A child’s expression is then so touching, there is so much grief in a warm tear slowly falling, in a little contracted face, a little heaving breast.

All this is long past.  Yet years have gone by without effacing these loved recollections; and now that my baby is thirty years old and has a heavy moustache, when he holds out his large hand and says in his bass voice, “Good morning, father,” it still seems to me that an echo repeats afar off the dear words of old, “Dood mornin’, papa.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE LITTLE BOOTS

In the morning when I left my room, I saw placed in line before the door his boots and mine.  His were little laced-up boots rather out of shape, and dulled by the rough usage to which he subjects them.  The sole of the left boot was worn thin, and a little hole was threatening at the toe of the right.  The laces, worn and slack, hung to the right and left.  Swellings in the leather marked the places of his toes, and the accustomed movements of his little foot had left their traces in the shape of creases, slight or deep.

Why have I remembered all this?  I really do not know, but it seems to me that I can still see the boots of the dear little one placed there on the mat beside my own, two grains of sand by two paving stones, a tom tit beside an elephant.  They were his every-day boots, his playfellows, those with which he ascended sand hills and explored puddles.  They were devoted to him, and shared his existence so closely that something of himself was met with again in them.  I should have recognized them among a thousand; they had an especial physiognomy about them; it seemed to me that an invisible tie attached them to him, and I could not look at their undecided shape, their comic and charming grace, without recalling their little master, and acknowledging to myself that they resembled him.

Everything belonging to a baby becomes a bit babyish itself, and assumes that expression of unstudied and simple grace peculiar to a child.

Beside these laughing, gay, good-humored little boots, only asking leave to run about the country, my own seemed monstrous, heavy, coarse, ridiculous, with their heels.  From their heavy and disabused air one felt that for them life was a grave matter, its journeys long, and the burden borne quite a serious one.

The contrast was striking, and the lesson deep.  I would softly approach these little boots in order not to wake the little man who was still asleep in the adjoining room; I felt them, I turned them over, I looked at them on all sides, and I found a delightful smile rise to my lips.  Never did the old violet-scented glove that lay for so long in the inmost recess of my drawer procure me so sweet an emotion.

Paternal love is no trifle; it has its follies and weaknesses, it is puerile and sublime, it can neither be analyzed nor explained, it is simply felt, and I yielded myself to it with delight.