His mother, a proud peasant woman from the slopes of the Jura mountains, accustomed to struggling with an ungrateful soil that was bitten by a harsh wind, went out by the day as a washerwoman in the canal and undertook the roughest work. She was as strong as a Percheron mare, attacking her work with her four limbs and her iron frame, greedy for gain, but painstaking, honest, hard on herself and close-fisted; she was feared and sought after; she had a redoubtable tongue, which she restrained, and people knew that, through her husband's death, she was the mistress of many family secrets. She made no use of these, but she possessed them, and it was more prudent to pay for her services than to do without them. She had no intellectual scruples and was rigorously active, rather sombre (for in this race Spain has left its blood), with a limitless passion of energy which, mingled with Gallic disillusionment, believes in nothing and yet acts as if salvation or damnation were awaiting it. She loved nothing but her son. She was ferocious in her love. She did not conceal from him any of the things about which she held her tongue with other people; she treated him as a partner. Ambitious for him alone, she sacrificed herself, and he was going to sacrifice himself--for whom? For _her_ revenge. (_Hers_? Yes, her own, that of the son, that of the mother--all the same thing!) No tenderness, no indulgence--above all, no whimpering. "Go without things! You will gloat over it later." When he came home from school--heaven knew by what efforts of work and diplomacy she obtained for him a scholarship in the town grammar-school, then at the lycée in the county-town!--when he came home, thrashed and humiliated by the little bourgeois boys, the fool-hardy heirs of the hidden spite of their fathers, she said to him, "You will be stronger than they are later. They will kiss your feet. Rely on yourself! Don't rely on anyone else!" He did not rely on anyone else, and he soon made it clear that they would have to reckon with him. She succeeded in clinging to life until her son's studies were brilliantly finished and he had taken his first term in medicine in Paris. He was in the midst of an examination when she had to take to her bed with an inflammation of the chest. She did not want to disturb him before he had finished. She died without him. In her rude handwriting, twisted like the claws of the vine in spring, with all the dots and accents well marked and in their places, she wrote to him on a blank sheet carefully cut from a letter from her son, who was reckless with his paper, "I am going. My boy, keep strong. Do not give way."