His heart beat as if it would suffocate him, but he did not stop, for he wished to see them, and he followed them.  They looked like a family of the better middle class.  Henriette was leaning on Paul’s arm, and speaking to him in a low voice, and looking at him sideways occasionally.  Parent got a side view of her and recognized her pretty features, the movements of her lips, her smile, and her coaxing glances.  But the child chiefly took up his attention.  How tall and strong he was!  Parent could not see his face, but only his long, fair curls.  That tall boy with bare legs, who was walking by his mother’s side like a little man, was George.  He saw them suddenly, all three, as they stopped in front of a shop.  Limousin had grown very gray, had aged and was thinner; his wife, on the contrary, was as young looking as ever, and had grown stouter.  George he would not have recognized, he was so different from what he had been formerly.

They went on again and Parent followed them.  He walked on quickly, passed them, and then turned round, so as to meet them face to face.  As he passed the child he felt a mad longing to take him into his arms and run off with him, and he knocked against him as if by accident.  The boy turned round and looked at the clumsy man angrily, and Parent hurried away, shocked, hurt, and pursued by that look.  He went off like a thief, seized with a horrible fear lest he should have been seen and recognized by his wife and her lover.  He went to his cafe without stopping, and fell breathless into his chair.  That evening he drank three absinthes.  For four months he felt the pain of that meeting in his heart.  Every night he saw the three again, happy and tranquil, father, mother, and child walking on the boulevard before going in to dinner, and that new vision effaced the old one.  It was another matter, another hallucination now, and also a fresh pain.  Little George, his little George, the child he had so much loved and so often kissed, disappeared in the far distance, and he saw a new one, like a brother of the first, a little boy with bare legs, who did not know him!  He suffered terribly at that thought.  The child’s love was dead; there was no bond between them; the child would not have held out his arms when he saw him.  He had even looked at him angrily.

Then, by degrees he grew calmer, his mental torture diminished, the image that had appeared to his eyes and which haunted his nights became more indistinct and less frequent.  He began once more to live nearly like everybody else, like all those idle people who drink beer off marble-topped tables and wear out their clothes on the threadbare velvet of the couches.

He grew old amid the smoke from pipes, lost his hair under the gas lights, looked upon his weekly bath, on his fortnightly visit to the barber’s to have his hair cut, and on the purchase of a new coat or hat as an event.  When he got to his cafe in a new hat he would look at himself in the glass for a long time before sitting down, and take it off and put it on again several times, and at last ask his friend, the lady at the bar, who was watching him with interest, whether she thought it suited him.