“I do not want to know anything more about you or your invention,” I said, interrupting him brusquely. “I thought you were a humane savant, and you are a wild beast. Your researches were in connection with the most beautiful manifestation of human genius, with those evolutions in the sky which I loved so dearly. You want now to transform these into cowardly attacks turned against the earth. You horrify me! Do go!”
With this I left my friend to himself and his cruel invention, ashamed for a moment. His efforts have not succeeded, though, according to his wishes.
The remains of the poor lad were put into a small coffin, and Madame Guérard and I followed the pauper’s hearse to the grave. The morning was so cold that the driver had to stop and take a glass of hot wine, as otherwise he might have died of congestion. We were alone in the carriage, for the boy had been brought up by his grandmother, who could not walk at all, and who knitted vests and stockings. It was through going to order some vests and socks for my men that I had made the acquaintance of Mère Tricottin, as she was called. At her request I had engaged her grandson, Victor Durieux, as an errand boy, and the poor old woman had been so grateful that I dared not go now to tell her of his death.
Madame Guérard went for me to the Rue de Vaugirard, where the old woman lived. As soon as she arrived the poor grandmother could see by her sad face that something had happened.
“Bon Dieu, my dear Madame, is the poor little thin lady dead?” This referred to me. Madame Guérard then told her, as gently as possible, the sad news. The old woman took off her spectacles, looked at her visitor, wiped them, and put them on her nose again. She then began to grumble violently about her son, the father of the dead boy. He had taken up with some low girl, by whom he had had this child, and she had always foreseen that misfortune would come upon them through it.
She continued in this strain, not sorrowing for the poor boy, but abusing her son, who was a soldier in the Army of the Loire.
Although the grandmother seemed to feel so little grief, I went to see her after the funeral.
“It is all over, Madame Durieux,” I said. “But I have secured the grave for a period of five years for the poor boy.”
She turned towards me, quite comic in her vexation.
“What madness!” she exclaimed. “Now that he’s with the bon Dieu he won’t want for anything. It would have been better to have taken a bit of land that would have brought something in. Dead folks don’t make vegetables grow.”