Original Short Stories — Volume 03Maupassant, Guy de
General
Original Short Stories — Volume 03
Maupassant, Guy de
Short stories, French -- Translations into English
“That must be the fiance of the younger one,” thought the wheelwright.
And until evening he kept trying to recall where he had formerly seen a
young man who resembled this one. But the one he was thinking of must be
an old man by this time, for it seemed as if he had known him down home
in his youth.
The same man frequently came again to walk home with the ladies, and
this vague, distant, familiar resemblance which he could not place
worried the old man so much that he made his wife come with him to see
if she could help his impaired memory.
One evening as it was growing dusk the three strangers entered together.
When they had passed the old man said:
“Well, do you know him?”
His wife anxiously tried to ransack her memory. Suddenly she said in a
low tone:
“Yes--yes--but he is darker, taller, stouter and is dressed like a
gentleman, but, father, all the same, it is your face when you were
young!”
The old man started violently.
It was true. He looked like himself and also like his brother who was
dead, and like his father, whom he remembered while he was yet young.
The old couple were so affected that they could not speak. The three
persons came out and were about to leave the church.
The man touched his finger to the holy water sprinkler. Then the old
man, whose hand was trembling so that he was fairly sprinkling the
ground with holy water, exclaimed:
“Jean!”
The young man stopped and looked at him.
He repeated in a lower tone:
“Jean!”
The two women looked at them without understanding.
He then said for the third time, sobbing as he did so:
“Jean!”
The man stooped down, with his face close to the old man's, and as a
memory of his childhood dawned on him he replied:
“Papa Pierre, Mamma Jeanne!”
He had forgotten everything, his father's surname and the name of his
native place, but he always remembered those two words that he had so
often repeated: “Papa Pierre, Mamma Jeanne.”
He sank to the floor, his face on the old man's knees, and he wept,
kissing now his father and then his mother, while they were almost
breathless from intense joy.
The two ladies also wept, understanding as they did that some great
happiness had come to pass.
Then they all went to the young man's house and he told them his
history. The circus people had carried him off. For three years he
traveled with them in various countries. Then the troupe disbanded,
and one day an old lady in a chateau had paid to have him stay with her
because she liked his appearance. As he was intelligent, he was sent to
school, then to college, and the old lady having no children, had left
him all her money. He, for his part, had tried to find his parents, but
as he could remember only the two names, “Papa Pierre, Mamma Jeanne,”
he had been unable to do so. Now he was about to be married, and he
introduced his fiancee, who was very good and very pretty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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