“’Oh!  If you only knew, if you only knew ... what a grief it is ... what a grief it is to me ...  I shall never get over it.’  ’Over what, little Fly?’ ’Over having killed it, for I did kill it!  Oh!  Without intending to!  Oh! how grieved I am!...’

“She was sobbing, and we stood round, deeply touched, but without knowing what to say, and she went on:  ‘Have you seen it?’ And we replied with one voice:  ‘Yes.’  ‘It was a boy, was it not?’ ‘Yes.’  ’Beautiful, was it not?’ We hesitated a good deal, but Petit-Bleu, who was less scrupulous than the rest of us, made up his mind to affirm it, and said:  ’Very beautiful.’

“He committed a mistake, however, for she began to sob, and almost to scream with grief, and Only-One-Eye, who perhaps loved her more than the rest of us did, had a happy thought.  Kissing her eyes, that were dimmed with tears, he said:  ’Console yourself, little Fly, console yourself; we will make another for you.’

“Her innate sense of the ridiculous was suddenly excited, and half-convinced, and half-joking, still tearful and her heart sore with grief, she said, looking at us all:  ‘Do you really mean it?’ And we replied all at once: 

“‘We really mean it.’”

THE MAD WOMAN

“I can tell you a terrible story about the Franco-Prussian war,” Monsieur d’Endolin said to some friends assembled in the smoking-room of Baron de Ravot’s chateau.  “You know my house in the Faubourg de Cormeil.  I was living there when the Prussians came, and I had for a neighbor a kind of a mad woman, who had lost her senses in consequence of a series of misfortunes, as at the age of seven and twenty she had lost her father, her husband and her newly born child, all in the space of a month.

“When death has once entered into a house, it almost invariably returns immediately, as if it knew the way, and the young woman, overwhelmed with grief, took to her bed and was delirious for six weeks.  Then, a species of calm lassitude succeeded that violent crisis, and she remained motionless, eating next to nothing, and only moving her eyes.  Every time they tried to make her get up, she screamed as if they were about to kill her, and so they ended by leaving her continually in bed, and only taking her out to wash her, to change her linen and to turn her mattress.

“An old servant remained with her, who gave her something to drink, or a little cold meat, from time to time.  What passed in that despairing mind?  No one ever knew, for she did not speak at all now.  Was she thinking of the dead?  Was she dreaming sadly, without any precise recollection of anything that had happened?  Or was her memory as stagnant as water without any current?  But however this may have been, for fifteen years she remained thus inert and secluded.

“The war broke out, and in the beginning of December the Germans came to Cormeil.  I can remember it as if it were but yesterday.  It was freezing hard enough to split the stones, and I, myself, was lying back in an armchair, being unable to move on account of the gout, when I heard their heavy and regular tread; I could see them pass, from my window.