The quarter had not changed, and it still had the appearance of a suburban faubourg.  They had just erected, within gunshot of the house where the Violettes and Gerards lived, a large five-story building, upon whose roof still trembled in the wind the masons’ withered bouquets.  But that was all.  In front of them, on the lot “For Sale,” enclosed by rotten boards, where one could always see tufts of nettles and a goat tied to a stake, and upon the high wall above which by the end of April the lilacs hung in their perfumed clusters, the rains had not effaced this brutal declaration of love, scraped with a knife in the plaster:  “When Melie wishes she can have me,” and signed “Eugene.”

Three years had passed, and little Amedee had grown a trifle.  At that time a child born in the centre of Paris—­for example, in the labyrinth of infected streets about the Halles—­would have grown up without having any idea of the change of seasons other than by the state of the temperature and the narrow strip of sky which he could see by raising his head.  Even today certain poor children—­the poor never budge from their hiding-places—­learn of the arrival of winter only by the odor of roasted chestnuts; of spring, by the boxes of gilly-flowers in the fruiterer’s stall; of summer, by the water-carts passing, and of autumn, by the heaps of oyster-shells at the doors of wine-shops.  The broad sky, with its confused shapes of cloud architecture, the burning gold of the setting sun behind the masses of trees, the enchanting stillness of moonlight upon the river, all these grand and magnificent spectacles are for the delight of those who live in suburban quarters, or play there sometimes.  The sons of people who work in buttons and jet spend their infancy playing on staircases that smell of lead, or in courts that resemble wells, and do not suspect that nature exists.  At the outside they suspect that nature may exist when they see the horses on Palm Sunday decorated with bits of boxwood behind each ear.  What matters it, after all, if the child has imagination?  A star reflected in a gutter will reveal to him an immense nocturnal poem; and he will breathe all the intoxication of summer in the full-blown rose which the grisette from the next house lets fall from her hair.

Amedee had had the good fortune of being born in that delicious and melancholy suburb of Paris which had not yet become “Haussmannized,” and was full of wild and charming nooks.

His father, the widower, could not be consoled, and tried to wear out his grief in long promenades, going out on clear evenings, holding his little boy by the hand, toward the more solitary places.  They followed those fine boulevards, formerly in the suburbs, where there were giant elms, planted in the time of Louis XIV, ditches full of grass, ruined palisades, showing through their opening market-gardens where melons glistened in the rays of the setting sun.  Both were silent; the father lost in reveries, Amedee absorbed