“The old gentleman—­my old professor, I mean—­”

“Pere Piquedent?”

“Yes, Pere Piquedent.  So you know his name?”

“Faith, I do!  What of that?”

“Well, he is in love with you!”

She burst out laughing wildly, and exclaimed: 

“You are only fooling.”

“Oh! no, I am not fooling!  He keeps talking of you all through the lesson.  I bet that he’ll marry you!”

She ceased laughing.  The idea of marriage makes every girl serious.  Then she repeated, with an incredulous air: 

“This is humbug!”

“I swear to you, it’s true.”

She picked up her basket which she had laid down at her feet.

“Well, we’ll see,” she said.  And she went away.

Presently when I had reached the boarding school, I took Pere Piquedent aside, and said: 

“You must write to her; she is infatuated with you.”

And he wrote a long letter, tenderly affectionate, full of phrases and circumlocutions, metaphors and similes, philosophy and academic gallantry; and I took on myself the responsibility of delivering it to the young woman.

She read it with gravity, with emotion; then she murmured: 

“How well he writes!  It is easy to see he has got education!  Does he really mean to marry me?”

I replied intrepidly:  “Faith, he has lost his head about you!”

“Then he must invite me to dinner on Sunday at the Ile des Fleurs.”

I promised that she should be invited.

Pere Piquedent was much touched by everything I told him about her.

I added: 

“She loves you, Monsieur Piquedent, and I believe her to be a decent girl.  It is not right to lead her on and then abandon her.”

He replied in a firm tone: 

“I hope I, too, am a decent man, my friend.”

I confess I had at the time no plan.  I was playing a practical joke a schoolboy joke, nothing more.  I had been aware of the simplicity of the old usher, his innocence and his weakness.  I amused myself without asking myself how it would turn out.  I was eighteen, and I had been for a long time looked upon at the lycee as a sly practical joker.

So it was agreed that Pere Piquedent and I should set out in a hack for the ferry of Queue de Vache, that we should there pick up Angele, and that I should take them into my boat, for in those days I was fond of boating.  I would then bring them to the Ile des Fleurs, where the three of us would dine.  I had inflicted myself on them, the better to enjoy my triumph, and the usher, consenting to my arrangement, proved clearly that he was losing his head by thus risking the loss of his position.

When we arrived at the ferry, where my boat had been moored since morning, I saw in the grass, or rather above the tall weeds of the bank, an enormous red parasol, resembling a monstrous wild poppy.  Beneath the parasol was the little laundress in her Sunday clothes.  I was surprised.  She was really pretty, though pale; and graceful, though with a rather suburban grace.