The Snowball — Background and Themes

There was only one person in the room, a young woman with fair, waving hair, a pale face, and blue eyes, who, seeing a cloaked stranger instead of the friend or neighbor she anticipated, stared at me in the utmost wonder and some alarm. The room, though poorly furnished, was particularly neat and clean; which, taken with the woman's complexion, left me in no doubt as to her native province. On the floor near the fire stood a cradle; and in the window a cage with a singing bird completed the homely and pleasant aspect of this interior, which was such as, if I could, I would multiply by thousands in every town of France.

A small lamp, which the woman was in the act of lighting, enabled me to see those details, and also discovered me to her. I asked politely if I spoke to Madame Felix, the wife of M. Felix of the Chamber of Accounts.

"I am Madame Felix," she answered, advancing slowly toward me. "My husband is late. Do you come from him? It is not bad news, Monsieur?"

The tone of anxiety in which she uttered her last question, and the quickness with which she raised her lamp to scan my face, went to my heart, already softened by this young mother in her home. I hastened to answer that I had no bad news, and wished merely to see her husband on business connected with his employment.

"He is very late," she said, a shade of perplexity crossing her face. "I have never known him so late before. Monsieur is unfortunate."

I replied that with her leave I would wait; on which she very readily placed a stool for me, and sat down herself by the cradle, I ventured to remark that perhaps M. Nicholas had detained her husband: she answered simply that it might be so, but that she had never known it happen before.

"M. Felix has evening employment?" I asked after a moment's reflection.

She looked at me in some wonder. "No," she said. "He spends his evenings with me, Monsieur. It is not much, for he is at work all day."

I bowed, and was preparing another question, when the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs in haste reached my ears, and led me to pause. Madame heard the noise at the same moment and rose. "It is my husband," she said, looking toward the door with such a light in her eyes as betrayed the sweetheart lingering in the wife. "I was afraid--I do not know what I feared," she muttered to herself.

Proposing to myself the advantage of seeing Felix before he saw me, I pushed back my stool into the shadow, contriving to do this so discreetly that the young woman noticed nothing. A moment later it appeared I might have spared my pains; for at sight of her husband, a comely young man who came in with lack-lustre eye and drooping head, she sprang forward with a cry of dismay, and, utterly forgetting my presence, appealed to him to know what was the matter.

He threw himself on to a stool, the first he reached, and, leaning his elbows on the table in an attitude of extreme dejection, covered his face with his hands. "What is it?" he said in a hollow tone. "We are ruined, Margot. I have no more work. I am dismissed."

"Dismissed?" she ejaculated.

He nodded. "Nicholas discharged me this morning," he said, almost in a whisper. He dared not speak louder, for he could not command his voice.

"Why?" she asked gently, as she leant over him. "What had you done?"

"Nothing!" he answered with bitterness. "He said clerks were plentiful, and the King or I must starve."

Hitherto I had witnessed the scene in silence, a prey to emotions so various I will not attempt to describe them. But hearing the King's name thus prostituted and put to base uses, I started forward with a violence which in a moment made my presence known. Felix, confounded by the sight of a stranger at his elbow, rose hurriedly from his seat, and retreating before me with vivid alarm painted on his countenance, asked with a faltering tongue who I was.

I replied in as soothing a manner as possible, that I was a friend, anxious to assist him. Nevertheless, seeing that I kept my cloak about my face--for I was not willing to be recognized--he continued to look at me with distrust and terror. "What do you want?" he said, raising the lamp much as his wife had done, to see me the better.