them, and then turned round, so as to meet them face to face. As he
passed the child he felt a mad longing to take him into his arms and run
off with him, and he knocked against him as if by accident. The boy
turned round and looked at the clumsy man angrily, and Parent hurried
away, shocked, hurt, and pursued by that look. He went off like a thief,
seized with a horrible fear lest he should have been seen and recognized
by his wife and her lover. He went to his cafe without stopping, and fell
breathless into his chair. That evening he drank three absinthes. For
four months he felt the pain of that meeting in his heart. Every night he
saw the three again, happy and tranquil, father, mother, and child
walking on the boulevard before going in to dinner, and that new vision
effaced the old one. It was another matter, another hallucination now,
and also a fresh pain. Little George, his little George, the child he had
so much loved and so often kissed, disappeared in the far distance, and
he saw a new one, like a brother of the first, a little boy with bare
legs, who did not know him! He suffered terribly at that thought. The
child's love was dead; there was no bond between them; the child would
not have held out his arms when he saw him. He had even looked at him
angrily.

Then, by degrees he grew calmer, his mental torture diminished, the image
that had appeared to his eyes and which haunted his nights became more
indistinct and less frequent. He began once more to live nearly like
everybody else, like all those idle people who drink beer off
marble-topped tables and wear out their clothes on the threadbare velvet
of the couches.

He grew old amid the smoke from pipes, lost his hair under the gas
lights, looked upon his weekly bath, on his fortnightly visit to the
barber's to have his hair cut, and on the purchase of a new coat or hat