Not knowing where to find my mother, and not being able to write, my nurse, without telling any of my friends, took me with her to her new abode.
The change delighted me. I was five years old at the time, and I remember the day as if it were yesterday. My nurse’s abode was just over the doorway of the house, and the window was framed in the heavy and monumental door. From outside, I thought it was beautiful, and I began to clap my hands on reaching the house. It was toward five o’clock in the evening, in the month of November, when everything looks gray. I was put to bed and no doubt I went to sleep at once, for there end my recollections of that day.
The next morning there was terrible grief in store for me. There was no window in the little room in which I slept, and I began to cry, and escaped from the arms of my nurse, who was dressing me, so that I could go into the adjoining room. I ran to the round window, which was an immense “bull’s eye” above the doorway. I pressed my stubborn brow against the glass and began to scream with rage on seeing no trees, no boxwood, no leaves falling, nothing, nothing, but stone, cold, gray, ugly stone, and panes of glass opposite me.
“I want to go away,” I screamed. “I don’t want to stay here! It is all black, black! It is ugly! I want to see the ceiling of the street!” and I burst into tears. My poor nurse took me up in her arms and, folding me in a rug, took me down into the courtyard.
“Lift up your head, Milk Blossom, and look! See, there is the ceiling of the street!”
It comforted me somewhat to see that there was some sky in this ugly place, but my little soul was very sad. I could not eat, and I grew pale and became anæmic, and I should certainly have died of consumption if it had not been for a mere chance, a most unexpected incident. One day I was playing in the courtyard with a little girl named Titine, who lived on the second floor and whose face or real name I cannot recall, when I saw my nurse’s husband walking across the courtyard with two ladies, one of whom was most fashionably attired. I could only see their backs, but the voice of the fashionably attired lady caused my heart to stop beating. My poor little body trembled with nervous excitement.
“Do any of the windows look on to the courtyard?” she asked.
“Yes, madame, those four,” he replied, pointing to four open ones on the first floor.
The lady turned to look at them, and I uttered a cry of joy.
“Aunt Rosine! Aunt Rosine!” I exclaimed, clinging to the skirts of the pretty visitor. I buried my face in her furs, stamping, sobbing, laughing, and tearing her wide, lace sleeves in my frenzy of delight. She took me in her arms and tried to calm me, and questioning the concierge she stammered out to her friend: