WHAT insufficient regard for hygiene, for comfort, for well-being, for gaiety! A sort of sordid economy seems to have dictated the placing and the contracting of the houses, in which no one but equally sordid people could achieve a semblance of happiness, in which any aspiration toward betterment is ugly, shabby, set.
No public garden, no place except the café to gather in on Sunday; no song, no game, show, or music; no invitation to get away for a minute from one’s work and one’s most selfish interests . . .
Little François D., whom I question about what he is going to do now that he has received his school diploma, tells me that he wanted to continue studying to become a schoolteacher.
Immense desire to help him, which immediately filled my heart and made tears come to my eyes . . . How can I express that urge in a way that will not immediately seem ridiculous to me?
The father who had long been a labourer and with whom I used to go frequently to chat since he had been laid up by illness, died last year of cancer . . . He was a sort of muzhik, a rebellious fellow greatly tormented by a persecution-mania, who poisoned his existence whenever he judged that he had not got his due from his neighbour or from the government . . . All the help one could give him meant less to him than the least centime of which he thought he had been cheated . . . I had for him the sort of friendship that, in the whole township, I now feel only for our old Edmond . . .
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Edmond, our gardener, has for some time now slept badly. Some nervous worry, almost moral in nature, keeps him awake . . . this simple, honest soul always fears falling beneath his task, having forgotten something, being in arrears. And when he goes to sleep at once, worn out by his day’s work, he wakes up well before dawn, much too early, gets up, goes back to bed, and tosses.
“It’s partly the birds that wake me up when they begin to squawk,” he says to his wife.
She protests: “But, Edmond, birds don’t squawk, they sing.”
Then she adds: “And don’t you think it’s wonderful that they are always happy?”
Whereupon he, grumpily:
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“Well, there’s no denying that they are lucky, at least!”