The father became angry. He was a naturally ill-tempered man. He sulked at his wife and found nothing to his liking. In a temper he sent the other children to bed. His wife sat down on a wooden seat and took up her distaff. He paced up and down and as he was pacing up and down he tried to pick an argument on any pretext.

‘If you’d gone to the mill like I told you to…’, and he finished the sentence shaking his head in the direction of my bed.

‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

‘It’s today that you should have gone like I told you to… And what about those bits of straw left on the floor of the barn? What are you waiting for to pick them up?’

‘It will be done tomorrow.’

‘But what we’ve got left is almost finished and you’d have done much better to pick them up today like I told you to… And that heap of barley that’s rotting in the loft? I’ll wager you didn’t think to turn it?’

‘The children did it.’

‘You should have done it yourself. If you had been up in your loft you wouldn’t have been at the door…’

At that moment a surgeon arrived, and then a second surgeon and then a third with the little boy from the cottage.

MASTER: And there you were with as many surgeons as there are hats on Saint Roch.4

JACQUES: The first was away when the little boy arrived at his house, but his wife had passed word to the second and the third had come back with the little boy.

‘Good evening, friends, what are you doing here?’ said the first to the others.

They had come as quickly as they could and were hot and thirsty. They sat down around the table which still had the table-cloth on it. The wife went down to the cellar and came up again with a bottle. The husband was muttering under his breath: ‘What the devil was she doing at the door?’

They drank, chatted about the illnesses of the neighbourhood, and started listing all the people they were treating. I started complaining. They said: ‘We’ll be with you in a moment.’

After the first bottle they asked for a second, on account, for my treatment, then a third, then a fourth, still on account, for my treatment. And with every bottle, the husband came back to his first cry: ‘What the devil was she doing at the door?’

What a scene anybody else would have made of these three surgeons, of their conversation on the fourth bottle, of the multitude of their marvellous cures, of the impatience of Jacques and the bad temper of their host, of what our country Aesculapiuses had to say as they clustered round Jacques’ knee, of their different opinions, one claiming that Jacques would be dead unless they made haste and amputated the leg, the other that they should remove the bullet and the piece of cloth that went in with it to save the poor devil’s leg. In the meantime, you might have seen Jacques sitting up in bed and looking at his leg pitifully, bidding it a last farewell like one of our generals being treated by Dufouart and Louis was recently seen doing.5 The third surgeon would have sat around gawping up to the point where a quarrel broke out between them and words then led to blows.

I will spare you all of these things which you can find in novels, the comedies of antiquity and in society. When I heard the host exclaim about his wife, ‘What the devil was she doing at the door?’ I was reminded of Molière’s Harpagon when he says, referring to his son: ‘What was he doing in that galley?’6 And I admit that it is not enough for a thing simply to be true, it must be amusing as well. And that is why people will always say: ‘What was he doing in that galley?’ while my peasant’s phrase, ‘What was she doing at the door?’, will never pass into proverb.

Jacques did not show the same reserve towards his master as I am showing to you. He did not omit the smallest detail even though he risked sending him to sleep for a second time. If it was not the cleverest it was at least the most sturdy of the three surgeons who remained in control of the patient.

Are you not going to take out lancets in front of our eyes, I hear you ask me, start cutting his flesh, make his blood run and show us a surgical operation? Would that be in good taste in your opinion?…

Come, let us pass over the operation. But you must at least allow Jacques to say to his master, as he did: ‘Ah, Monsieur, it’s a terrible job to put a shattered knee back together again.’

And allow his master to reply as before: ‘Come, come, Jacques, you’re joking.’

But the one thing I would not keep from you for all the gold in the world is that hardly had Jacques’ master made this impertinent reply when his horse stumbled and fell and his knee came into violent contact with a pointed stone and there he was shouting at the top of his voice: ‘I’m dying! My knee is shattered!’

Although Jacques, who was the nicest chap you could imagine, was very fond of his master, I would very much like to know what was going on at the bottom of his heart, if not in the first moment, at least when he had assured himself that his master’s fall would not have any serious consequences, and whether he was able to resist a slight feeling of secret joy at an accident that would teach his master what it was to have an injury to the knee. And, Reader, there is another thing which I would like you to tell me. That is whether his master would not have preferred to have been injured even a little more seriously any place other than the knee or in other words whether he was not more sensitive to shame than to pain?

When the master had recovered a little from his fall and his pain he got back into his saddle and spurred his horse five or six times, which made him go off like greased lightning. Jacques’ mount followed suit because there existed between the two animals the same intimacy as between their riders. They were two pairs of friends.

When the two panting horses had gone back to their normal pace Jacques said to his master: ‘Well, Monsieur, what do you think, then?’

MASTER: About what?

JACQUES: An injury to the knee.

MASTER: I agree with you. It is one of the most painful injuries.

JACQUES: When it’s your knee?

MASTER: No, no, yours, mine, all the knees in the world.

JACQUES: Master, master, you obviously haven’t thought about this at all. We only ever feel sorry for ourselves, believe me.

MASTER: What nonsense.

JACQUES: Ah, if only I knew how to speak the way I think, but it was written up above that I would have things in my head and the words wouldn’t come to me.

Here Jacques threw himself into some very subtle philosophical ideas which might also be very true. He was trying to make his master conceive that the word pain does not refer to any real idea and only begins to signify anything at all at the moment when it recalls in our memory a sensation which we have already experienced. His master asked him if he had ever given birth.

‘No,’ replied Jacques.

‘Do you think that giving birth is a painful experience?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘Do you feel sorry for women in childbirth?’

‘Very much so.’

‘So you sometimes feel sorry for people other than yourself?’

‘I feel sorry for anyone who wrings their hands, tears out their hair and screams because I know from experience that one does not do that unless one is suffering. But as for the particular pain of a woman giving birth, I cannot sympathize with that because I don’t know what it is, thank God. But to come back to a pain with which we are both more familiar. The story of my knee which has now become yours as well because of your fall…’

MASTER: No, Jacques, the story of your loves which have become mine as well through my own past sorrows.

JACQUES: So there I was, bandaged up and feeling a little better.