Bethlehem! Why did that legendary name, sweet to the ear, warm as the straw in the miraculous stable, give you such a cold shudder when you saw it in gilt letters over that iron gateway? The feeling was due perhaps to the melancholy landscape, the vast, desolate plain that stretches from Nanterre to Saint-Cloud, broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing the place one's heart contracted. When one entered the grounds it was much worse. An oppressive, inexplicable silence hovered about the house, where the faces at the windows had a depressing aspect behind the small old-fashioned, greenish panes. The she-goats, straying along the paths, languidly cropped the first shoots of grass, with occasional "baas" in the direction of their keeper, who seemed as bored as they, and followed visitors with a listless eye. There was an air of mourning, the deserted, terrified aspect of a plague-stricken spot. Yet that had once been an attractive, cheerful property, and there had been much feasting and revelry there not long before. It had been laid out for the famous singer who had sold it to Jenkins, and it exhibited traces of the imaginative genius peculiar to the operatic stage, in the bridge across the pond, where there was a sunken wherry filled with water-soaked leaves, and in its summer-house, all of rockwork, covered with climbing ivy. It had seen some droll sights, had that summer-house, in the singer's time, and now it saw some sad ones, for the infirmary was located there. To tell the truth, the whole establishment was simply one huge infirmary. The children fell sick as soon as they arrived, languished and finally died unless their parents speedily removed them to the safe shelter of their homes. The cure of Nanterre went so often to Bethlehem with his black vestments and his silver crucifix, the undertaker had so many orders for coffins for the house, that it was talked about in the neighborhood, and indignant mothers shook their fists at the model nursery, but only at a safe distance if they happened to have in their arms a little pink and white morsel of humanity to shelter from all the contagions of that spot. That was what gave the miserable place such a heart-rending look. A house where children die cannot be cheerful; it is impossible for the trees to bloom there, or the birds to nest, or the water to flow in laughing ripples of foam.