Lying on his back, bound up in bandages and a zinc trough, and
imprisoned by cushions, he nevertheless looks like a ship which
the tide will set afloat at dawn.
He is putting on flesh, yet, strange to say, he seems to get
lighter and lighter. He is learning not to groan, not because his
frail soul is gaining strength, but because the animal is better
fed and more robust.
His ideas of strength of mind are indeed very elementary. As soon
as I hear his first cry, in the warm room where his wound is
dressed, I give him an encouraging look, and say:
"Be brave, Marie! Try to be strong!"
Then he knits his brows, makes a grimace, and asks:
"Ought I to say 'By God!'?"
The zinc trough in which Marie's shattered leg has been lying has
lost its shape; it has become oxydised and is split at the edges;
so I have decided to change it.
I take it away, look at it, and throw it into a corner. Marie
follows my movements with a scared glance. While I am adjusting
the new trough, a solid, comfortable one, but rather different in
appearance, he casts an eloquent glance at the discarded one, and
his eyes fill with copious tears.
This change is a small matter; but in the lives of the sick, there
are no small things.
Lerondeau will weep for the old zinc fragment for two days, and it
will be a long time before he ceases to look distrustfully at the
new trough, and to criticise it in those minute and bitter terms
which only a connoisseur can understand or invent.
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