He answered:  “Simon.”

“Simon what?” retorted the other.

The child, altogether bewildered, repeated:  “Simon.”

The lad shouted at him:  “One is named Simon something—­that is not a name—­Simon indeed.”

The child, on the brink of tears, replied for the third time: 

“My name is Simon.”

The urchins began to laugh.  The triumphant tormentor cried:  “You can see plainly that he has no papa.”

A deep silence ensued.  The children were dumfounded by this extraordinary, impossible, monstrous thing—­a boy who had not a papa; they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt that hitherto inexplicable contempt of their mothers for La Blanchotte growing upon them.  As for Simon, he had leaned against a tree to avoid falling, and he remained as if prostrated by an irreparable disaster.  He sought to explain, but could think of nothing-to say to refute this horrible charge that he had no papa.  At last he shouted at them quite recklessly:  “Yes, I have one.”

“Where is he?” demanded the boy.

Simon was silent, he did not know.  The children roared, tremendously excited; and those country boys, little more than animals, experienced that cruel craving which prompts the fowls of a farmyard to destroy one of their number as soon as it is wounded.  Simon suddenly espied a little neighbor, the son of a widow, whom he had seen, as he himself was to be seen, always alone with his mother.

“And no more have you,” he said; “no more have you a papa.”

“Yes,” replied the other, “I have one.”

“Where is he?” rejoined Simon.

“He is dead,” declared the brat, with superb dignity; “he is in the cemetery, is my papa.”

A murmur of approval rose among the little wretches as if this fact of possessing a papa dead in a cemetery had caused their comrade to grow big enough to crush the other one who had no papa at all.  And these boys, whose fathers were for the most part bad men, drunkards, thieves, and who beat their wives, jostled each other to press closer and closer, as though they, the legitimate ones, would smother by their pressure one who was illegitimate.

The boy who chanced to be next Simon suddenly put his tongue out at him with a mocking air and shouted at him: 

“No papa!  No papa!”

Simon seized him by the hair with both hands and set to work to disable his legs with kicks, while he bit his cheek ferociously.  A tremendous struggle ensued between the two combatants, and Simon found himself beaten, torn, bruised, rolled on the ground in the midst of the ring of applauding schoolboys.  As he arose, mechanically brushing with his hand his little blouse all covered with dust, some one shouted at him: 

“Go and tell your papa.”