However, Amedee gave them little trouble, and Mamma Gerard loved him as if he were her own.  The orphan was now inseparable from little Maria, a perfect little witch, who became prettier every day.  The engraver, having found in a cupboard the old bearskin cap which he had worn as a grenadier in the National Guard, a headdress that had been suppressed since ’98, gave it to the children.  What a magnificent plaything it was, and how well calculated to excite their imagination!  It was immediately transformed in their minds into a frightfully large and ferocious bear, which they chased through the apartment, lying in wait for it behind armchairs, striking at it with sticks, and puffing out their little cheeks with all their might to say “Boum!” imitating the report of a gun.  This hunting diversion completed the destruction of the old furniture.  Tranquil in the midst of the joyous uproar and disorder, the engraver was busily at work finishing off the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and the large bullion epaulettes of the Prince President, whom, as a suspicious republican and foreseeing the ‘coup d’etat’, he detested with all his heart.

“Truly, Monsieur Violette,” said Mother Gerard to the employe, when he came for his little son upon his return from the office, and excused himself for the trouble that the child must give his neighbors, “truly, I assure you, he does not disturb us in the least.  Wait a little before you send him to school.  He is very quiet, and if Maria did not excite him so—­upon my word, she is more of a boy than he—­your Amedee would always be looking at the pictures.  My Louise hears him read every day two pages in the Moral Tales, and yesterday he amused Gerard by telling him the story of the grateful elephant.  He can go to school later—­wait a little.”

But M. Violette had decided to send Amedee to M. Batifol’s.  “Oh, yes, as a day scholar, of course!  It is so convenient; not two steps’ distance.  This will not prevent little Amedee from seeing his friends often.  He is nearly seven years old, and very backward; he hardly knows how to make his letters.  One can not begin with children too soon,” and much more to the same effect.

This was the reason why, one fine spring day, M. Violette was ushered into M. Batifol’s office, who, the servant said, would be there directly.

M. Batifol’s office was hideous.  In the three bookcases which the master of the house—­a snob and a greedy schoolmaster—­never opened, were some of those books that one can buy upon the quays by the running yard; for example, Laharpe’s Cours de Litterature, and an endless edition of Rollin, whose tediousness seems to ooze out through their bindings.  The cylindrical office-table, one of those masterpieces of veneered mahogany which the Faubourg St. Antoine still keeps the secret of making, was surmounted by a globe of the world.

Suddenly, through the open window, little Amedee saw the sycamore in the yard.  A young blackbird, who did not know the place, came and perched for an instant only upon one of its branches.