“No, I wish nothing!”
“We must draw him out of this,” the doctor said. “This torpor frightens me!—you are the father and the mother, you know your child well—Seek for something to reanimate this little body, recall to earth this spirit which runs after the clouds!”
Then he went away.
“Seek!”
Yes, without doubt they knew him well, their François, these worthy people! They knew how it amused him, the little one, to plunder the hedges on Sunday and to come back to Paris on his father’s shoulders laden with hawthorne—Jacques Legrand had bought some images, some gilded soldiers, and some Chinese shadows for François; he cut them out, put them on the child’s bed and made them dance before the bewildered eyes of the little one, and with a desire to weep himself he tried to make him laugh.
“Dost thou see, it is the broken bridge—Tire tire tire!—And that is a general!—Thou rememberest we saw one, a general, once, in the Bois de Boulogne?—If thou takest thy medicine well I will buy thee a real one with a cloth tunic and gold epaulets—Dost thou wish for him, the general, say?”
“No,” replied the child, with the dry voice which fever gives.
“Dost thou wish a pistol, some marbles—a crossbow?”
“No,” repeated the little voice, clearly and almost cruelly.
And to all that they said to him, to all the jumping-jacks, to all the balloons that they promised him, the little voice—while the parents looked at each other in despair—responded: