moving
fancy of this extraordinary little creature, who now lived chastely in
the midst of us five, whom she called 'her five papas.' She saw him as a
sailor, and told us that he would discover another America; as a
general, restoring Alsace and Lorraine to France, then as an emperor,
founding a dynasty of wise and generous rulers who would bestow settled
welfare on our country; then as a learned man and natural philosopher,
revealing, first of all, the secret of the manufacture of gold, then
that of living forever; then as an aeronaut, who invented the means of
soaring up to the stars, and of making the skies an immense promenade
for men; the realization of the most unforeseen and magnificent dreams.

"How nice and how amusing she was, poor little girl, until the end of the
summer, but the twentieth of September dissipated her dream. We had come
back from breakfasting at the Maison Lafitte and were passing
Saint-Germain, when she felt thirsty and asked us to stop at Pecq.

"For some time past, she had been getting very heavy, and that
inconvenienced her very much. She could not run about as she used to do,
nor jump from the boat to the shore, as she had formerly done. She would
try, in spite of our warnings and efforts to stop her, and she would
have fallen a dozen times, had it not been that our restraining arms
kept her back. On that day, she was imprudent enough to wish to land
before the boat had stopped; it was one of those pieces of bravado by
which athletes, who are ill or tired, sometimes kill themselves, and at
the very moment when we were going to come alongside, she got up, took a
spring and tried to jump onto the landing-stage. She was not strong
enough, however, and only just touched the stones with her foot, struck
the sharp angle with her stomach, uttered a cry and disappeared into the
water.

"We all five plunged in at the same moment, and pulled out the poor,
fainting woman, who was as pale as death, and was already suffering
terrible pain, and we carried her as quickly as possible to the nearest
inn, and sent for a medical man. For the six hours that her miscarriage
lasted, she suffered the most terrible pain with the courage of a
heroine, while we were grieving round her, feverish with anxiety and
fear. Then she was delivered of a dead child, and for some days we were
in the greatest fear for her life; at last, however, the doctor said to
us one morning: 'I think her life is saved. That girl is ma