The widower, who from the Beauce country, sent his son to his
native village in the Eure-et-Loir to be brought up by kinsfolk
there. As for himself, he was a strong man, and soon learned
to be resigned; he was of a saving habit by instinct in both
business and family matters, and never put off the green serge
apron from week's end to week's end save for a Sunday visit to
the cemetery. He would hang a wreath on the arm of the black
cross, and, if it was a hot day, take a chair on the way back
along the boulevard outside the door of a wine-shop. There, as he
sat slowly emptying his glass, his eye would rest on the mothers
and their youngsters going by on the sidewalk.
These young wives, as he watched them approach and pass on, were
so many passing reminders of his Clotilde and made him feel sad
without his quite understanding why, for he was not much given
to thinking.
Time slipped by, and little by little his dead wife grew to be a
tender, vague memory in the bookbinder's mind. One night he tried
in vain to recall Clotilde's features; after this experience,
he told himself that perhaps he might be able to discover the
mother's lineaments in the child's face, and he was seized with
a great longing to see this relic of the lost one once more,
to have the child home again.
In the morning he wrote a letter to his old sister, Mademoiselle
Servien, begging her to come and take up her abode with the little
one in the _Rue Notre-Dame des Champs_. The sister, who had lived
for many years in Paris at her brother's expense, for indolence
was her ruling passion, agreed to resume her life in a city where,
she used to say, folks are free and need not depend on their
neighbours.
One autumn evening she arrived at the _Gare de l'Ouest_ with Jean
and her boxes and baskets, an upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed
figure, all ready to defend the child against all sorts of
imaginary perils. The bookbinder kissed the lad and expressed his
satisfaction in two words.
Then he lifted him pickaback on his shoulders, and bidding him
hold on tight to his father's hair, carried him off proudly to
the house.
Jean was seven. Soon existence settled down to a settled routine.
At midday the old dame would don her shawl and set off with the
child in the direction of Grenelle.
The pair followed the broad thoroughfares that ran between shabby
walls and red-fronted drinking-shops. Generally speaking, a sky
of a dappled grey like the great cart-horses that plodded past,
invested the quiet suburb with a gentle melancholy. Establishing
herself on a bench, while the child played under a tree, she would
knit her stocking and chat with an old soldier and tell him her
troubles--what a hard life it was in other people's houses.
One day, one of the last fine days of the season, Jean, squatted
on the ground, was busy sticking up bits of plane-tree bark in
the fine wet sand. That faculty of "pretending," by which children
are able to make their lives one unending miracle, transformed a
handful of soil and a few bits of wood into wondrous galleries and
fairy castles to the lad's imagination; he clapped his hands and
leapt for joy. Then suddenly he felt himself wrapped in something
soft and scented. It was a lady's gown; he saw nothing except
that she smiled as she put him gently out of her way and walked
on. He ran to tell his aunt:
"How good she smells, that lady!"
Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies were no
better than others, and that she thought more of herself with
her merino skirt than all those set-up minxes in their flounces
and finery, adding:
"Better a good name than a gilt girdle."
But this talk was beyond little Jean's comprehension. The perfumed
silk that had swept his face left behind a vague sweetness, a
memory as of a gentle, ghostly caress.