The child coughed again, and it gave my heart a wrench. Suppose it should die! O God! O God! What would become of me?
I rose from my chair to go and look at him, and with a candle in my hand I leaned over him. Seeing him breathing quietly I felt reassured, when he coughed a third time. It gave me such a shock tat I started backward, just as one does at sight of something horrible, and let my candle fall.
As I stood erect after picking it up, I noticed that my temples were bathed in perspiration, that cold sweat which is the result of anguish of soul. And I remained until daylight bending over my son, becoming calm when he remained quiet for some time, and filled with atrocious pain when a weak cough came from his mouth.
He awoke with his eyes red, his throat choked, and with an air of suffering.
When the woman came in to arrange my room I sent her at once for a doctor. He came at the end of an hour, and said, after examining the child:
"Did he not catch cold?"
I began to tremble like a person with palsy, and I faltered:
"No, I do not think so."
And then I said:
"What is the matter? Is it serious?"
"I do not know yet," he replied. "I will come again this evening."
He came that evening. My son had remained almost all day in a condition of drowsiness, coughing from time to time. During the night inflammation of the lungs set in.
That lasted ten days. I cannot express what I suffered in those interminable hours that divide morning from night, right from morning.
He died.
And since--since that moment, I have not passed one hour, not a single hour, without the frightful burning recollection, a gnawing recollection, a memory that seems to wring my heart, awaking in me like a savage beast imprisoned in the depth of my soul.
Oh! if I could have gone mad!