the lilacs hung in their perfumed clusters, the rains had not effaced
this brutal declaration of love, scraped with a knife in the plaster:
"When Melie wishes she can have me," and signed "Eugene."

Three years had passed, and little Amedee had grown a trifle. At that
time a child born in the centre of Paris--for example, in the labyrinth
of infected streets about the Halles--would have grown up without having
any idea of the change of seasons other than by the state of the
temperature and the narrow strip of sky which he could see by raising his
head. Even today certain poor children--the poor never budge from their
hiding-places--learn of the arrival of winter only by the odor of roasted
chestnuts; of spring, by the boxes of gilly-flowers in the fruiterer's
stall; of summer, by the water-carts passing, and of autumn, by the heaps
of oyster-shells at the doors of wine-shops. The broad sky, with its
confused shapes of cloud architecture, the burning gold of the setting
sun behind the masses of trees, the enchanting stillness of moonlight
upon the river, all these grand and magnificent spectacles are for the
delight of those who live in suburban quarters, or play there sometimes.
The sons of people who work in buttons and jet spend their infancy
playing on staircases that smell of lead, or in courts that resemble
wells, and do not suspect that nature exists. At the outside they
suspect that nature may exist when they see the horses on Palm Sunday
decorated with bits of boxwood behind each ear. What matters it, after
all, if the child has imagination? A star reflected in a gutter will
reveal to him an immense nocturnal poem; and he will breathe all the
intoxication of summer in the full-blown rose which the grisette from the
next house lets fall from her hair.

Amedee had had the good fortune of being born in that delicious and
melancholy suburb of Paris which had not yet become "Haussmannized,"