A stranger indeed. Marc never suspected that at moments he invoked before his mother's eyes the stranger, his father, and, even worse, the other Brissots. For in the secret warfare that went on henceforth between the mother and the young boy the latter instinctively armed himself with everything he could find, in his own nature, that was opposed to Annette. Thus, without knowing it, he sometimes disinterred and used against her various traits he had inherited from his Brissot ancestry: the famous condescending smile, the self-satisfaction, the waggish philistinism the hostile certitude of which nothing could shake. A shadow, a reflexion on the water. Annette recognized them and thought, "They have caught me!" Was he really a stranger? No, he was not. The weapon, the inherited traits, yes; but the hand that held it was of Annette's substance. And that rebellious hand was clenched in that opposition between two beings who were too closely related, too much akin, which was only one of the thousand tricks of Love and Destiny. XXXII He had no friends. This boy of thirteen, who spent every morning and afternoon in a class with thirty other children, was isolated from his comrades. When he was smaller, he had enjoyed chattering, playing, running, shouting. For a year or two now, he had had fits of speechlessness, a sudden hunger for solitude. This did not mean that he had ceased to feel the need of companions. He may even have needed them more than before. Exactly! He needed them too much; he expected too much and he had too much to give. And there were bristles everywhere in this spring thicket. A bridling self-esteem. A mere nothing wounded it, and he was afraid of being wounded and especially of showing it. That was a weakness, and he had to take care not to give the enemy a hold over him. (There is an enemy in every friend.) What he had grasped, or rather imagined, regarding his civil status, his mother's past, kept him in an absurd, ridiculous, towering state of torment. His reading contributed to this; he was convinced that he was a "natural" child. (His romantic books called him by a harsher name.) He found a way of taking pride in this. He almost went so far as to catch in the archaic insult the wild, musty scent of nobility. He considered himself interesting, different from other people, solitary, just a little damned. It would not have displeased him to find himself among the Satanic bastards of Schiller and Shakespeare. This would have given him the right to despise the world, with lofty tirades--in secret.