he
Madeleine and the Rue Drouot, he suddenly saw a lady whose bearing struck
him. A tall gentleman and a child were with her, and all three were
walking in front of him. He asked himself where he had seen them before,
when suddenly he recognized a movement of her hand; it was his wife, his
wife with Limousin and his child, his little George.

His heart beat as if it would suffocate him, but he did not stop, for he
wished to see them, and he followed them. They looked like a family of
the better middle class. Henriette was leaning on Paul's arm, and
speaking to him in a low voice, and looking at him sideways occasionally.
Parent got a side view of her and recognized her pretty features, the
movements of her lips, her smile, and her coaxing glances. But the child
chiefly took up his attention. How tall and strong he was! Parent could
not see his face, but only his long, fair curls. That tall boy with bare
legs, who was walking by his mother's side like a little man, was George.
He saw them suddenly, all three, as they stopped in front of a shop.
Limousin had grown very gray, had aged and was thinner; his wife, on the
contrary, was as young looking as ever, and had grown stouter. George he
would not have recognized, he was so different from what he had been
formerly.

They went on again and Parent followed them. He walked on quickly, passed
them, and then turned round, so as to meet them face to face. As he
passed the child he felt a mad longing to take him into his arms and run
off with him, and he knocked against him as if by accident. The boy
turned round and looked at the clumsy man angrily, and Parent hurried
away, shocked, hurt, and pursued by that look. He went off like a thief,
seized with a horrible fear lest he should have been seen and recognized
by his wife and her lover. He went to his cafe without stopping, and fell
breathless into his chair. That evening he drank three absinthes. For
four months he felt the pain of that meeting in his heart. Every night he
saw the three again, happy and tranquil, father, mother, and child
walking on the boulevard before going in to dinner, and that new vision
effaced the old one. It was another matter, another hallucination now,
and also a fresh pain. Little George, his little George, the child he had
so much loved and so often kissed, disappeared in the far distance, and
he saw a new one, like a brother of the first, a little boy with bare
legs, who did not know him! He su