Read "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard" by Anatole France online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
My resolve had been taken and my preparations made; it only remained for me to notify my housekeeper. I must acknowledge it was a long time before I could make up my mind to tell her I was going away. I feared her remonstrances, her railleries, her objurgations, her tears. "She is a good, kind girl," I said to myself; "she is attacked to me; she will want to prevent me from going; and the Lord knows that when she has her mind set upon anything, gestures and cries cost her no effort. In this instance she will be sure to call the concierge, the scrubber, the mattress-maker, and the seven sons of the fruit-seller; they will all kneel down in a circle around me; they will begin to cry, and then they will look so ugly that I shall be obliged to yield, so as not to have the pain of seeing them any more."
Such were the awful images, the sick dreams, which fear marshaled before my imagination. Yes, fear -- "fecund Fear," as the poet says -- gave birth to these monstrosities in my brain. For -- I may as well make the confession in these private pages -- I am afraid of my housekeeper. I am aware that she knows I am weak; and this fact alone is sufficient to dispel all my courage in any contest with her. Contests are of frequent occurrence; and I invariably succumb.