Adèle Skolyk

Adèle Skolyk’s character is defined by a painful contradiction: she treats Stefania as a sister, yet remains her mistress, and their shared affection cannot dissolve the hierarchy that governs their lives. Her attachment to an abandoned boy, her response to the family’s debts, and her eventual acknowledgment of jealousy and resentment make that contradiction visible in actions as well as in words.

Identity and Household Position

Born Adèle Anger, she is the daughter of Doctor Anger and later the wife of Petro Skolyk. In the household where Stefania works as a servant, Adèle occupies the position of mistress. Their upbringing together fosters an intimacy that resembles sisterhood, but does not give them equal authority or release Stefania from domestic service. Adèle’s later reflection names this structure directly: she sees herself and Stefania as girls who grew up together, shared one another’s dreams, and were left by Doctor Anger to depend on each other without knowing how to escape the arrangement.

The difference between emotional kinship and social position remains active even when the two women are distressed together. In one crisis, Doctor Anger opens the door to find Adèle and Stefania weeping at the same time. He kneels and takes each woman by the hand, as if both were his daughters and as if the two women were sisters by blood. The moment offers an image of equality and familial closeness, but it does not undo the servant–mistress distinction that Adèle later identifies as a source of injury.

Protection and Possession

When an unusual child comes into the household’s orbit, Adèle refuses to consider handing him over to Father Josef. The priest first mistakes the child for a girl and suggests taking the child to the Basilian sisters’ institute for young women on Kazimierzowska Street. He then proposes asking the Protestant pastor Zekler to receive the child at Bethlehem, an orphanage on Sapieżyńska Street. Onlookers instead argue over the child’s apparent religious or ethnic identity, with some calling for the kahal and others suggesting the Armenians. Stefania says she cannot understand what the crowd thinks it sees in the child as improper; Adèle’s response is more immediate and physical. She holds the boy firmly in her arms, her eyes bright with what the narrator calls a pathological passion.

Adèle’s refusal to surrender the child does not mean she can secure his future without compromise. Ernest Thorn offers five hundred crowns for him, and Adèle accepts calmly while Petro exclaims against the proposal. She explains the pressure in terms of obligations, debts, interest, and the mortgage, adding that even selling the Colosseum cannot save her. Her composure contrasts with Petro’s alarm; the offer converts the child she had held so fiercely into an answer to a financial crisis. Protection and possession thus meet in a decision shaped by debts rather than by any uncomplicated freedom of choice.

Marriage, Love, and the Apparent Miracle

Adèle’s life with Petro forms the domestic setting for the household’s pressures, but her emotional world also reaches beyond that marriage. When Stefania sees Adèle arrive by phaeton while Stefania and Father Josef are together, Adèle is radiantly happy and hurries toward them, calling Father Josef her father and saying that he is the person she most wanted to see. He replies that he has come to see her and needs to speak with her. The encounter presents their closeness through Adèle’s joy and her intimate address, while the surrounding scene is charged by Stefania’s own difficult feelings toward the priest.

Later, Stefania accuses Adèle of lying and says she saw Adèle and Father Josef embracing passionately in the salon. Adèle recognizes the incident Stefania means and rejects that interpretation. She says she was thanking the priest for his prayers, had asked for his help, and that they prayed together; she then reports that Doctor Vodnetsky says she is pregnant. Stefania immediately thinks the claim cannot be true and calls it a miracle. The scene turns an apparent embrace into a contested interpretation: what Stefania reads as passionate intimacy, Adèle explains as prayer and gratitude, followed by news of a pregnancy. The evidence establishes Adèle’s report and Stefania’s disbelief, not an independent confirmation of the pregnancy’s circumstances.

Stefania and the Unequal Sisterhood

Adèle’s most revealing account of her relationship with Stefania comes in a direct confrontation over what sisterhood should mean. Stefania asks why they do not do everything together if they are sisters, and why Adèle mocks her whenever she mentions housework. She also objects that Adèle repeatedly marks the distinction between mistress and faithful servant. Adèle answers through the history and consequences of that imbalance: Petro has told her that neither woman is responsible, that Doctor Anger was chiefly at fault for leaving them dependent on one another, and that they did not know how to find a way out.

Her answer does not simply excuse the hierarchy. She describes its accumulated emotional cost: the servant resents the mistress for falling in love and wanting to marry, while the mistress eats turnip salad that she hates for an entire month, obediently and without daring to protest. Domestic service appears here not as an abstract status but as a daily pattern of labor and submission, reaching even into what Adèle must eat. The turnip salad gives the conflict a concrete form: Stefania’s care continues, but it is also entangled with resentment, while Adèle’s compliance suggests how little room she feels she has to voice dissatisfaction.

Adèle then looks at Stefania and admits she has always been jealous that her father loved Stefania as much as he loved her. That admission complicates any simple division between privileged mistress and deprived servant. Adèle has authority in the household, yet she has experienced Stefania as a rival for her father’s affection; Stefania, in turn, experiences Adèle’s authority as the daily fact of service. Their intimacy has supplied companionship, but it has also intensified the pain of unequal treatment by making each woman’s life inseparable from the other’s.

Narrative Significance

Adèle’s actions and explanations expose the limits of sisterhood when affection is made to coexist with class and household power. The women can weep together, share memories and dreams, and understand themselves as bound by a common upbringing; nevertheless, Adèle can still occupy the role of mistress, and Stefania remains the servant expected to perform domestic work. Their closeness is not false, but neither is it a substitute for equality.

The child episode extends this conflict beyond the two women. Adèle’s fierce embrace suggests an intense claim of care, while her acceptance of Thorn’s money under the pressure of debts shows how economic necessity can redirect that attachment. In the later argument, the unwanted turnip salad similarly makes care inseparable from obligation and resentment. Across these moments, Adèle is neither reduced to a sentimental protector nor cast simply as an oppressor: the narrative shows her acting within a household whose unequal arrangements constrain both women, while also allowing her to exercise authority and to recognize, at last, the jealousy and injury those arrangements have produced.