“’Oh! If you only knew, if you only
knew ... what a grief it is ... what a grief it is
to me ... I shall never get over it.’
’Over what, little Fly?’ ’Over having
killed it, for I did kill it! Oh! Without
intending to! Oh! how grieved I am!...’
“She was sobbing, and we stood round, deeply
touched, but without knowing what to say, and she
went on: ‘Have you seen it?’ And we
replied with one voice: ‘Yes.’
‘It was a boy, was it not?’ ‘Yes.’
’Beautiful, was it not?’ We hesitated
a good deal, but Petit-Bleu, who was less scrupulous
than the rest of us, made up his mind to affirm it,
and said: ’Very beautiful.’
“He committed a mistake, however, for she began
to sob, and almost to scream with grief, and Only-One-Eye,
who perhaps loved her more than the rest of us did,
had a happy thought. Kissing her eyes, that were
dimmed with tears, he said: ’Console yourself,
little Fly, console yourself; we will make another
for you.’
“Her innate sense of the ridiculous was suddenly
excited, and half-convinced, and half-joking, still
tearful and her heart sore with grief, she said, looking
at us all: ‘Do you really mean it?’
And we replied all at once:
“‘We really mean it.’”
“I can tell you a terrible story about the Franco-Prussian
war,” Monsieur d’Endolin said to some
friends assembled in the smoking-room of Baron de
Ravot’s chateau. “You know my house
in the Faubourg de Cormeil. I was living there
when the Prussians came, and I had for a neighbor a
kind of a mad woman, who had lost her senses in consequence
of a series of misfortunes, as at the age of seven
and twenty she had lost her father, her husband and
her newly born child, all in the space of a month.
“When death has once entered into a house, it
almost invariably returns immediately, as if it knew
the way, and the young woman, overwhelmed with grief,
took to her bed and was delirious for six weeks.
Then, a species of calm lassitude succeeded that violent
crisis, and she remained motionless, eating next to
nothing, and only moving her eyes. Every time
they tried to make her get up, she screamed as if they
were about to kill her, and so they ended by leaving
her continually in bed, and only taking her out to
wash her, to change her linen and to turn her mattress.
“An old servant remained with her, who gave
her something to drink, or a little cold meat, from
time to time. What passed in that despairing
mind? No one ever knew, for she did not speak
at all now. Was she thinking of the dead?
Was she dreaming sadly, without any precise recollection
of anything that had happened? Or was her memory
as stagnant as water without any current? But
however this may have been, for fifteen years she
remained thus inert and secluded.
“The war broke out, and in the beginning of
December the Germans came to Cormeil. I can remember
it as if it were but yesterday. It was freezing
hard enough to split the stones, and I, myself, was
lying back in an armchair, being unable to move on
account of the gout, when I heard their heavy and
regular tread; I could see them pass, from my window.
