Today, I saw a mother begging by the roadside with an infant. I went up to speak with her, but she only spoke German. I had studied German at military school and had been to Germany several times, yet I could not utter a single word or remember any of it. Fortunately, someone traveling with me understood German.
The woman was a soldier's wife. Her husband had died in the war, and now she was alone, seeking a better refuge. I asked whether she intended to raise the child in her arms by herself, and she handed me a letter. It was the last letter her husband had written to her. He said that he loved her, that he would love no one but her until death, but nowhere in the entire letter did he mention asking her to raise their child.
Then the woman told me that she knew raising a child alone would be difficult, but she did not intend to hand the child over to an orphanage and start over. She had once thought that if she ever fell so low as to beg in the streets, she might as well die. Now, this child was the hope keeping her going.
I believed that a child's character depended entirely on the mother. When I met Eugene and Hortense, I knew Josephine was a good woman. They were unlike my family—not only polite and considerate, though Hortense was sometimes afraid of me and did not dare tell me what she wanted. In that regard, she was unlike her mother. Josephine's careless extravagance sometimes left the household in utter disorder.
After every quarrel, she would restrain herself for a while, but before long she would go back to spending recklessly, until you appeared.
The first time I saw you,