The death of Jean-Baptiste was the great event of my life : it put my mother back in her shackles and gave me my freedom.
There is no such thing as a good father, as a rule ; the fact that this grievance tends not to be held against these men, but against the bond of fatherhood, is rotten. Producing children, and nothing better ; actually having them, what an iniquity! Had he lived, my father would have sat on me with all his weight and would have crushed me. By chance, he died at a young age ; among the Aeneases who carry their Anchises on their backs, I go from pillar to post, alone and detesting these invisible sires riding their sons horseback all their lives ; I left behind me a dead youngster who did not have time to be my father and who could be my son today. Was this good or bad ? I do not know ; but I subscribe willingly to the verdict of an eminent psychoanalyst : I have no Super-ego.
That is not everything about dying : there is a time to die. Later on, I felt that I was to blame ; a self-conscious orphan blames itself : offended by what they have seen, its parents retreated into their heavenly quarters. As for me, I was robbed : my sad condition inspired respect, laid the ground for my importance ; I counted my sorrow amongst my virtues. My father had had the gallantry to die in error ; my grandmother kept saying that he had escaped his duties ; my grandfather, rightly proud of his Schweitzer longevity, did not see how one could disappear at the age of thirty ; in the light of this suspicious demise, he came to doubt that his son-in-law had ever existed and, in the end, he forgot him. I did not even have to forget him : by going absent without leave, Jean-Baptiste had denied me the pleasure of getting to know him. Even today, I am astonished at what little I know about him. Still, he loved, he wanted to live, he ended up dying ; that is enough to make a whole man.