Dr. Anger and Thérèse’s Marriage

Dr. Anger and Thérèse’s marriage survives in the novel as a conjunction of tenderness, loss, and remembrance. The marriage ends in catastrophe when Thérèse dies in the fire of September 28, 1868, but Dr. Anger’s attachment continues through recurring nightmares and through his painstaking recollections to Petro, who turns those memories into a marble likeness. Their relationship is thus present not as an ongoing household but as an absence that shapes the widower’s life and acquires a public, enduring form in stone.

Marriage and remembered intimacy

The surviving account of the marriage is made up of the details Dr. Anger tells Petro while watching him sculpt. Thérèse could cry at happiness or sorrow, and at apparently minor changes in the world around her: clouds gathering, a neighbor’s servant becoming pregnant, or guests praising a roast she had prepared. She ate peaches with a spoon and embroidered patterns her husband considered foolish. Such particulars do not turn her into an abstract emblem of grief. They make her a person remembered in the small habits and household scenes that loss has made precious.

Their marriage also carried the pain of childlessness. Dr. Anger believed that corsets harmed the body and might be one cause of Thérèse’s infertility. He argued with her about wearing them; she resisted because she considered the subject improper, though her longing for children eventually led her to compromise. She wore only a light corset, and only for costume balls and receptions, asking that it not be fastened tightly. The recollection preserves both her desire for a child and the limits of the couple’s knowledge: Dr. Anger could offer a medical explanation, but he could not make their hope come true.

The memories turn, too, on a repeated evening ritual. Returning late from the hospital, Dr. Anger would knock softly at Thérèse’s bedroom door. Hearing the sheets rustle and her quiet invitation to enter, he would approach her bed by candlelight. The tenderness of the scene lies in its restraint: a familiar summons, a dim room, and a smile beside the bed. As Petro adjusts the marble face, Dr. Anger recognizes in it the posture and expression of the woman he remembers.

The fire and its aftermath

The marriage was cut short by the fire of September 28, 1868. A confection was being prepared in the Lothringer garden when the blaze consumed half the city and killed Thérèse, Adèle’s mother. The catastrophe became inseparable from Dr. Anger’s later life. For more than twenty years, until his death, he cried out in his sleep as he dreamed of fire. His nocturnal cries shifted in sound, at times resembling a siren, an owl, a locomotive, or a gust of air; the repeated dream carried the loss into the household long after the flames were gone.

The novel presents the fire through a layered recollection: Stefania says that the images produced by Dr. Anger’s dreams become entangled with her earliest memories, and she sees the scene through his eyes. In the operating room, he dreams of making a precise incision without blood, only to discover that the patient is a straw-stuffed doll. The dream’s disquieting substitution does not undo the historical fact of Thérèse’s death; it shows how the fire returns in altered, dreamlike form. Dr. Anger’s bereavement persists as an experience that cannot be confined to a single remembered day.

The loss also shaped the household’s ordinary life. Because the fire began while jam was being made, there was never jam on the table afterward. A domestic food became a reminder of the catastrophe, and its absence gave grief a daily, material presence. The marriage’s afterlife therefore appears not only in Dr. Anger’s nightmares and stories but in a household practice that keeps the circumstances of Thérèse’s death close at hand.

Petro’s sculpture as memorial

Dr. Anger met Petro on the twentieth anniversary of Thérèse’s death, when a recommendation brought the young sculptor, recently returned to Stanislaviv after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, to his attention. He commissioned a monument to his wife. Petro, who was consumed by work, began carving it from white marble so clear that its sheen suggested ice from an Alpine peak. The commission turned remembrance into a collaboration: Dr. Anger supplied the memories, and Petro gave them a durable visible form.

Dr. Anger visited Petro’s workshop in a rented wooden house on Siemiradzki Street. The approach was uncomfortable and the workshop’s surroundings untidy, but his attention fixed on the developing sculpture. After an earlier fall on the slope, he moved cautiously along the path, even buying a cane with a comfortable handle. Each visit brought a nervous anticipation of what part of Thérèse Petro had uncovered: a lock of hair, a softened corner of the mouth, or a vein at her temple. His eagerness makes the sculpting process an extension of bereavement: every newly revealed feature offers another encounter with the absent wife.

During one visit, Dr. Anger sat on the edge of a high stump and watched Petro’s hands as he spoke about Thérèse. He recounted her habits, their disagreements over corsets, and his late-night visits to her room. Petro worked with energetic, exact strokes, while the widower’s account supplied the intimate history that the marble could not contain by itself. The sculpture’s likeness was not merely a technical achievement; it was shaped by the particulars Dr. Anger chose to remember and by the concentrated attention with which he watched those particulars emerge.

The monument and the marriage’s continuing presence

Years after Dr. Anger’s death, the marble Thérèse still lies on a stone bed among the pillows and covers of the tomb beneath the lime trees in the cemetery. Her head rests carelessly on her right shoulder, and her slender arms settle into the folds of the bedding. The pose echoes the bedroom scene Dr. Anger described, translating a private image of his wife at rest into a memorial that others can see. Though the stone outlasts both spouses, its details retain the sense of a particular woman rather than a generic funerary figure.

Beside Thérèse, a grieving angel presses a hand to its forehead and turns its eyes toward the sky. Its acute sorrow contrasts with the calm, untroubled expression on her face. The monument holds the emotional imbalance created by the marriage’s ending: the carved wife appears peaceful, while the figure beside her gives visible shape to mourning. Petro’s gift, as the narrative describes it, is to make the stone form so compelling that an onlooker pauses, but the material remains stone, resistant to the life and change the imagination would give it.

The marriage is consequently remembered through two forms that cannot be fully reconciled. Dr. Anger’s dreams repeat the fire, and his account preserves the small, living particulars of Thérèse; Petro’s monument fixes her in a serene and lasting image. Neither brings her back, but together they show how attachment persists through repetition, speech, and art. The marble wife continues to occupy the place of a loved person in Dr. Anger’s memory even after he is gone, while the angel’s grief keeps the loss legible beside her apparent calm.