Poor little Desiree!

She recalls the country excursion which Frantz had organized for her.  That breath of nature, which she breathed that day for the first time, falls to her lot again at the moment of her death.  “Remember,” it seems to say to her; and she replies mentally, “Oh! yes, I remember.”

She remembers only too well.  When it arrives at the end of the quay, which was bedecked as for a holiday, the furtive little shadow pauses at the steps leading down to the bank.

Almost immediately there are shouts and excitement all along the quay: 

“Quick—­a boat—­grappling-irons!” Boatmen and policemen come running from all sides.  A boat puts off from the shore with a lantern in the bow.

The flower-women awake, and, when one of them asks with a yawn what is happening, the woman who keeps the cafe that crouches at the corner of the bridge answers coolly: 

“A woman just jumped into the river.”

But no.  The river has refused to take that child.  It has been moved to pity by so great gentleness and charm.  In the light of the lanterns swinging to and fro on the shore, a black group forms and moves away.  She is saved!  It was a sand-hauler who fished her out.  Policemen are carrying her, surrounded by boatmen and lightermen, and in the darkness a hoarse voice is heard saying with a sneer:  “That water-hen gave me a lot of trouble.  You ought to see how she slipped through my fingers!  I believe she wanted to make me lose my reward.”  Gradually the tumult subsides, the bystanders disperse, and the black group moves away toward a police-station.

Ah! poor girl, you thought that it was an easy matter to have done with life, to disappear abruptly.  You did not know that, instead of bearing you away swiftly to the oblivion you sought, the river would drive you back to all the shame, to all the ignominy of unsuccessful suicide.  First of all, the station, the hideous station, with its filthy benches, its floor where the sodden dust seems like mud from the street.  There Desiree was doomed to pass the rest of the night.

At last day broke with the shuddering glare so distressing to invalids.  Suddenly aroused from her torpor, Desiree sat up in her bed, threw off the blanket in which they had wrapped her, and despite fatigue and fever tried to stand, in order to regain full possession of her faculties and her will.  She had but one thought—­to escape from all those eyes that were opening on all sides, to leave that frightful place where the breath of sleep was so heavy and its attitudes so distorted.

“I implore you, messieurs,” she said, trembling from head to foot, “let me return to mamma.”

Hardened as they were to Parisian dramas, even those good people realized that they were face to face with something more worthy of attention, more affecting than usual.  But they could not take her back to her mother as yet.  She must go before the commissioner first.  That was absolutely necessary.  They called a cab from compassion for her; but she must go from the station to the cab, and there was a crowd at the door to stare at the little lame girl with the damp hair glued to her temples, and her policeman’s blanket which did not prevent her shivering.  At headquarters she was conducted up a dark, damp stairway where sinister figures were passing to and fro.