After breakfast Madame Gerard put on her hat and shawl and went out, taking Amedee with her.  They got into a carriage that took them through streets that the child did not 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