Doctor Anger and Stefania’s Relationship

Doctor Anger and Stefania’s Relationship begins in a shared catastrophe and endures through reciprocal care, but it takes its decisive form as an obligation passed from the dying doctor to the girl he had helped raise. The fire that killed his wife and Stefania’s parents left Doctor Anger unable to recover; for more than twenty years, Stefania soothed his recurring nightmares. At his deathbed, he charged her to serve Adèle, making their intimacy inseparable from the household’s demands on her labor and devotion.

Shared Bereavement and an Unspoken Bond

The relationship is rooted in the fire of September 28, 1868. While jam was being prepared in the Lothringers’ garden, the blaze consumed half the city, killed Doctor Anger’s wife, and left him grieving until his own death. Stefania’s parents, who lived in a poor cottage adjoining the Angers’ home, died in the same disaster. Their house vanished, but lilacs grew in its place; Stefania liked to sit among them and imagine what her mother might once have prepared for Doctor Anger and his wife while working in their service.

Neighbors rescued Stefania and Adèle together and returned them to Doctor Anger, wrapped in soot-stained rags that stank of smoke. The girls’ survival thus joined their lives to the bereaved doctor’s household, but their positions within it were not alike. Adèle remained at Stefania’s side as the faces of successive caretakers came and went. Stefania, meanwhile, was a difficult, nervous child who cried and sometimes fell silent; she suspected, without knowing why, that the women hired to care for them left despite wages twice those of their husbands at the distillery or sawmill because of her. The narrative gives no confirmation of that suspicion, but it shows how early she interpreted herself as a burden within the home that had taken her in.

Doctor Anger’s grief also had a domestic consequence: there was never jam at the family table. The absence of this ordinary food marks the catastrophe’s persistence in household life. Stefania’s recollection of the fire is bound not only to the lost home and mother she cannot remember, but also to the man who survived it and could not leave it behind.

Nightly Care and the Doctor’s Trauma

For more than twenty years, until his death, Doctor Anger cried out in his sleep because he dreamed of a fire. His cries shifted among sounds: a siren, an owl, a locomotive, or a current of air. In the nightmare, the disaster repeated itself from beginning to end, yet its ending never truly arrived and nothing could be changed. The sound that woke Stefania was therefore not an isolated episode but the recurring expression of a trauma that kept the past active in the present.

Stefania had learned to wake at the first cry. She would slip from Adèle’s embrace and hurry downstairs to the doctor’s office, where Doctor Anger slept on a narrow sofa beneath his father’s portrait. Usually she found him sitting up, sweating and restless, his eyes fixed on nothing. She searched his gaze for a reflection of what had happened during the fire, but saw only broken blood vessels, despair, horror, pain, and guilt. The expected revelation never came through his eyes; what she encountered instead was the visible aftermath of suffering.

Even as a child, Stefania tried to calm him. She stroked his soaked head, attempted to lay him down, and endured his resistance and unintelligible protests. She brought him water, measured a sedative from a blue vial into a spoon, wiped his head and chest, and changed the damp sheets. These repeated tasks reverse the ordinary arrangement between an adult physician and a child: the doctor who treats patients becomes the person she tends, while the orphaned girl assumes responsibility for his body and distress.

Only in the interval between sleep and waking could Stefania question him about the fire. Yet the care she provided did not produce a clear account that would resolve the past. Her access to him was intimate and physical, but the catastrophe remained something she approached through his nightmares, his guilt, and the recurring work of helping him wake from them.

From Care to a Deathbed Charge

Doctor Anger’s final words give the relationship its enduring command. On his deathbed, he compared Stefania and Adèle to two trees whose trunks had become entangled, then told her to think of Adèle and of her own life: it would be hard for her, but she must serve Adèle. His instruction acknowledged the cost of the role even as it made that role binding. The image of intertwined trunks presents closeness not as a freely chosen separation-proof idyll, but as a bond in which one life has grown around another.

The final moments make the transfer of responsibility concrete. Doctor Anger’s lips were already foaming and his face had turned blue; he spoke with difficulty, and Stefania had to infer the end of the sentence. Frightened, she closed her eyes, but he gripped her hand so hard that her bones cracked. When she looked again, he was dead. His body seemed to her like a dried-out doll in the doctor’s clothes, yet his final words remained vividly present in her mind.

After his death, Stefania describes those words as pulsing through her veins and being projected forward by her heart. They propel her through dozens of daily tasks, one after another, in a circle, each like a prayer for Adèle. The relationship therefore changes form rather than ending: the doctor is no longer there to be comforted, but his injunction continues to organize Stefania’s labor and sense of duty. She later repeats the command to herself—his warning that serving Adèle would be hard—and adds that it may require forgetting her own existence.

A Legacy That Shapes Stefania’s Choices

The charge helps explain why Stefania remains in the household despite humiliation and exhaustion. She imagines leaving for a convent, or becoming a companion to an old woman, but cannot bring herself to abandon Adèle. In her view, Adèle is weak, often anemic and troubled by migraines, unable even to cook a soft-boiled egg; Stefania fears that without her, Adèle might injure herself, cause a fire, or die of sorrow. These fears are Stefania’s reasoning, not an objective verdict on Adèle’s capacity, and they reveal how the doctor’s command has fused care with the belief that departure would be dangerous.

The obligation is reinforced by the contrast between the doctor’s deathbed words and Stefania’s position as a servant. At Adèle’s birthday gathering, she prepares food while guests praise her cooking, yet she reflects that her work is to prepare, cook, bake, wash, clean, and mend—and to grit her teeth, know, and remain silent. Doctor Anger’s instruction gives this service the language of love and duty, but it does not remove the unequal conditions under which she performs it. His legacy can be felt in the daily labor that sustains Adèle and the household, as well as in Stefania’s difficulty distinguishing devotion from the surrender of her own life.

The relationship is thus tender without being uncomplicated. Stefania responds to Doctor Anger’s helplessness with sustained bodily care, and he entrusts her with the person dearest to him. But his final appeal converts that intimacy into a lasting charge whose cost he explicitly recognizes and whose limits he cannot define. The doctor’s nightmares end with his death; the duty he leaves behind continues in Stefania’s hands.