Naturally he had no means of knowing. Save for a few pictures in the museum, he had been spared every kind of funereal spectacle. Stiff in his little bed, he felt the walls of his body. How could he find out? An imprudent word revealed to him, quite close by, a window that opened on the abyss into which he burned to look. One summer day he was dawdling by the window. He caught some flies and was pulling off their wings. It amused him to see them floundering about. It did not occur to him that he was doing them any harm; he was playing a game. They were living toys, and it made no difference if he broke them. . . . His mother surprised him at this occupation. With the violence that she was unable to repress, she seized him by the shoulders and shook him, exclaiming that he was a disgusting little coward. "What would you say if someone broke your arms? Don't you know that these creatures suffer just as you do?" He pretended to laugh, but he was astounded by this. It had not occurred to him. These creatures were like him! He did not feel the least pity for them. But he looked at them now with other eyes, troubled, attentive, hostile. . . . A fallen horse in the street. . . . A howling dog that had been run over. . . . He watched. . . . The need of knowing was too strong for his pity to be awakened. . . . At Easter, as the child, after a gray, damp winter that had been neither cold nor sunny, had suffered from a mild, but insidious, attack of influenza that had drained all the color from his cheeks, Annette rented for a fortnight a room in a farmhouse in the valley of Bièvres. It contained only one big bed for herself and the child. He did not like this very much: but she had not asked for his advice. Happily, he was alone during the day; Annette went back to Paris for her work, and she left him in the care of the landlady, who paid very little attention to him. Marc would quickly vanish into the fields. He looked around him, rummaged about, tried to grasp, from animals and things, some secret that concerned him; for everything in nature he related to himself. Wandering through the woods, he heard some boys making a noise in the distance. He was not looking for the company of other children; he was not strong enough, and he would have wanted to dominate them. But he was attracted just the same. He approached and saw that there were four or five of them forming a circle about a wounded cat. The animal's back was broken, and the children were amusing themselves poking it, tormenting it, prodding it with the ends of their sticks. Without stopping to think, Marc threw himself into the group and struck about him with his fists. When the surprise was over, the band fell upon him shouting. He beat a retreat, but he remained a few steps away, hidden behind some bushes, and stopped his ears. He could not make up his mind to leave. . . . He returned. The young scoundrels hailed him with jeers,