscription card—renew monthly—the exhilaration of answering: “Subscriber” and the triumphant verification.
t. the mother speaks up—He’ll be tired.
u. His reading earlier? the upper neighborhoods?
v. collar button, detachable collar. - Passage circled by the author.
w. postal transactions?
x. Summer lessons after the baccalaureate—the stupefied head in front of him.
y. The longshoreman’s accident? See diary.
2 : A Mystery to Himself
Oh yes, that was how it was, the life of this child was like that: that was how life was in the neighborhood’s island of poverty, bound together by
