The narrow circle of her ideas grew more restricted than it
already was; the bellowing of the oxen, the chime of the bells no
longer reached her intelligence. All things moved silently, like
ghosts. Only one noise penetrated her ears: the parrot's voice.

As if to divert her mind, he reproduced for her the tick-tack of
the spit in the kitchen, the shrill cry of the fish-vendors, the
saw of the carpenter who had a shop opposite, and when the
door-bell rang, he would imitate Madame Aubain: "Félicité! go to
the front door."

They held conversations together, Loulou repeating the three
phrases of his repertory over and over, Félicité replying by words
that had no greater meaning, but in which she poured out her
feelings. In her isolation, the parrot was almost a son, a lover.
He climbed upon her fingers, pecked at her lips, clung to her
shawl, and when she rocked her head to and fro like a nurse, the
big wings of her cap and the wings of the bird flapped in unison.
When clouds gathered on the horizon and the thunder rumbled,
Loulou would scream, perhaps because he remembered the storms in
his native forests. The dripping of the rain would excite him to
frenzy; he flapped around, struck the ceiling with his wings,
upset everything, and would finally fly into the garden to play.
Then he would come back into the room, light on one of the
andirons, and hop around in order to get dry.

One morning during the terrible winter of 1837, when she had put
him in front of the fire-place on account of the cold, she found
him dead in his cage, hanging to the wire bars with his head down.