Dr. Anger and Adèle’s Father-Daughter Relationship

Dr. Anger and Adèle’s Father-Daughter Relationship is shaped by an early catastrophe, the doctor’s practical care for his daughter, and a lasting dependence on Stefania. The 1868 fire killed Adèle’s mother and left Dr. Anger unable to recover from the loss; afterward, he raised Adèle in a household where Stefania, orphaned in the same disaster, became her constant companion and caretaker. His concern for Adèle was genuine, but his final instruction to Stefania that she serve her daughter turned private paternal devotion into an enduring obligation that outlived him.

Identity and the Loss That Defines the Household

Adèle is Dr. Anger’s daughter, and the fire that took her mother stands at the center of their family history. On September 28, 1868, while jam was being prepared in the Lothringer garden, a fire spread until half the city had burned. Adèle’s mother died in it. Dr. Anger remained afflicted by her absence for the rest of his life and never recovered from the loss. The household’s refusal to serve jam gives that grief an everyday form: a domestic food is made inseparable from the circumstances of the mother’s death.

The fire also killed Stefania’s parents, whose home stood beside the Angers’. Neighbors rescued both girls and returned them to Dr. Anger together, wrapped in soot-stained rags and reeking of smoke. Their shared survival placed Stefania within Adèle’s family at the very moment Adèle lost her mother. In the years that followed, the women hired to care for the girls came and went, despite receiving unusually high wages; Stefania, a difficult, crying child, believed their departures were her fault. Adèle, by contrast, remained beside her. The father-daughter household therefore came to rest not only on the doctor’s care but on the inseparable presence of the girl who had survived the same disaster.

A Father’s Care and Adèle’s Dependence

Adèle is portrayed as delicate, pale, fair-haired, dreamy, sensitive, and emotional, in contrast to Stefania’s robust build and restless energy. The difference helps explain why care becomes so central to her relationship with her father and, later, with Stefania: people feel an impulse to protect Adèle, keep dangerous objects from her, and tend to her as if she were a child. Her adult household still reflects this vulnerability. When she suffers a migraine, she searches through scattered clothes for her ergot, valerian, and belladonna medicines, fearing that dependence on others leaves her helpless if they disappear. Stefania finds the medicines in a walnut box once used by Dr. Anger on his travels and has placed among Adèle’s belongings. Even after his death, an object from his professional life remains part of the care that sustains his daughter.

The doctor’s protection did not make Adèle capable of managing ordinary domestic tasks. He joked that she might cook fruit compote when soup was wanted, or make a thin broth when compote was expected; she could not even light a kitchen fire. When a neighbor’s servant told the women about a girl burned by ammonia, Adèle did not know what ammonia was, and Stefania would not let her near the laundry or the dishwashing sink. These details make the tenderness of paternal protection double-edged: Adèle is cherished and sheltered, but also left reliant on someone else for skills and tasks her household demands.

The Father’s Charge to Stefania

Dr. Anger’s deathbed words define the relationship’s legacy. Facing death, he told Stefania that she and Adèle were like two trees whose trunks had become entangled, asked her to think of both Adèle and her own life, and instructed her to serve Adèle. Stefania did not hear the whole sentence clearly: the doctor’s lips foamed, his face turned blue, and his final grip on her hand was so forceful that her bones cracked. When she looked again, he was dead. His words nevertheless continued to pulse through her memory, driving her to perform task after task as if each were a prayer for Adèle.

The command acquired force because it matched a dependence already visible in daily life. Stefania cooks, cleans, shops, carries Petro’s meals to the cathedral or prison chapel, massages Adèle, and prepares iron-nailed apples in an effort to relieve her anemia. She imagines leaving for a monastery or another position, yet fears that Adèle could not survive without her: unable to cook even a soft-boiled egg, Adèle might injure herself, start a fire, or wither from missing Stefania. The fear is Stefania’s, not an established prediction, but it shows how the doctor’s dying instruction has become entangled with her own conviction that leaving would be a betrayal and a danger.

Labor, Affection, and the Father’s Continuing Authority

After Dr. Anger’s death, his authority persists in how Adèle describes the upbringing he began. In front of Ernest Thorn, Adèle insists that servants cannot simply be expected to work well by luck; they must be educated, raised, and instructed. She says her father began this process with Stefania from the cradle and that she continued it, describing the arrangement as both rigorous and tender. Her formulation casts Stefania’s labor as the product of a carefully cultivated closeness, yet also names it as training. Their affection and the household’s hierarchy occupy the same account: the servant is valued as near family, but her work remains expected and controlled.

That tension continues in the household after Adèle marries Petro. During the prolonged rains, Stefania changes the buckets catching water from the roof while still preparing meals, cleaning, shopping, and caring for Adèle. Later she works in two houses, maintaining order and cooking in both, and discovers that her strength has multiplied. At Adèle’s birthday gathering she keeps quiet while guests praise the food, reminding herself that she is a servant whose work is to prepare, cook, bake, wash, clean, and mend. Petro thanks her and calls her family, but that recognition coexists with the labor she performs and the obligation inherited from Dr. Anger.

The Relationship’s Afterlife

Dr. Anger’s influence also shapes Stefania’s response when the obligation is challenged. When Josef offers to pay her for the work she has done in his household, she collapses into her chair, overwhelmed by the prospect that labor should be compensated. The moment contrasts with the duties she performs for Adèle, where work is bound to service, kin-like intimacy, and the dead doctor’s command. His daughter’s dependence is real, but so is the cost of making Stefania responsible for it without a clear boundary between affection and employment.

At the novel’s close, Stefania imagines her cooking reaching people across the ocean, who would then meet Adèle and smile at her child; she insists that her love is as enduring as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet the house is already filling with smoke and its lovingly made objects melting in the flames. In the smoke, Stefania recognizes the illusion in which she has lived. The fire that first joined the girls through shared loss returns as an image of the fragility beneath a seemingly permanent household. Dr. Anger’s command survives him, but the ending makes visible the unstable foundation on which its promise of lifelong service has rested.