Adèle Skolyk–Felix relationship

Adèle Skolyk’s relationship with Felix is a struggle over whether care means welcoming a child as he is or shaping him into the child she longs to possess. She rescues and shelters him, but his refusal of her gestures leaves her care frustrated; when she mistakes a comb she had given away for a theft, suspicion briefly overwhelms the evidence. Felix’s growing attachment to Petro changes the household’s pattern, though Adèle’s later demand that the boy lose weight shows that acceptance remains conditional and entangled with control.

Taking Felix In

When the boy is found, Adèle refuses even to consider leaving him with Father Josef. The priest proposes possible shelter with the Basilian sisters or at a Protestant orphanage, while the crowd argues over where the child belongs. Adèle’s answer is bodily and immediate: she holds Felix firmly in her arms, her eyes shining with what the narrator calls a pathological passion. Father Josef blesses the boy by touching his fair curls and calmly reminds Adèle that his parents may be looking for him. She lowers her eyes, tightens her hold, and insists that no one is searching. Rather than continue the discussion, she coolly postpones her meeting with the priest and heads for a carriage.

The scene establishes the relation’s defining contradiction. Adèle’s intervention keeps Felix from being passed among institutions and strangers, yet her embrace is already possessive: the possibility that he belongs to another family is something she cannot accept. Her assertion that he has no one is not established as fact; it is the claim she makes while holding him tighter. Care and appropriation arrive together.

Affection Meets Refusal

At home, Adèle tries to draw Felix into familiar forms of affection, but he will not perform them. He does not embrace her, take her hand, offer a kiss, seek cuddles, or ask for comforting food. He refuses her shirts, her soft shoes, and her attempts to dress and adorn him. When she strokes his head, he pushes her away; when she kisses him, he spits and wipes his mouth as if disgusted. Even the sailor suit she makes with Stefania—carefully sewn over several candlelit nights from white batiste and wool, with silk bands, lace, and fabric-covered buttons—cannot make him accept her version of childhood.

Adèle answers his distance with increasingly elaborate provision. She orders pigeons, liver pâté, and other rich food because he looks pale and anemic; she buys sweets and an enormous basket of bagels after noticing his interest. The bagels dry uneaten and have to be thrown to the dogs. In public, she explains that the household took him in because nobody else would want him, describing him as a wild little animal who sleeps in a nest, bites and scratches, and makes sounds rather than speaking. Her account presents her as burdened by his needs, even as her failed gifts and the narrator’s covert disposal of sweets show that the care is neither simple nor consistently attuned to what Felix will accept.

Her disappointment becomes entangled with her relationship to Stefania. Adèle complains that Stefania does too little at home and that her cooking has become impossible to eat: soups are too thick, meat too peppery, and pastry too greasy. She also complains that Stefania is often absent and does not help, while presenting herself as a generous family member who has been repaid with ingratitude. The recriminations follow the frustration of her efforts with Felix, but they redirect that frustration toward the person already carrying much of the household’s work.

Withdrawal, Suspicion, and Reversal

After the quarrel, Adèle changes course. She stops whispering tenderly to Felix, bringing him treats, and giving him presents, and behaves as though he does not exist. At the same time, she conspicuously hides her jewelry and locks her room. Her withdrawal is therefore not a clean relinquishment: she distances herself from the boy while remaining alert to the possibility that he might take something from her.

The suspicion erupts one evening when Felix has, for the first time, accepted the couch prepared for him. Adèle rushes downstairs, pulls away his blanket, and shouts about the police, betrayal, and a house full of thieves. Asked what is missing, she names her dragonfly comb. The accusation falters when Stefania reminds her that she gave the comb away after the visit to Father Josef, when he accompanied the women to their carriage. Adèle pretends to recover the memory, then concedes that she had forgotten; Petro tells her to leave the priest alone. Her certainty about theft is thus undone by her own earlier act of generosity. The comb becomes the concrete measure of how readily fear and resentment have displaced what she knows.

Once Felix is found, the household resumes its ordinary course, but the narrator notices a sudden rapprochement between Adèle and Petro that includes the boy. Felix remains physically unusual and independent: he curls himself into knots, hides in pots or the attic, hangs upside down from a beam, and draws a plan of the city. Yet he also begins eating breakfast with Petro—buns and milk, or buckwheat or millet pancakes—and follows him solemnly to the workshop or garden. Adèle longs to kiss and tickle him, but restrains herself because she knows he may run away and stop eating. Her desire for closeness has not disappeared; it has become subject, at least momentarily, to attention to his limits.

Conditional Acceptance

Felix’s growing routine with Petro gives Adèle a way back into family life without requiring Felix to answer her affection on her terms. The boy who refused her clothing and kisses can remain strange and self-directed while joining the household’s meals and work. Adèle’s restraint marks a real adjustment: she recognizes that pressing contact could undo the fragile trust on which his eating depends.

That adjustment does not settle the relationship. After Felix is saved from the authorities, Adèle tells Petro and Stefania that the boy must be put on a diet because she will not live under the same roof as an obese person. Her declaration turns the earlier effort to feed and strengthen a pale, anemic child into a new demand that his body conform to her standards. The sequence leaves Adèle neither simply a devoted rescuer nor simply a rejected would-be mother. Her protection, extravagant giving, injury, suspicion, renewed closeness, and judgment of Felix’s body remain bound together, making acceptance real but conditional.