e unhappy child again. For
five years I have heard nothing from him. I sought to deceive myself. I
said experience will reform him, and there--there--just now--"

And the poor old woman sobbed in a pitiful way. A crowd had formed. It
was no longer to me that she spoke; it was not to the crowd; it was to
herself, to the bitterness of her own heart.

"He, my Adrien, the child that I nourished at my own breast, a
mountebank in a travelling theatre! struck and insulted before the whole
world! He, whom I saved at four when he was so ill, a clown in a tent!
He, the beautiful baby of whom I was so proud, whom I made the neighbors
admire when he was so small that he rolled naked on my knee, holding his
little foot in his hand!"

Suddenly at this point in her heart-breaking monologue the old woman
perceived the crowd listening to her. She looked on the spectators in
astonishment, as one who starts from sleep. She recognized me who had
questioned her, and became frightfully pale.

"What have I said?" she stammered. "Let me pass." And brusquely putting
us aside with an imperious gesture, she went off with a rapid step, and
disappeared in the night.

The adventure made a lively impression on me. I thought often of it, and
after that, when I saw before my eyes some wretched and degraded
creature, some woman of the street, trailing her light silk skirts in
the flare of a gas-jet, some drunken idler leaning on the bar of a cafe
and bending his bloated face over his glass of absinthe, I have thought,
"Is it possible that that being can ever have been a little child?"

Now, some little time after that _rencontre_--let us be careful not to
indicate the date--I was taken into a gallery of the Chamber of Deputies
to be present at a sensational sitting. The law that they were
discussing on that day is of no importance, but it was the old and
tedious story: a Ministerial candidate, formerly in the Opposition,
proposed to strike a blow at some liberty--I don't know what--which he
had formerly demanded with virulence and force. And, more than that, the
man in power was going to forfeit his word to the tribune. In good
French that is called "to betray," but in parliamentary language they
employ the phrase, "accomplish a change of base." Opinion was divided,
the majority uncertain; and upon his speech would depend the political
future of the speaker. Therefore, on that day, the legislators were in
their places, and the Chamber did not rese