Amedee may be certain of the gratitude and devotion of his wife, but he never will have her love, for Maurice, a posthumous rival, rises between them.  Ah, this Maurice!  He had loved Maria very little or not very faithfully!  She should remember that he had first betrayed her, that but for Amedee he would have abandoned her and she never would have been his wife.  If she knew that in Paris when she was far away he had deceived her!  But she never would know anything of it, for Amedee has too much delicacy to hurt the memory of the dead, and he respects and even admires this fidelity of illusion and love in Maria.  He suffers from it.  The one to whom he has given his name, his heart, and his life, is inconsolable, and he must be resigned to it.  Although remarried, she is a widow at the bottom of her heart, and it is in vain that she puts on bright attire, her eyes and her smile are in mourning forever.

How could she forget her Maurice when he is before her every day in her son, who is also named Maurice and whose bright, handsome face strikingly resembles his father’s?  Amedee feels a presentiment that in a few years this child will be another Maurice, with the same attractions and vices.  The poet does not forget that his dying friend confided the orphan to him, and he endeavors to be kind and good to him and to bring him up well.  He sometimes has a feeling of sorrow when he discovers the same instincts and traits in the child as in the man whom he had so dearly loved and who had made him such trouble; in spite of all, he can not feel the sentiments of a father for another’s son.  His own union has been sterile.

Poor Amedee!  Yet he is envied!  The little joy that he has is mingled with grief and sorrow, and he dares not confide it to the excellent Louise—­who suspects it, however—­whose old and secret attachment for him he surmises now, and who is the good genius of his household.  Had he only realized it before!  It might have been happiness, genuine happiness for him!

The leaves fall! the leaves fall!

After breakfast, while they were smoking their cigars and walking along beside the masses of dahlias, upon which the large golden spider had spun its silvery web, Amedee Violette and Paul Sillery had talked of times past and the comrades of their youth.  It was not a very gay conversation, for since then there had been the war, the Commune.  How many were dead!  How many had disappeared!  And, then, this retrospective review proves to one that one can be entirely deceived as to certain people, and that chance is master.

Such an one, whom they had once considered as a great prose writer, as the leader of a sect, and whose doctrines of art five or six faithful disciples spread while copying his waistcoats and even imitating his manner of speaking with closed teeth, is reduced to writing stories for obscene journals.  “Chose,” the fiery revolutionist, had obtained a good place; and the modest “Machin,” a man hardly noticed in the clubs, had published two exquisite books, genuine works of art.