a cry. You darted forward; his face was contracted, and
he looked toward you with eyes that no longer saw. And then all was calm,
silent and motionless, while his hollow cheeks became yellow and
transparent as the amber of his necklaces.

The recollection of that moment lasts for a lifetime in the hearts of
those who have loved; and even in old age, when time has softened your
grief, when other joys and other sorrows have filled your days, his dying
bed still appears to you when sitting of an evening beside the fire. You
see amid the sparkling flames the room of the lost child, the table with
the drinks, the bottles, the arsenal of illness, the little garments,
carefully folded, that waited for him so long, his toys abandoned in a
corner. You even see the marks of his little fingers on the wall paper,
and the zigzags he made with his pencil on the door; you see the corner
scribbled over with lines and dates, in which he was measured every
month, you see him playing, running, rushing up in a perspiration to
throw himself into your arms, and, at the same time, you also see him
fixing his glazing eyes on you, or motionless and cold under a white
sheet, wet with holy water.

Does not this recollection recur to you sometimes, Grandma, and do not
you still shed a big tear as you say to yourself: "He would have been
forty now?" Do we not know, dear old lady, whose heart still bleeds, that
at the bottom of your wardrobe, behind your jewels, beside packets of
yellow letters, the handwriting of which we will not guess at, there is a
little museum of sacred relics--the last shoes in which he played about
on the gravel the day he complained of being cold, the remains of some
broken toys, a dried sprig of box, a little cap, his last, in a triple
wrapper, and a thousand trifles that are a world to you, poor woman, that
are the fragments of your broken heart?

The ties that unite children to parents are unloosed. Those which unite
parents to children are broken. In one case, it is the past that is wiped
out; in the other, the future that is rent away.

CHAPTER XXXIII

CONVALESCENCE

But, my patient reader, forget what have just said. Baby does not want to
leave you, he does not want to die, poor little thing, and if you want a
proof of it, watch him very closely; there, he smiles.

A very faint smile like those rays of sunlight that steal between two
clouds at the close of a wet winter. You rather guess at than see this