The holy priest gently removed the bread shoes from the dead child’s feet and burned them himself at the flames of a candle, reciting a prayer the while.
When night came, Hans appeared to his mother one last time, but he was gay, rosy and happy, and had with him two little cherubim with whom he had already made friends; he had wings of light and a fillet of diamonds.
“Oh, mother, what joy, what happiness, and oh, how beautiful are the gardens of Paradise! We play there all the time and our good God never scolds.”
Next day, the mother saw her son again, not on earth, but in heaven; for she died during the day, her brow pressed against the empty cradle.
THE REVEREND FATHER GAUCHER’S ELIXIR
ALPHONSE DAUDET
“Drink this, neighbour, and tell me what you think of it.”
And drop by drop, with the scrupulous care of a lapidary counting pearls, the curé of Graveson poured me out two fingers of a golden-green liquor, warm, shimmering, exquisite.... It warmed my stomach like sunshine.
“That is Father Gaucher’s elixir, the pride and the health of our Provence,” the good man informed me triumphantly. “It is made at the Premonstratensian convent, a couple of leagues from your mill.... Isn’t it worth all their Chartreuses?... And if you only knew how amusing the story of this elixir is! Just listen....”
Thereupon quite innocently, thinking no evil, in the Presbytery dining-room so simple and quiet with its little pictures of the Stations of the Cross and its pretty white starched curtains like surplices, the abbé began to tell me a tale just a little sceptical and irreverent, after the manner of a story from Erasmus or D’Assoucy.