Sometimes they would pass a public-house painted in a sinister wine-color; or else a garden hedged in by acacias, at the fork of two roads, with arbors and a sign consisting of a very small windmill at the end of a pole, turning in the fresh evening breeze.  It was almost country; the grass grew upon the sidewalks, springing up in the road between the broken pavements.  A poppy flashed here and there upon the tops of the low walls.  They met very few people; now and then some poor person, a woman in a cap dragging along a crying child, a workman burdened with his tools, a belated invalid, and sometimes in the middle. of the sidewalk, in a cloud of dust, a flock of exhausted sheep, bleating desperately, and nipped in the legs by dogs hurrying them toward the abattoir.  The father and son would walk straight ahead until it was dark under the trees; then they would retrace their steps, the sharp air stinging their faces.  Those ancient hanging street-lamps, the tragic lanterns of the time of the Terror, were suspended at long intervals in the avenue, mingling their dismal twinkle with the pale gleams of the green twilight sky.

These sorrowful promenades with his melancholy companion would commonly end a tiresome day at Batifol’s school.  Amedee was now in the “seventh,” and knew already that the phrase, “the will of God,” could not be turned into Latin by ‘bonitas divina’, and that the word ‘cornu’ was not declinable.  These long, silent hours spent at his school-desk, or beside a person absorbed in grief, might have become fatal to the child’s disposition, had it not been for his good friends, the Gerards.  He went to see them as often as he was able, a spare hour now and then, and most of the day on Thursdays.  The engraver’s house was always full of good-nature and gayety, and Amedee felt comfortable and really happy there.

The good Gerards, besides their Louise and Maria, to say nothing of Amedee, whom they looked upon as one of the family, had now taken charge of a fourth child, a little girl, named Rosine, who was precisely the same age as their youngest.

This was the way it happened.  Above the Gerards, in one of the mansards upon the sixth floor, lived a printer named Combarieu, with his wife or mistress—­the concierge did not know which, nor did it matter much.  The woman had just deserted him, leaving a child of eight years.  One could expect nothing better of a creature who, according to the concierge, fed her husband upon pork-butcher’s meat, to spare herself the trouble of getting dinner, and passed the entire day with uncombed hair, in a dressing-sacque, reading novels, and telling her fortune with cards.  The grocer’s daughter declared she had met her one evening, at a dancing-hall, seated with a fireman before a salad-bowl full of wine, prepared in the French fashion.

During the day Combarieu, although a red-hot Republican, sent his little girl to the Sisters; but he went out every evening with a mysterious air and left the child alone.  The concierge even uttered in a low voice, with the romantic admiration which that class of people have for conspirators, the terrible word “secret society,” and asserted that the printer had a musket concealed under his straw bed.