little, Monsieur Parent; you should get some fresh air and go into the
country; I assure you that you have changed very much within the last
few months." And when his customer had gone out, he used to say to the
barmaid: "That poor Monsieur Parent is booked for another world; it is
no good never to go out of Paris. Advise him to go out of town for a day
occasionally; he has confidence in you. It is nice weather, and will do
him good." And she, full of pity and good will for such a regular
customer, said to Parent every day: "Come, Monsieur, make up your mind
to get a little fresh air; it is so charming in the country when the
weather is fine. Oh! If I could, I would spend my life there."

And she told him her dreams, the simple and poetical dreams of all the
poor girls who are shut up from one year's end to the other in a shop
and who see the noisy life of the streets go while they think of the
calm and pleasant life in the country, of life under the trees, under
the bright sun shining on the meadows, of deep woods and clear rivers,
of cows lying in the grass, and of all the different flowers, blue, red,
yellow, purple, lilac, pink and white, which are so pretty, so fresh, so
sweet, all the wild flowers which one picks as one walks, and makes into
large nosegays.

She liked to speak to him frequently of her continual, unrealized and
unrealizable longing, and he, an old man without hope, was fond of
listening to her, and used to go and sit near the counter to talk to
Mademoiselle Zoé and to discuss the country with her. Then, by degrees
he was seized by a vague desire to go just once and see whether it was
really so pleasant there, as she said, outside the walls of the great
city, and so one morning he said to her: "Do you know where one can get
a good lunch in the neighborhood of Paris?" "Go to the Terrace at
Saint-Germain; it is delightful there!"