SAD CHANGES

Trees are like men; there are some that have no luck.  A genuinely unfortunate tree was the poor sycamore which grew in the playground of an institution for boys on the Rue de la Grande-Chaumiere, directed by M. Batifol.

Chance might just as well have made it grow upon the banks of a river, upon some pretty bluff, where it might have seen the boats pass; or, better still, upon the mall in some garrison village, where it could have had the pleasure of listening twice a week to military music.  But, no! it was written in the book of fate that this unlucky sycamore should lose its bark every summer, as a serpent changes its skin, and should scatter the ground with its dead leaves at the first frost, in the playground of the Batifol institution, which was a place without any distractions.

This solitary tree, which was like any other sycamore, middle-aged and without any singularities, ought to have had the painful feeling that it served in a measure to deceive the public.  In fact, upon the advertisement of the Batifol institution (Cours du lycee Henri IV.  Preparation au baccalaureat et aux ecoles de l’Etat), one read these fallacious words, “There is a garden;” when in reality it was only a vulgar court graveled with stones from the river, with a paved gutter in which one could gather half a dozen of lost marbles, a broken top, and a certain number of shoe-nails, and after recreation hours still more.  This solitary sycamore was supposed to justify the illusion and fiction of the garden promised in the advertisement; but as trees certainly have common sense, this one should have been conscious that it was not a garden of itself.

It was a very unjust fate for an inoffensive tree which never had harmed anybody; only expanding, at one side of the gymnasium portico, in a perfect rectangle formed by a prison wall, bristling with the glass of broken bottles, and by three buildings of distressing similarity, showing, above the numerous doors on the ground floor, inscriptions which merely to read induced a yawn:  Hall 1, Hall 2, Hall 3, Hall 4, Stairway A, Stairway B, Entrance to the Dormitories, Dining-room, Laboratory.

The poor sycamore was dying of ennui in this dismal place.  Its only happy seasons—­the recreation hours, when the court echoed with the shouts and the laughter of the boys—­were spoiled for it by the sight of two or three pupils who were punished by being made to stand at the foot of its trunk.  Parisian birds, who are not fastidious, rarely lighted upon the tree, and never built their nests there.  It might even be imagined that this disenchanted tree, when the wind agitated its foliage, would charitably say, “Believe me! the place is good for nothing.  Go and make love elsewhere!”

In the shade of this sycamore, planted under an unlucky star, the greater part of Amedee’s infancy was passed.