struggled for fifteen years against these terrible evils, which arrived
in rapid succession to tear her son away from her. She vanquished them
all by patience, care, and adoration. Camille having grown up, rescued
from death, had contracted a shiver from the torture of the repeated
shocks he had undergone. Arrested in his growth, he remained short and
delicate. His long, thin limbs moved slowly and wearily. But his mother
loved him all the more on account of this weakness that arched his back.
She observed his thin, pale face with triumphant tenderness when she
thought of how she had brought him back to life more than ten times
over.

During the brief spaces of repose that his sufferings allowed him,
the child attended a commercial school at Vernon. There he learned
orthography and arithmetic. His science was limited to the four rules,
and a very superficial knowledge of grammar. Later on, he took lessons
in writing and bookkeeping. Madame Raquin began to tremble when advised
to send her son to college. She knew he would die if separated from her,
and she said the books would kill him. So Camille remained ignorant, and
this ignorance seemed to increase his weakness.

At eighteen, having nothing to do, bored to death at the delicate
attention of his mother, he took a situation as clerk with a linen
merchant, where he earned 60 francs a month. Being of a restless nature
idleness proved unbearable. He found greater calm and better health in
this labour of a brute which kept him bent all day long over invoices,
over enormous additions, each figure of which he patiently added up. At
night, broken down with fatigue, without an idea in his head, he enjoyed
infinite delight in the doltishness that settled on him. He had to
quarrel with his mother to go with the dealer in linen. She wanted to
keep him always with her, between a couple of blankets, far from the