bare
legs, who was walking by his mother's side like a little man, was
George.

He saw them suddenly, all three, as they stopped in front of a shop.
Limousin had grown very gray, had aged, and was thinner; his wife, on
the contrary, was as young looking as ever, and had grown stouter;
George he would not have recognized, he was so different to what he had
been formerly.

They went on again, and Parent followed them, then walked on quickly,
passed them and then turned round, so as to meet them face to face. As
he passed the child he felt a mad longing to take him into his arms and
run off with him, and he knocked against him as if it were
accidentally. The boy turned round and looked at the clumsy man angrily,
and Parent went off hastily, struck and hurt by the look. He went off
like a thief, seized by a horrible fear lest he should have been seen
and recognized by his wife and her lover, and he went to his _cafe_
without stopping, and fell breathless into his chair, and that evening
he drank three absinthes.

For four months he felt the pain of that meeting in his heart. Every
night he saw the three again, happy and tranquil, father, mother and
child walking on the boulevard before going in to dinner, and that new
vision effaced the old one. It was another matter, another hallucination
now, and also a fresh pain. Little George, his little George, the child
he had so much loved and so often kissed formerly, disappeared in the
far distance, and he saw a new one, like a brother of the first, a
little boy with bare legs, who did not know him! He suffered terribly at
that thought. The child's love was dead; there was no bond between them;
the child would not have held out his arms when he saw him. He had even
looked at him angrily.

Then, by degrees he grew calmer, his mental torture diminished, the
image that had appeared to his eyes and which haunted his nights became
more indistinct and less frequent. He began once more to live nearly
like everybody else, like all those idle people who drink beer off
marble topped tables and wear out the seats of their trousers on the
threadbare velvet of the couches.

He grew old amidst the smoke from the pipes, lost his hair under the gas
lights, looked upon his weekly bath, on his fortnightly visit to the
barber's to have his hair cut, and on the purchase of a new coat or hat,
as an event. When he got to his _cafe_ in a new hat covering he used to
look at himself in the glass fo