oyster-shells at the doors of wine-shops. The broad sky,
with its confused shapes of cloud architecture, the burning gold of
the setting sun behind the masses of trees, the enchanting stillness of
moonlight upon the river, all these grand and magnificent spectacles are
for the delight of those who live in suburban quarters, or play there
sometimes. The sons of people who work in buttons and jet spend their
infancy playing on staircases that smell of lead, or in courts that
resemble wells, and do not suspect that nature exists. At the outside
they suspect that nature may exist when they see the horses on Palm
Sunday decorated with bits of boxwood behind each ear. What matters it,
after all, if the child has imagination? A star reflected in a gutter
will reveal to him an immense nocturnal poem; and he will breathe all
the intoxication of summer in the full-blown rose which the grisette
from the next house lets fall from her hair.

Amedee had had the good fortune of being born in that delicious and
melancholy suburb of Paris which had not yet become "Haussmannized," and
was full of wild and charming nooks.

His father, the widower, could not be consoled, and tried to wear out
his grief in long promenades, going out on clear evenings, holding his
little boy by the hand, toward the more solitary places. They followed
those fine boulevards, formerly in the suburbs, where there were giant
elms, planted in the time of Louis XIV, ditches full of grass, ruined
palisades, showing through their opening market-gardens where melons
glistened in the rays of the setting sun. Both were silent; the father
lost in reveries, Amedee absorbed in the confused dreams of a child.
They went long distances, passing the Barriere d'Enfer, reaching
unknown parts, which produced the same effect upon an inhabitant of Rue
Montmartre as the places upon an old map of the world, marked with the
mysterious words 'Mare ignotum', would upon a savant of the Middle Ages.
There were many houses in this ancient suburb; curious old buildings,
nearly all of one story.

Sometimes they would pass a public-house painted in a sinister
wine-color; or else a garden hedged in by acacias, at the fork of two
roads, with arbors and a sign consisting of a very small windmill at
the end of a pole, turning in the fresh evening breeze. It was almost
country; the grass grew upon the sidewalks, springing up in the road
between the broken pavements. A poppy flashed here and ther