sk the two little girls, with an
innocent air.

But if you fancy they don't know what is in the air, if you think that
when Mlle. Elise used to give three raps on the ceiling they imagined
that it was for information on business, you are more ingenuous even
than _le pere_ Joyeuse.

"That's all right--that's all right, children; go and dress, in any
case."

Then there begins another refrain:

"What frock must I put on, Bonne Maman--the gray?"

"Bonne Maman, there is a string off my hat."

"Bonne Maman, my child, have I no more starched cravats left?"

For ten minutes the charming grandmother is besieged with questions and
entreaties. Every one needs her help in some way; it is she who had the
keys of everything, she who gives out the pretty, white, fine goffered
linen, the embroidered handkerchiefs, the best gloves, all the dainty
things which, taken out from drawers and wardrobes, spread over the bed,
fill a house with a bright Sunday gaiety.

The workers, the people with tasks to fulfil, alone know that delight
which returns each week consecrated by the customs of a nation. For
these prisoners of the week, the almanac with its closed prison-like
gratings opens at regular intervals into luminous spaces, with
breaths of refreshing air. It is Sunday, the day that seems so long
to fashionable folk, to the Parisians of the boulevard whose habits it
disturbs, so gloomy to people far from their homes and relatives, that
constitutes for a multitude of human beings the only recompense, the one
aim of the desperate efforts of six days of toil. Neither rain nor hail,
nothing makes any difference, nothing will prevent them from going
out, from closing behind them the door of the deserted workshop, of the
stuffy little lodging. But when the springtime is come, when the May
sunshine glitters on it as this morning, and it can deck itself out in
gay colours, then indeed Sunday is the holiday of holidays.

If one would know it well, it must be seen especially in the working
quarters of the town, in those gloomy streets which it lights up and
enlarges by closing the shops, keeping in their sheds the heavy drays
and trucks, leaving the space free for wandering bands of children
washed and in their Sunday clothes, and for games of battledore and
shuttlecock played amid the great circlings of the swallows beneath some
porch of old Paris. It must be seen in the densely populated, feverishly
toiling suburbs, where, as soon as morn