Amedee himself was not interested in his uncle’s fortune.  He was just then a pupil in the fourth grade, which follows the same studies as at the Lycee Henri IV.  Having suddenly grown tall, he was annoyed at wearing short trousers, and had already renounced all infantile games.  The dangling crows which illustrated the pages of his Burnouf grammar were all dated the previous year, and he had entirely renounced feeding silkworms in his desk.  Everything pointed to his not being a very practical man.  Geometry disgusted him, and as for dates, he could not remember one.  On holidays he liked to walk by himself through quiet streets; he read poems at the bookstalls, and lingered in the Luxembourg Gardens to see the sun set.  Destined to be a dreamer and a sentimentalist—­so much the worse for you, poor Amedee!

He went very often to the Gerards, but he no longer called his little friends “thou.”  Louise was now seventeen years old, thin, without color, and with a lank figure; decidedly far from pretty.  People, in speaking of her, began to say, “She has beautiful eyes and is an excellent musician.”  Her sister Maria was twelve years old and a perfect little rosebud.

As to the neighbor’s little girl, Rosine Combarieu, she had disappeared.  One day the printer suddenly departed without saying a word to anybody, and took his child with him.  The concierge said that he was concerned in some political plot, and was obliged to leave the house in the night.  They believed him to be concealed in some small town.

Accordingly, Father Gerard was not angry with him for fleeing without taking leave of him.  The conspirator had kept all his prestige in the eyes of the engraver, who, by a special run of ill-luck, was always engaged by a publisher of Bonapartist works, and was busy at that moment upon a portrait of the Prince Imperial, in the uniform of a corporal of the Guards, with an immense bearskin cap upon his childish head.

Father Gerard was growing old.  His beard, formerly of a reddish shade, and what little hair there was remaining upon his head, had become silvery white; that wonderful white which, like a tardy recompense to red-faced persons, becomes their full-blooded faces so well.  The good man felt the weight of years, as did his wife, whose flesh increased in such a troublesome way that she was forced to pant heavily when she seated herself after climbing the five flights.  Father Gerard grew old, like everything that surrounded him; like the house opposite, that he had seen built, and that no longer had the air of a new building; like his curious old furniture, his mended crockery, and his engravings, yellow with age, the frames of which had turned red; like the old Erard piano, upon which Louise, an accomplished performer, now was playing a set of Beethoven’s waltzes and Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words.”  This poor old servant now had only the shrill, trembling tones of a harmonica.