A Life by Guy de Maupassant Page B

even though she was only forty-two, and a gentle, sad look in her eyes; she had never counted for anything in her family. As a small child, hardly any-  one had ever kissed her, seeing that she was neither pretty nor boisterous; and she used to sit sweetly and quietly in the corner. Ever since then she had always been the one to be sacrificed. As a young girl, nobody had taken the slightest interest in her.
    She was rather like a shadow or a familiar object, like a living piece of furniture one is used to seeing every day but without giving it a moment's notice.
    Her sister, from habit acquired in the parental home, looked on her as a failure, as someone of absolutely no consequence. Everyone treated her with a casual familiarity which masked a kind of well-meaning disdain. She was called Lise, and seemed to be embarrassed by this smart, youthful name. When it became evident that she was not getting married, and doubtless never would, Lise had turned into Lison. Since the arrival of Jeanne she had become known as 'Aunt Lison', a humble relation, all prim and proper and dreadfully shy, even with her sister and brother-in-law, who nevertheless felt a certain fondness for her, but a fondness that was a mixture of undiscriminating kind-heartedness, instinctive compassion, and natural generosity.
    Sometimes, when the Baroness talked about her distant childhood, she would date things by referring to the 'time of Lison's little episode'.
    Nothing further would be said; and this 'little episode' remained as though shrouded in mist.
    One evening Lise, then aged twenty, had tried to drown herself, no one knew why. Nothing in her previous life, or in her behaviour, could have led one to anticipate such an act of madness. She had been dragged out of the water, half dead; and her parents, raising their arms in indignation rather than trying to ascertain the mysterious cause of this act, had been content to refer to her 'episode', rather as they spoke of the accident which had befallen Coco the horse, who had broken its leg shortly before that on stumbling in a rut and had had to be put down.
    Since then Lise, soon to be Lison, had been considered weak in the head. The mild contempt which she inspired in her kin gradually communicated itself to everybody else in the vicinity. Even little Jeanne, with her child's intuitive understanding, never  bothered with her, never went upstairs to give her a kiss in bed, and never even went into her room. Indeed, only Rosalie the maid, who performed the few necessary chores in this room, seemed to know where it was.
    When Lison came into the dining-room for lunch, the 'Little One' would routinely go up to her and proffer her forehead to be kissed; but that was that.
    If anyone wanted to speak to her, a servant was sent to fetch her; and if she was not there, no one was concerned, no one gave her a thought: it would never have occurred to any of them to worry about her or say: 'But wait, I haven't seen Lison this morning.'
    She took up no space; she was one of those creatures who remain strangers, even to their own family, like unexplored lands, and whose death leaves no gap, no empty place in a household, one of those people who are incapable of entering into the lives and loves and everyday routines of those around them.
    When someone said 'Aunt Lison', those two words stirred almost no affection in anyone. It was as if they had said 'the coffee-pot' or 'the sugar-bowl'.
    She always walked with short, rapid, silent steps; never making a noise or bumping into anything, seemingly able to communicate to objects themselves this capacity to make not a sound. Her hands appeared to be made of some sort of wadding, so lightly and delicately did she handle everything she touched.
    She arrived toward the middle of July, in a great state of excitement at the prospect of this marriage. She brought a pile of presents, which, since they were from her, passed almost unnoticed.
    The day after she came, no one