and had already renounced all infantile games.
The dangling crows which illustrated the pages of his Burnouf grammar
were all dated the previous year, and he had entirely renounced feeding
silkworms in his desk. Everything pointed to his not being a very
practical man. Geometry disgusted him, and as for dates, he could not
remember one. On holidays he liked to walk by himself through quiet
streets; he read poems at the bookstalls, and lingered in the
Luxembourg Gardens to see the sun set. Destined to be a dreamer and a
sentimentalist--so much the worse for you, poor Amedee!

He went very often to the Gerards, but he no longer called his little
friends "thou." Louise was now seventeen years old, thin, without color,
and with a lank figure; decidedly far from pretty. People, in speaking
of her, began to say, "She has beautiful eyes and is an excellent
musician." Her sister Maria was twelve years old and a perfect little
rosebud.

As to the neighbor's little girl, Rosine Combarieu, she had disappeared.
One day the printer suddenly departed without saying a word to anybody,
and took his child with him. The concierge said that he was concerned
in some political plot, and was obliged to leave the house in the night.
They believed him to be concealed in some small town.

Accordingly, Father Gerard was not angry with him for fleeing without
taking leave of him. The conspirator had kept all his prestige in the
eyes of the engraver, who, by a special run of ill-luck, was always
engaged by a publisher of Bonapartist works, and was busy at that moment
upon a portrait of the Prince Imperial, in the uniform of a corporal of
the Guards, with an immense bearskin cap upon his childish head.

Father Gerard was growing old. His beard, formerly of a reddish shade,
and what little hair there was remaining upon his head, had become
silvery white; that wonderful white which, like a tardy recompense to
red-faced persons, becomes their full-blooded faces so well. The good
man felt the weight of years, as did his wife, whose flesh increased
in such a troublesome way that she was forced to pant heavily when she
seated herself after climbing the five flights. Father Gerard grew old,
like everything that surrounded him; like the house opposite, that he
had seen built, and that no longer had the air of a new building; like
his curious old furniture, his mended crockery, and his engravings,
yellow with age, the frames of which had turned red; like