Read Online Pedigree by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online

with corrugated frosted glass bearing the inscription: ‘Torset et Mitouron’, and now and then Désiré caught sight of a stocky silhouette, a thick moustache, hair cut in a stubble.
    â€˜Come to bed, Désiré. I can give him the bottle.’
    Why? It was always he who fed the baby, without the slightest sign of impatience. Didn’t she understand that he liked it, that he liked everything about it, getting up, standing in the cold kitchen, seeing the milk go down in the bottle, carefully counting the drops of medicine, going back to bed, and dropping off to sleep straight away?
    At six o’clock, when the alarm-clock went off, the light was still on across the street and his gaze greeted it. He knew that the man was making his coffee in a vessel whose shape Désiré knew only in silhouette.
    He lit the fire, swept the room, went down to the entresol to empty the slops and brought up some fresh water. Even if he did not hum himself, the music was in him, a harmonious ebb and flow of thoughts similar to the flux of a calm sea, the gentle movement of a woman’s breasts.
    Would he see the night watchman at last? The man came downstairs at eight o’clock: Désiré knew that from seeing the light go out at that time, on the shortest days of the year. He came downstairs just as the employees arrived and threw open the ground-floor shutters. Désiré went downstairs too. But he had never met the night watchman, whom he knew only as a silhouette. Did he go out through the main door? Or before plunging into the town did he slip through a little back door which opened on to another street?
    â€˜Leave it, Désiré. Madame Smet will do it.’
    That wasn’t true. Madame Smet would do nothing. It was good of her to keep Élise company. It had been good of Valérie too to suggest her. It had been impossible to refuse. But old Mother Smet, who never took off either her black spangled bonnet or her mittens, and who always remained perched on the edge of her chair, as if she were paying a call, was incapable of doing anything, and she would probably have been found dead of hunger if her two daughters had not looked after her like a child.
    She smiled beatifically at her daydreams while Élise fretted, blushed, coughed, and hesitated for a long time before plucking up courage to say in an imploring, apologetic voice:
    â€˜Madame Smet, could you possibly put a little coal on the fire?’
    Désiré thought of everything, peeled the potatoes, got the day’s bottles ready, and did everything to the best of his ability, with a sense of satisfaction, even if it was only a matter of wringing out a dishcloth.
    â€˜Don’t you think the baby’s looking pale, Désiré?’
    â€˜You’re just imagining things again.’
    But he was a man! Only the day before, Élise had said again to Valérie:
    â€˜You know, poor little Valérie, a man doesn’t feel things as we do. Even if the baby brings up all his milk, he doesn’t worry.’
    Because he did what he could, all that he could, and considered that the rest would be given to him into the bargain.
    Just now the night watchman on the other side of the street must be getting ready to go downstairs and would already have filled his big meerschaum pipe with the cherrywood stem. In the cold morning air, Valérie and her mother were trotting along, and in a few moments Valérie would leave Madame Smet, like a child being taken to school, outside Cession’s. She had not time to come upstairs, for she had to be at L’Innovation at eight o’clock.
    Désiré was ready, his hat on his head. He stood looking vaguely at the trams full of workers and clerks who had got up early in the country or the outlying suburbs and who were wearing the resigned expression of people who have been awakened too early. On Sunday they would dawdle in bed.
    â€˜Do you think they’ll arrest