s he had met with already, demanded:

"What is your name, 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."

The child, on the brink of tears, replied for the third time:

"My name is Simon."

The urchins began to laugh. The triumphant tormentor cried: "You can see
plainly that he has no papa."

A deep silence ensued. The children were dumfounded 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 hitherto inexplicable contempt of their mothers for La Blanchotte
growing upon them. As for Simon, he had leaned against a tree to avoid
falling, and he remained as if prostrated by an irreparable disaster.
He sought to explain, but could think of nothing-to say to refute 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 those country boys, little more than animals, experienced
that cruel craving which prompts the fowls of a farmyard to destroy one
of their number as soon as it is wounded. Simon suddenly espied a little
neighbor, the son of a widow, whom he had seen, as he himself was to be
seen, always 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 among the little wretches 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
boys, whose fathers were for the most part bad men, drunkards, thieves,
and who beat their wives, jostled each other to press closer and closer,
as though they, the legitimate ones, would smother by their pressure one
who was illegitimate.

The boy who chanced to be next Simon suddenly put his tongue out at him
with a mocking air and shouted at him:

"No papa! No papa!"

Simon seized him by the hair with both hands and set to work to disable
his legs with kicks, while he bit his cheek ferociously. A tremendous
struggle ensued