“Now, be good children!  Look, you little stupid, you are dirty already!  I’ll come for you in a minute; don’t stir.”

The hearse drove up; it was time to start, but Madame Deberle appeared, exclaiming:  “The bouquets have been forgotten!  Quick, Pauline, the bouquets!”

Some little confusion ensued.  A bouquet of white roses had been prepared for each little girl; and these bouquets now had to be distributed.  The children, in an ecstasy of delight, held the great clusters of flowers in front of them as though they had been wax tapers; Lucien, still at Marguerite’s side, daintily inhaled the perfume of her blossoms as she held them to his face.  All these little maidens, their hands filled with flowers, looked radiant with happiness in the golden light; but suddenly their faces grew grave as they perceived the men placing the coffin on the hearse.

“Is she inside that thing?” asked Sophie in a whisper.

Her sister Blanche nodded assent.  Then, in her turn, she said:  “For men it’s as big as this!”

She was referring to the coffin, and stretched out her arms to their widest extent.  However, little Marguerite, whose nose was buried amongst her roses, was seized with a fit of laughter; it was the flowers, said she, which tickled her.  Then the others in turn buried their noses in their bouquets to find out if it were so; but they were remonstrated with, and they all became grave once more.

The funeral procession was now filing into the street.  At the corner of the Rue Vineuse a woman without a cap, and with tattered shoes on her feet, wept and wiped her cheeks with the corner of her apron.  People stood at many windows, and exclamations of pity ascended through the stillness of the street.  Hung with white silver-fringed drapery the hearse rolled on without a sound; nothing fell on the ear save the measured tread of the two white horses, deadened by the solid earthen roadway.  The bouquets and wreaths, borne on the funeral car, formed a very harvest of flowers; the coffin was hidden by them; every jolt tossed the heaped-up mass, and the hearse slowly sprinkled the street with lilac blossom.  From each of the four corners streamed a long ribbon of white watered silk, held by four little girls—­Sophie and Marguerite, one of the Levasseur family, and little Mademoiselle Guiraud, who was so small and so uncertain on her legs that her mother walked beside her.  The others, in a close body, surrounded the hearse, each bearing her bouquet of roses.  They walked slowly, their veils waved, and the wheels rolled on amidst all this muslin, as though borne along on a cloud, from which smiled the tender faces of cherubs.  Then behind, following Monsieur Rambaud, who bowed his pale face, came several ladies and little boys, Rosalie, Zephyrin, and the servants of Madame Deberle.  To these succeeded five empty mourning carriages.  And as the hearse passed along the sunny street like a car symbolical of springtide, a number of white pigeons wheeled over the mourners’ heads.