L’injonction du docteur Anger à Stefania de servir Adèle

Doctor Anger’s deathbed injunction that Stefania must serve Adèle is more than a final instruction: it becomes the rule through which Stefania understands her duties, her attachment, and even her right to leave. The command binds her to Adèle after Doctor Anger’s death, turning repetitive domestic care into an obligation that Stefania describes as prayer, while making departure feel like betrayal and abandonment.

The injunction at the deathbed

Doctor Anger delivers the injunction as he is dying, reminding Stefania that she and Adèle are like two trees whose trunks have become entwined. He tells her to think of Adèle and of her own life, acknowledges that obedience will be difficult, and then insists that she serve Adèle. The image of interlaced trunks makes the relationship sound at once intimate and constraining: the two lives are joined, but the joining does not erase the hardship Stefania is told to expect.

The words reach Stefania in the physical extremity of the scene. Doctor Anger’s lips are already foaming, his face has turned blue, and a rattle rises from his hollow chest. Afraid, Stefania closes her eyes; he grips her hand so hard that her bones crack. When she looks again, he has died. She sees not simply the doctor’s body but something like a dried-up doll dressed in his clothes, and his last words continue to resonate inside her. The injunction thus passes from a dying speaker into Stefania’s memory at the precise moment his authority disappears from the household.

A spoken command becomes a daily rule

Stefania describes the command as pulsing in her veins and being projected forward by her heart. Its effect is practical and recurrent: it obliges her to carry out dozens of tasks, one after another, in a circular routine, each task becoming like a prayer for Adèle. The comparison gives household labor a devotional form, but it also shows how completely the deathbed instruction organizes Stefania’s days. Service is not an occasional act prompted by crisis; it is the pattern by which she continues to live.

The injunction returns in the same words when Stefania tries to explain why she remains. She recalls that serving Adèle may mean forgetting her own existence, yet asks what would become of Adèle if she left, since Adèle cannot even take out her chamber pot. Stefania imagines Adèle crying alone at night while Petro, her husband, torments her. That account makes the command both an inherited duty and a justification Stefania gives herself: she stays because she believes Adèle needs her, even as the service that sustains Adèle threatens to consume Stefania’s separate life.

The duty tested by resentment and humiliation

Stefania’s obedience does not mean that she regards the arrangement as fair. She remembers Adèle calling her a slave when they were children, accusing her of stealing Doctor Anger’s watch, and becoming angry when Stefania dealt with fleas in the bedding instead of arranging Adèle’s hair before a concert in the park. The remembered incidents make the asymmetry concrete: Stefania’s work is treated as available for Adèle’s needs, while Stefania’s judgment about urgent tasks can itself become a source of reproach.

She says she has learned to swallow her bitterness without showing it and to continue with her work, because she is not there to establish justice but to make Adèle’s life easier. When the remembered command surfaces again, the pain is figured as a hook lodged in her entrails. She then throws two chamber pots filled with thick nighttime urine into the darkness that has opened in her mind. The act does not cancel the rule; it exposes the pressure accumulating beneath its performance. The command has made endurance habitual, but it has not made humiliation painless.

The promise’s reach and its limits

Stefania’s dependence on the injunction is reinforced by her conviction that Adèle is helpless without her. She imagines that Adèle might cause a fire, scald herself, cut her hand with an axe, or wither from sadness if left alone. These fears make departure appear not merely disloyal but dangerous. The deathbed words therefore work through both obligation and anticipation: Stefania serves Adèle in the present and stays because she foresees catastrophe in her absence.

The text also places this promise beside a history of intimate entanglement rather than presenting it as a clean moral resolution. Doctor Anger’s image of entwined trunks acknowledges the bond, while Stefania’s own account reveals its costs: her resentment, her sense of having lost space in her own life, and the repetitive labor by which she tries to protect Adèle. The injunction survives its speaker and repeatedly regains force in Stefania’s memory. Its lasting consequence is not that her conflict disappears, but that she continues to act within it: serving Adèle while feeling the weight of what that service requires.