and loneliness made the place one of haunted terror to the sensitive
and imaginative nature of a growing child.

He was, however, never insufficiently fed; and the luxury of forgetting
misery in sleep could not well be denied him.

By day, until of age to go to school, he played apprehensively in the
hallways with makeshift toys, a miserable, dejected little body with
his heart in his mouth at every sudden footfall, very much in the way
of femmes-de-chambre who had nothing in common with the warm-hearted,
impulsive, pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to
Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost
uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent,
to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not
infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her
notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to
look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the
wide-eyed, terrified stare of the transfixed boy....

That he was privileged to attend school at all was wholly due to a
great fear that obsessed Madame of doing anything to invite the
interest of the authorities. She was an honest woman, according to her
lights, an honest wife, and kept an honest house; but she feared the
gendarmerie more than the Wrath of God. And by ukase of Government a
certain amount of education was compulsory. So Marcel learned among
other things to read, and thereby took his first blind step toward
salvation.

Reading being the one pastime which could be practiced without making a
noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it