A Romance of Youth | Page 6

know, across a bridge in the
middle of which stood a large brass horseman, with his head crowned
with laurel, and stopped before a large house and entered with the
crowd, where a very agile and rapid young man put some black clothes
on Amedee.
On their return the child found his father seated at the dining-room
table with M. Gerard, and both of them were writing addresses upon
large sheets of paper bordered with black. M. Violette was not crying,
but his face showed deep lines of grief, and he let his lock of hair fall
over his right eye.
At the sight of little Amedee, in his black clothes, he uttered a groan,
and arose, staggering like a drunken man, bursting into tears again.
Oh, no! he never will forget that day, nor the horrible next day, when
Madame Gerard came and dressed him in the morning in his black
clothes, while he listened to the noise of heavy feet and blows from a
hammer in the next room. He suddenly remembered that he had not
seen his mother since two days before.
"Mamma! I want to see mamma!"
It was necessary then to try to make him understand the truth. Madame
Gerard repeated to him that he ought to be very wise and good, and try
to console his father, who had much to grieve him; for his mother had
gone away forever; that she was in heaven.
In heaven! heaven is very high up and far off. If his mother was in
heaven, what was it that those porters dressed in black carried away in
the heavy box that they knocked at every turn of the staircase? What

did that solemn carriage, which he followed through all the rain,
quickening his childish steps, with his little hand tightly clasped in his
father's, carry away? What did they bury in that hole, from which an
odor of freshly dug earth was emitted--in that hole surrounded by men
in black, and from which his father turned away his head in horror?
What was it that they hid in this ditch, in this garden full of crosses and
stone urns, where the newly budded trees shone in the March sun after
the shower, large drops of water still falling from their branches like
tears?
His mother was in heaven! On the evening of that dreadful day Amedee
dared not ask to "see mamma" when he was seated before his father at
the table, where, for a long time, the old woman in a short jacket had
placed only two plates. The poor widower, who had just wiped his eyes
with his napkin, had put upon one of the plates a little meat cut up in
bits for Amedee. He was very pale, and as Amedee sat in his high chair,
he asked himself whether he should recognize his mother's sweet,
caressing look, some day, in one of those stars that she loved to watch,
seated upon the balcony on cool September nights, pressing her
husband's hand in the darkness.
CHAPTER II
SAD CHANGES
Trees are like men; there are some that have no luck. A genuinely
unfortunate tree was the poor sycamore which grew in the playground
of an institution for boys on the Rue de la Grande-Chaumiere, directed
by M. Batifol.
Chance might just as well have made it grow upon the banks of a river,
upon some pretty bluff, where it might have seen the boats pass; or,
better still, upon the mall in some garrison village, where it could have
had the pleasure of listening twice a week to military music. But, no! it
was written in the book of fate that this unlucky sycamore should lose
its bark every summer, as a serpent changes its skin, and should scatter
the ground with its dead leaves at the first frost, in the playground of

the Batifol institution, which was a place without any distractions.
This solitary tree, which was like any other sycamore, middle-aged and
without any singularities, ought to have had the painful feeling that it
served in a measure to deceive the public. In fact, upon the
advertisement of the Batifol institution (Cours du lycee Henri IV.
Preparation au baccalaureat et aux ecoles de l'Etat), one read these
fallacious words, "There is a garden;" when in reality it was only a
vulgar court graveled with stones from the river, with a paved gutter in
which one could gather half a dozen of lost marbles, a broken top, and
a certain number of shoe-nails, and after recreation hours still more.
This solitary sycamore was supposed to justify the illusion and fiction
of the garden promised in the advertisement; but as trees certainly have
common sense, this one should have been conscious that it was not a
garden