Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (French I).djvu/78

Rh the year of which I am going to speak,—it was 1861, the year in which you were sent away to school,—I used to come this way alone as I returned from the lyceum, and among the bewitching things in those shop windows was a certain object which obliterated for me all the rest,—namely, a copper-gilt sabre. To my eyes that sabre literally filled Cold Street with sunshine. You can readily imagine that I became possessed by a frantic desire to possess it, for you know the fervor of my imagination and the feverish condition in which I lived up to my fifteenth year. The gold of that scabbard irradiated for me the gloomy lane; it bathed with effulgent beams the gray tints of the old stone buildings. The hilt was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the sword-belt was of red leather. To buckle that belt around my waist, to clasp that hilt, to draw that blade from its damascened sheath, became to my nine-year-old brain one of those dreams of infinite felicity so frantically cherished that they seem to our minds impossible of attainment. Alas, that golden sabre cost twenty-four francs. My sister Blanche, who often gave me books, knowing my desire for it, said to me: 'If you can lay by ten francs I will give you the rest.' To save ten francs out of my poor little schoolboy allowance—you know if I could! My only chance was that at Christmas my uncle might give me, as he had done before, a little money; but even then I was