“No.”—“No.”—“No!”
“But what dost thou wish, my François?” asked the mother. “Let us see, there is certainly something thou wouldst like to have—Tell it, tell it to me! to me!—thy mother!” And she laid her cheek on the pillow of the sick boy and whispered this softly in his ear as if it were a secret. Then the child, with an odd accent, straightening himself up in his bed and stretching out his hand eagerly toward some invisible thing, replied suddenly in an ardent tone, at the same time supplicating and imperative:
“I want Boum-Boum!”
Boum-Boum.
Poor Madeleine threw a frightened look toward her husband. What did the little one say? Was it the delirium, the frightful delirium, which had come back again?
Boum-Boum!
She did not know what that meant, and she was afraid of these singular words which the child repeated with a sickly persistence as if, not having dared until now to formulate his dream, he grasped the present time with invincible obstinacy:
“Yes, Boum-Boum! Boum-Boum! I want Boum-Boum!”
The mother had seized Jacques’s hand and spoke very low, as if demented.
“What does that mean, Jacques? He is lost!”