As we were nearing our destination his confidences grew more rapid. After all a man who had thought and felt about things to this extent must have badly needed a means of expression at times.
One is so apt to imagine that the lives one touches thus casually are all more or less what one calls "normal." But when the veil is lifted by some accident, it is not often the purely normal that one finds below it. When Tartarin mentioned that he and his sister were born at Tarascon, I had vaguely pictured an ordinary well-conducted French family. But I found my mistake. The man spoke hesitatingly of his childhood. He had the Frenchman's conventional and inconsequent respect for his mother--inconsequent considering the unceremonious manner in which she has previously been treated, as a woman. In this case the conduct of the mother had been painfully out of order. The Frenchman reverences his mother surprisingly indeed, but on strict condition that she carries out her _rôle_ in absolute conformity with expected sentiments. _La mère_ is _la mère_, neither more nor less, an esteemed functionary rather than a private individual. Is this to be doubted in the country under whose laws the mother is unhesitatingly sacrificed in the case of having to choose between her life and the child's?
So poor Tartarin's state of mind must have been most complex, for his mother had shown a spirit anything but official. She could not stand uninterrupted family life, it appears, and used to go off at intervals in a sort of exasperation, for a week or a month of solitude. Tartarin spoke of it with bated breath, not severely, but sadly, for was she not _la mère_? She appears to have shown singularly small appreciation of the creditable fact. What she had, at moments, permitted herself to remark about _les enfants et la famille_ generally, her good son refrained from quoting, but I gathered that it was something truly appalling! Of course this led to quarrels; the neighbours were scandalised, and incited the husband to take strong measures, and that was the end.
"If you had but let me go now and then I would not have left you," she cried, as she fled from the house never to return. And thus Tartarin and his sister had been deprived in their early years of _la tendresse d'une mère_. He spoke of it with a sort of self-pity, evidently engendered by the comments of indignant neighbours and by the sentiments of a maiden-aunt who joyfully seized the happy opportunity to fill the place thus left vacant. The brother and sister had therefore enjoyed all the _tendresse_ that they could have desired, and evidently it was as like the ordinary _tendresse d'une mere_ as one egg is like another. For there was nothing in the way of alternate embracings and irrelevant punishments that had been lacking in the system of education of that admirable aunt. She had worshipped the children; so altogether it was difficult to see what the pair had missed. They had certainly gained the prestige of their misfortune, for all Tarascon had petted and pitied them.