“Then she indulged in the most fantastic flights of fancy.  They were interminable stories, astounding inventions, from the day of his birth until his final triumph.  In the unsophisticated, passionate and moving fancy of this extraordinary little creature, who now lived chastely in the midst of us five, whom she called ‘her five papas.’  She saw him as a sailor, and told us that he would discover another America; as a general, restoring Alsace and Lorraine to France, then as an emperor, founding a dynasty of wise and generous rulers who would bestow settled welfare on our country; then as a learned man and natural philosopher, revealing, first of all, the secret of the manufacture of gold, then that of living forever; then as an aeronaut, who invented the means of soaring up to the stars, and of making the skies an immense promenade for men; the realization of the most unforeseen and magnificent dreams.

“How nice and how amusing she was, poor little girl, until the end of the summer, but the twentieth of September dissipated her dream.  We had come back from breakfasting at the Maison Lafitte and were passing Saint-Germain, when she felt thirsty and asked us to stop at Pecq.

“For some time past, she had been getting very heavy, and that inconvenienced her very much.  She could not run about as she used to do, nor jump from the boat to the shore, as she had formerly done.  She would try, in spite of our warnings and efforts to stop her, and she would have fallen a dozen times, had it not been that our restraining arms kept her back.  On that day, she was imprudent enough to wish to land before the boat had stopped; it was one of those pieces of bravado by which athletes, who are ill or tired, sometimes kill themselves, and at the very moment when we were going to come alongside, she got up, took a spring and tried to jump onto the landing-stage.  She was not strong enough, however, and only just touched the stones with her foot, struck the sharp angle with her stomach, uttered a cry and disappeared into the water.

“We all five plunged in at the same moment, and pulled out the poor, fainting woman, who was as pale as death, and was already suffering terrible pain, and we carried her as quickly as possible to the nearest inn, and sent for a medical man.  For the six hours that her miscarriage lasted, she suffered the most terrible pain with the courage of a heroine, while we were grieving round her, feverish with anxiety and fear.  Then she was delivered of a dead child, and for some days we were in the greatest fear for her life; at last, however, the doctor said to us one morning:  ‘I think her life is saved.  That girl is made of steel,’ and we all of us went into her room, with radiant hearts, and Only-One-Eye, as spokesman for us all, said to her:  ’The danger is all over, little Fly, and we are all happy again.’

“Then, for the second time, she wept in our presence, and, with her eyes full of tears, she said, hesitatingly: