street could be seen the ruins of a barricade. Versigny and
Bancel, as I have just said, were with me. E.P. turned to them.

"These gentlemen can come," said he.

I asked him,--

"What street is this?"

"The Rue Tiquetonne."

We followed him.

I have elsewhere told this tragical event.[26]

E.P. stopped before a tall and gloomy house. He pushed open a
street-door which was not shut, then another door and we entered into a
parlor perfectly quiet and lighted by a lamp.

This room appeared to adjoin a shop. At the end could be distinguished
two beds side by side, one large and one small. Above the little bed
hung a woman's portrait, and above the portrait a branch of holy
box-tree.

The lamp was placed over the fireplace, where a little fire was burning.

Near the lamp upon a chair there was an old woman leaning forward,
stooping down, folded in two as though broken, over something which was
in the shadow, and which she held in her arms. I drew near. That which
she held in her arms was a dead child.

The poor woman was silently sobbing.

E.P., who belonged to the house, touched her on the shoulder, and
said,--

"Let us see it."

The old woman raised her head, and I saw on her knees a little boy, pale,
half-undressed, pretty, with two red holes in his forehead.

The old woman stared at me, but she evidently did not see me, she
muttered, speaking to herself,--

"And to think that he called me 'Granny' this morning!"

E.P. took the child's hand, the hand fell back again.

"Seven years old," he said to me.

A basin was on the ground. They had washed the child's face; two tiny
streams of blood trickled from the two holes.

At the end of the room, near a half-opened clothes-press, in which could
be seen some linen, stood a woman of some forty years, grave, poor, clean,
fairly good-looking.

"A neighbor," E.P. said to me.

He explained to me that a doctor lived in the house, that the doctor had
come down and had said, "There is nothing to be done." The child had
been hit by two balls in the head while crossing the street to "get out
of the way." They had brought him back to his grandmother, who "had no
one left but him."

The portrait of the dead mother hung above the little bed.

The child had his eyes half open, and that inexpressible gaze of the
dead, where the perception of the real is replaced by the vision of the
infinite. The grandmother spoke through her sobs by snatches: "God! is
it poss