One day, one of the last fine days of the season, Jean, squatted on the ground, was busy sticking up bits of plane-tree bark in the fine wet sand.  That faculty of “pretending,” by which children are able to make their lives one unending miracle, transformed a handful of soil and a few bits of wood into wondrous galleries and fairy castles to the lad’s imagination; he clapped his hands and leapt for joy.  Then suddenly he felt himself wrapped in something soft and scented.  It was a lady’s gown; he saw nothing except that she smiled as she put him gently out of her way and walked on.  He ran to tell his aunt: 

“How good she smells, that lady!”

Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies were no better than others, and that she thought more of herself with her merino skirt than all those set-up minxes in their flounces and finery, adding: 

“Better a good name than a gilt girdle.”

But this talk was beyond little Jean’s comprehension.  The perfumed silk that had swept his face left behind a vague sweetness, a memory as of a gentle, ghostly caress.

III

One evening in summer the bookbinder was enjoying the fresh air before his door when a big man with a red nose, past middle age and wearing a scarlet waistcoat stained with grease-spots, appeared, bowing politely and confidentially, and addressed him in a sing-song voice in which even Monsieur Servien could detect an Italian accent: 

“Sir, I have translated the Gerusalemme Liberata, the immortal masterpiece of Torquato Tasso”—­and a bulging packet of manuscript under his arm confirmed the statement.

“Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to this glorious and ungrateful task.  Without family or fatherland, I have written my translation in dark, ice-cold garrets, on chandlers’ wrappers, snuff papers, the backs of playing cards!  Such has been the exile’s task!  You, sir, you live in your own land, in the bosom of a happy family—­at least I hope so.”

This speech, which impressed him by its magniloquence and its strangeness, set the bookbinder dreaming of the dead woman he had loved, and he saw her in his mind’s eye coiling her beautiful hair as in the early days of their married life.

The big man proceeded: 

“Man is like a plant which perishes when the storms uproot it.

“Here is your son, is it not so?  He is like you”—­and laying his hand on Jean’s head, who clung to his father’s coat-tails in wonder at the red waistcoat and the sing-song voice, he asked if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.

“That noble language,” he added, “whose inimitable monuments have often made me forget my misfortunes.

“Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal.”