Little Poems in Prose

“The most terrible sorrows are those which find no voice.” As to the father, he contented him- self with saying, half stupidly, half dreamily, “After all, it is perhaps for the best; he was sure to finish badly.” However, the body was stretched on my di- van, and, with the aid of a servant I was busy- ing myself with the final preparations when the mother came into my studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of her son. I could not, of course, prevent her from intoxicating herself with her unhappiness; I could not refuse her this supreme, this sombre consolation. By and by she begged me to show her the place where her little boy had hanged himself. “Oh no,” I answered her; “that will do you no good,” and as, involuntarily, my eyes turned towards the fatal wardrobe, I saw, with disgust mingles with horror and anger, that the nail remained fixed in the wall with a long piece of rope still hanging to it. I darted forward rapidly to tear down these last traces of the catastrophe, and as I was going to throw them out of the open window the poor woman seized my arm and said to me in a voice too earnest to resist, “Oh Sir, leave me that; I beg you, I beseech you.” Her despair had doubtless, it seemed to me, so disturbed her brain that it had begotten a ten- derness for the instrument of her son’s death,