« Tu dois servir Adèle. »

“You must serve Adèle” is the dying charge the doctor gives Stefania, and its force comes from becoming more than a final request: Stefania hears it as an obligation that governs her daily life and makes separation feel morally impossible. Recalled at moments of hurt and anger, the command ties intimate care to obedience, while the work of serving Adèle gradually eclipses Stefania’s sense of a life of her own.

The Charge at the Doctor’s Death

The doctor frames the charge through the image of two trees whose trunks have grown together. He tells Stefania that life will be difficult for her, urges her to think of Adèle and of her own life, and then instructs her to serve Adèle. The image offers a rationale for the demand: their lives are presented as entangled. But the imperative also makes that entanglement an assignment, placing the responsibility for sustaining the bond on Stefania.

Stefania does not hear every word clearly. As the doctor speaks, his lips are already foaming, his face has turned blue, and a rattle rises from his chest. She closes her eyes in fear; he grips her hand so tightly that her bones crack. When she looks again, he has died. The scene makes the charge inseparable from the physical ordeal of witnessing his last moments, giving his words the weight of a command spoken at the threshold of death.

From Last Words to Daily Practice

Afterward, Stefania describes the doctor’s words as still pulsing in her veins and being propelled forward by her heart. They oblige her to carry out task after task, in a circular routine, each one like a prayer for Adèle. The command thus persists not as a single remembered sentence but as a pattern of repeated labor: its continuing effect is measured in the work Stefania performs every day.

The charge returns when Stefania recalls earlier humiliations. She remembers Adèle pointing her out to friends as her slave, accusing her of stealing the doctor’s watch, and becoming angry when Stefania prioritized dealing with fleas in the bedding over arranging Adèle’s hair before a military orchestra concert. Stefania says she now swallows her bitterness without showing it and continues her duties. She does not claim the task of administering justice; she says her purpose is to make Adèle’s life easier. The doctor’s injunction offers a language for enduring service even when that service brings injury and resentment.

The Bond and the Cost of Leaving

When Stefania asks herself why she remains despite her misery, she imagines leaving for a monastery, work as a companion to an old woman, or another employment. But she immediately pictures Adèle as unable to manage without her: weak, anemic, and prone to migraines, supposedly incapable of even cooking a soft-boiled egg. In Stefania’s fearful imagining, Adèle might cause a fire, scald or cut herself, or waste away from sadness. These are Stefania’s predictions, not reported outcomes; their accumulation shows how care, fear, and the doctor’s command combine to make departure feel catastrophic.

Later, Stefania reduces the question to the difficulty of leaving someone who cannot even take out her chamber pot, and wonders who would comfort Adèle at night when her husband torments her. She adds that serving Adèle may mean forgetting her own existence. The command’s central tension is therefore explicit: it keeps Stefania close to someone she loves and cares for, while asking her to subordinate her own life to that care. Its recurrence reveals both the sustaining force of their bond and the cost of treating service as an unquestionable duty.