La Blanchotte’s son appeared in his turn upon the threshold of the school.

He was seven or eight years old.  He was rather pale, very neat, with a timid and almost awkward manner.

He was on the point of making his way back to his mother’s house when the groups of his school-fellows perpetually whispering and watching him with the mischievous and heartless eyes of children bent upon playing a nasty trick, gradually surrounded him and ended by enclosing him altogether.  There he stood fixed amidst them, surprised and embarrassed, not understanding what they were going to do with him.  But the lad who had brought the news, puffed up with the success he had met with already, demanded: 

“How do you name yourself, you?”

He answered:  “Simon.”

“Simon what?” retorted the other.

The child, altogether bewildered, repeated:  “Simon.”

The lad shouted at him:  “One is named Simon something ... that is not a name ...  Simon indeed.”

And he, on the brink of tears, replied for the third time: 

“I am named Simon.”

The urchins fell a-laughing.  The lad triumphantly lifted up his voice:  “You can see plainly that he has no papa.”

A deep silence ensued.  The children were dumbfounded by this extraordinary, impossible monstrous thing—­a boy who had not a papa; they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt that contempt, until then inexplicable, of their mothers for La Blanchotte grow upon them.  As for Simon, he had propped himself against a tree to avoid falling and he remained as though struck to the earth by an irreparable disaster.  He sought to explain, but he could think of no answer for them, to deny this horrible charge that he had no papa.  At last he shouted at them quite recklessly:  “Yes, I have one.”

“Where is he?” demanded the boy.

Simon was silent, he did not know.  The children roared, tremendously excited; and these sons of toil, most nearly related to animals, experienced that cruel craving which animates the fowls of a farm-yard to destroy one among themselves as soon as it is wounded.  Simon suddenly espied a little neighbor, the son of a widow, whom he had always seen, as he himself was to be seen, quite alone with his mother.

“And no more have you,” he said, “no more have you a papa.”

“Yes,” replied the other, “I have one.”

“Where is he?” rejoined Simon.

“He is dead,” declared the brat with superb dignity, “he is in the cemetery, is my papa.”

A murmur of approval rose amidst the scapegraces, as if this fact of possessing a papa dead in a cemetery had caused their comrade to grow big enough to crush the other one who had no papa at all.  And these rogues, whose fathers were for the most part evil-doers, drunkards, thieves and ill-treaters of their wives, hustled each other as they pressed closer and closer, as though they, the legitimate ones, would stifle in their pressure one who was beyond the law.