One night, shortly after her confinement, the kitchen-maid
was seized with the most appalling pains; Mamma heard her groans, and rose
and awakened Francoise, who, quite unmoved, declared that all the outcry
was mere malingering, that the girl wanted to 'play the mistress' in the
house. The doctor, who had been afraid of some such attack, had left a
marker in a medical dictionary which we had, at the page on which the
symptoms were described, and had told us to turn up this passage, where we
would find the measures of 'first aid' to be adopted. My mother sent
Francoise to fetch the book, warning her not to let the marker drop out.
An hour elapsed, and Francoise had not returned; my mother, supposing that
she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told me to go myself to the
bookcase and fetch the volume. I did so, and there found Francoise who, in
her curiosity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read the
clinical account of these after-pains, and was violently sobbing, now that
it was a question of a type of illness with which she was not familiar. At
each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would exclaim: "Oh, oh,
Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes any wretched human creature to
suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!"
But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of Giotto's
Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow; she could find no stimulus for
that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity which she very well knew,
having been moved to it often enough by the perusal of newspapers; nor any
other pleasure of the same kind in her sense of weariness and irritation
at being pulled out of bed in the middle of the night for the
kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very sufferings, the printed
account of which had moved her to tears, she had nothing to offer but
ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter sarcasm, saying, when she
thought that we had gone out of earshot: "Well, she need never have done
what she must have done to bring all this about! She found that pleasant
enough, I dare say! She had better not put on any airs now.
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