Her first thought, when she recovered her senses, was to open the basket.  Loulou was unharmed.  She felt a sting on her right cheek; when she took her hand away it was red, for the blood was flowing.

She sat down on a pile of stones, and sopped her cheek with her handkerchief; then she ate a crust of bread she had put in her basket, and consoled herself by looking at the bird.

Arriving at the top of Ecquemanville, she saw the lights of Honfleur shining in the distance like so many stars; further on, the ocean spread out in a confused mass.  Then a weakness came over her; the misery of her childhood, the disappointment of her first love, the departure of her nephew, the death of Virginia; all these things came back to her at once, and, rising like a swelling tide in her throat, almost choked her.

Then she wished to speak to the captain of the vessel, and without stating what she was sending, she gave him some instructions.

Fellacher kept the parrot a long time.  He always promised that it would be ready for the following week; after six months he announced the shipment of a case, and that was the end of it.  Really, it seemed as if Loulou would never come back to his home.  “They have stolen him,” thought Felicite.

Finally he arrived, sitting bold upright on a branch which could be screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on one side, and in his beak a nut which the naturalist, from love of the sumptuous, had gilded.  She put him in her room.

This place, to which only a chosen few were admitted, looked like a chapel and a second-hand shop, so filled was it with devotional and heterogeneous things.  The door could not be opened easily on account of the presence of a large wardrobe.  Opposite the window that looked out into the garden, a bull’s-eye opened on the yard; a table was placed by the cot and held a wash-basin, two combs, and a piece of blue soap in a broken saucer.  On the walls were rosaries, medals, a number of Holy Virgins, and a holy-water basin made out of a cocoanut; on the bureau, which was covered with a napkin like an altar, stood the box of shells that Victor had given her; also a watering-can and a balloon, writing-books, the engraved geography and a pair of shoes; on the nail which held the mirror, hung Virginia’s little plush hat!  Felicite carried this sort of respect so far that she even kept one of Monsieur’s old coats.  All the things which Madame Aubain discarded, Felicite begged for her own room.  Thus, she had artificial flowers on the edge of the bureau, and the picture of the Comte d’Artois in the recess of the window.  By means of a board, Loulou was set on a portion of the chimney which advanced into the room.  Every morning when she awoke, she saw him in the dim light of dawn and recalled bygone days and the smallest details of insignificant actions, without any sense of bitterness or grief.

As she was unable to communicate with people, she lived in a sort of somnambulistic torpor.  The processions of Corpus-Christi Day seemed to wake her up.  She visited the neighbours to beg for candlesticks and mats so as to adorn the temporary altars in the street.