We started out in a group with a street-organ, generally played by Le Poittevin, the painter, with a cotton nightcap on his head.  Two men carried lanterns.  We followed in procession, laughing and chattering like a pack of fools.

We woke up the farmer and his servant-maids and farm hands.  We got them to make onion soup (horror!), and we danced under the apple trees, to the sound of the barrel-organ.  The cocks waking up began to crow in the darkness of the out-houses; the horses began prancing on the straw of their stables.  The cool air of the country caressed our cheeks with the smell of grass and of new-mown hay.

How long ago it is!  How long ago it is!  It is thirty years since then!

I do not want you, my darling, to come for the opening of the hunting season.  Why spoil the pleasure of our friends by inflicting on them fashionable toilettes on this day of vigorous exercise in the country?  This is the way, child, that men are spoiled.  I embrace you.  Your old aunt,
                  Genevieve de L.

A WEDDING GIFT

For a long time Jacques Bourdillere had sworn that he would never marry, but he suddenly changed his mind.  It happened suddenly, one summer, at the seashore.

One morning as he lay stretched out on the sand, watching the women coming out of the water, a little foot had struck him by its neatness and daintiness.  He raised his eyes and was delighted with the whole person, although in fact he could see nothing but the ankles and the head emerging from a flannel bathrobe carefully held closed.  He was supposed to be sensual and a fast liver.  It was therefore by the mere grace of the form that he was at first captured.  Then he was held by the charm of the young girl’s sweet mind, so simple and good, as fresh as her cheeks and lips.

He was presented to the family and pleased them.  He immediately fell madly in love.  When he saw Berthe Lannis in the distance, on the long yellow stretch of sand, he would tingle to the roots of his hair.  When he was near her he would become silent, unable to speak or even to think, with a kind of throbbing at his heart, and a buzzing in his ears, and a bewilderment in his mind.  Was that love?

He did not know or understand, but he had fully decided to have this child for his wife.

Her parents hesitated for a long time, restrained by the young man’s bad reputation.  It was said that he had an old sweetheart, one of these binding attachments which one always believes to be broken off and yet which always hold.

Besides, for a shorter or longer period, he loved every woman who came within reach of his lips.

Then he settled down and refused, even once, to see the one with whom he had lived for so long.  A friend took care of this woman’s pension and assured her an income.  Jacques paid, but he did not even wish to hear of her, pretending even to ignore her name.  She wrote him letters which he never opened.  Every week he would recognize the clumsy writing of the abandoned woman, and every week a greater anger surged within him against her, and he would quickly tear the envelope and the paper, without opening it, without reading one single line, knowing in advance the reproaches and complaints which it contained.