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company.
    We spent a fairly sordid night celebrating, while my mother, who had been at the ceremony, waited for me in her hotel room. The next morning, without having been to bed, I left with her, not for Bourgneuf, where she had sold almost all the land that was left, but for a little town, Ormois, about twenty kilometres from La Roche-sur-Yon.
    That day I think my mother was completely happy. Such a frail little thing, she sat there beside her big son, first in the train, then in the bus. If I had allowed her to, she would have carried the bags.
    Would she have preferred it if I had become a priest? It is possible. She had always wanted me to be either a priest or a doctor. I had chosen medicine to please her, when the life of the fields would have suited me so much better.
    That very afternoon I began, so to speak, my career as a doctor at Ormois, where my mother had bought the practice of an old doctor who, almost blind, had at last decided to retire.
    A wide street. White houses. A square with a church on one side and the town hall on the other. A few old women who still wore the white bonnets of the Vendée.
    Finally, since we could not afford a car and since I had to have some sort of a conveyance take me on my visits to the outlying farms, my mother had bought me a big blue motor-cycle.
    The house was sunny and much too big for us, for my mother refused to have a servant and, during my office hours, she herself opened the door for the patients.
    The old doctor, whose name was Marchandeau, had gone to live at the other end of town where he had bought a small house and spent his whole time working in his garden.
    He was all grey and wizened, and wore an enormous straw hat that made him look like a queer mushroom. He always stared at people before speaking because of his uncertain eyesight, waiting to hear the sound of their voices.
    Perhaps I too was happy, your Honour! I don't know. I was full of goodwill. I have always been full of goodwill. I wanted to please everybody and first of all my mother.
    Can you see our little household? She looked after me, spoiled me. All day long she trotted around our unnecessarily large house, trying to make it more and more agreeable, as though she vaguely realized the need for holding me.
    Holding me from what? Wasn't it in order to hold me that she wanted me to be a priest or a doctor?
    Towards her son she showed the same docility, the same humility as she had always shown towards his father and I hardly ever saw her opposite me at table, for she insisted on waiting on me like a servant.
    I was often obliged to jump on to my motor-cycle and go to consult my old colleague, for I felt inexperienced and was sometimes embarrassed by certain cases that came to me.
    I wanted to do what was right, you see. I aimed at perfection. Since I was a doctor, I looked upon medicine as a sacred calling.
    'Old man Cochin?' Marchandeau would exclaim. 'As long as you stuff him full of twenty francs worth of pills, any old pills, he'll be satisfied.'
    For there was no chemist in the village and I myself sold the medicines I prescribed.
    'They are all the same. And don't go telling them that a glass of water would do them as much good as a drug. They would lose all confidence in you and, what's more, at the end of the year you would have earned barely enough to pay your licence and your taxes. Drugs, my friend, and more drugs!'
    The amusing thing was that as a gardener, old Marchandeau was exactly like the patients he made fun of. From morning to night he treated his borders with the most improbable concoctions which he read about in horticultural catalogues and sent for at great expense.
    'Drugs! ... They don't want to be cured, but to be treated ... and whatever you do, don't ever tell them they're not sick ... That'll finish you...'
    Dr Marchandeau, who was a widower, had married off the elder of his two daughters to a chemist in La Roche and lived with the younger one, Jeanne, who was then