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: “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!” But the father had on his rough, working man’s face a smile almost happy, but astonished too, the smile of a condemned man who foresees a possibility of liberty. Boum-Boum! He remembered well the morning of Easter Monday when he had taken François to the circus. He had still in his ears the child’s outbursts of joy, the happy laugh of the amused boy, when the clown, the beautiful clown, all spangled with gold and with a great gilded butterfly sparkling, many-colored, on the back of his black costume, skipped across the track, gave the trip to a rider or held himself motionless and stiff on the sand, his head down and his feet in the air. Or again he tossed up to the chandelier some soft, felt hats which he caught adroitly on his head, where they formed, one by one, a pyramid; and at each jest, like a refrain brightening up his intelligent and droll face, he uttered the same cry, repeated the same word, accompanied now and then by a burst from the orchestra: Boum-Boum! Boum-Boum! and each time that it rang out, Boum-Boum, the audience burst out into hurrahs and the little one joined in with his hearty, little laugh. Boum-Boum! It was this Boum-Boum, it was the clown of the circus, it was this favorite of a large part of the city that little François wished to see and to have and whom he could not have and could not see since he was lying here without strength in his white bed.