The Mother

I doubt if there be anything in the world more enchanting to a mother’s heart than the thoughts awakened by the sight of her child’s little shoe— more especially when it is the holiday shoe, the Sunday, the christening shoe— the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the child has not yet taken a step. The shoe is so tiny, has such a charm in it, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it is to the mother as if she saw her child. She smiles as it, kisses it, babbles to it; she asks herself if it can be that there is a foot so small, and should the child be absent, the little shoe suffices to bring back to her vision the sweet and fragile creature. She imagines she sees it— she does see it— living, laughing, with its tender hands, its little round head, its dewy lips, its clear bright eyes. If it be winter, there it is creeping about the carpet, laboriously clambering over a stool, and the mother trembles lest it come too near the fire. If it be summer, it creeps about the garden, plucks up the grass between the stones, gazes with the artless courage of childhood at the great dogs, the great horses, plays with the shell borders, with the flowers, and makes the gardener scold when he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth on all the paths. The whole world smiles, and shines, and plays round it like itself, even to the breeze and the sunbeams that wanton in its curls. The shoe brings up all this before the mother’s eye, and her heart melts thereat like wax before the fire.

But if the child be lost, these thousand images of joy, of delight, of tenderness crowded round the little shoe become so many pictures of horror. The pretty embroidered thing is then an instrument of torture eternally racking the mother’s heart. It is still the same string that vibrates— the deepest, most sensitive of the human heart— but instead of the caressing touch of an angel’s hand, it is a demon’s horrid clutch upon it.

One morning, as the May sun rose into one of those deep blue skies against which Garofalo loves to set his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels and horses and the clanking of iron in the Place de Grève. But little moved by it, she knotted her hair over her ears to deaden the sound, and resumed her contemplation of the object she had been adoring on her knees for fifteen years. That little shoe, as we have already said, was to her the universe. Her thoughts were wrapped up in it, never to leave it till death. What bitter imprecations she had sent up to heaven, what heart-rending plaints, what prayers and sobs over this charming rosy toy, the gloomy cell of the Tour- Roland alone knew. Never was greater despair lavished upon a thing so engaging and so pretty.

On this morning it seemed as though her grief found more than usually violent expression, and her lamentations could be heard in the street as she cried aloud in monotonous tones that wrung the heart:

“Oh, my child!” she moaned, “my child! my dear and hapless babe! shall I never see thee more? All hope is over! It seems to me always as if it had happened but yesterday. My God! my God! to have taken her from me so soon, it had been better never to have given her to me at all. Knowest thou not that our children are flesh of our flesh, and that a mother who has lost her child believes no longer in God? Ah, wretched that I am, to have gone out that day! Lord! Lord! to have taken her from me so! Thou canst never have looked upon us together— when I warmed her, all sweet and rosy, at my fire— when I suckled her— when I made her little feet creep up my bosom to my lips! Ah, hadst thou seen that, Lord, thou wouldst have had pity on my joy— hadst not taken from me the only thing left for me to love! Was I so degraded a creature, Lord, that thou couldst not look at me before condemning me? Woe! woe is me!— there is the shoe— but the foot— where is it?— where is the rest— where is the child? My babe, my babe! what have they done with thee? Lord, give her back to me! For fifteen years have I worn away my knees in prayer to thee, O God— is that not enough? Give her back to me for one day, one hour, one minute— only one minute, Lord, and then cast me into hell for all eternity! Ah, did I but know where to find one corner of the hem of thy garment, I would cling to it with both hands and importune thee till thou wast forced to give me back my child! See its pretty little shoe— hast thou no pity on it, Lord? Canst thou condemn a poor mother to fifteen years of such torment? Holy Virgin— dear mother in heaven! my Infant Jesus— they have taken it from me— they have stolen it, they have devoured it on the wild moor— have drunk its blood— have gnawed its bones; Blessed Virgin, have pity on me! My babe— I want my babe! What care I that she is in paradise? I will have none of your angels— I want my child! I am a lioness, give me my cub. Oh, I will writhe on the ground— I will dash my forehead