Mother, admirably beautiful, looking like a Madonna, with her golden hair and her eyes fringed with such long lashes that they made a shadow on her cheeks when she bent her eyes, distributed money on all sides. She would have given her golden hair, her slender white fingers, her tiny feet, her life itself, in order to save the child. And she was as sincere in her despair and her love as in her unconscious forgetfulness. Baron Larrey left for Paris, leaving my mother, Aunt Rosine, and the surgeon with me. Forty-two days later mother took in triumph to Paris the nurse, the foster-father, and me, and installed us in a little house at Neuilly, on the banks of the Seine. I had not even a scar, it appears. My skin was rather too bright a pink, but that was all. My mother, happy and trustful once more, began to travel again, leaving me in care of my aunts. Two years were spent in the little garden at Neuilly, which was full of horrible dahlias, growing close together and coloured like woollen balls. My aunts never came there. My mother used to send money, bonbons, and toys. The foster-father died, and my nurse married a concierge, who used to pull open the door at 65, Rue de Provence. Not knowing where to find my mother, and not being able to write, my nurse--without telling any of my friends took me with her to her new abode. The change delighted me. I was five years old at the time, and I remember the day as if it were yesterday. My nurse's abode was just over the doorway of the house, and the window was framed in the heavy and monumental door. From outside I thought it was beautiful, and I began to clap my hands on reaching the house. It was towards five o'clock in the evening in the month of November, when everything looks grey. I was put to bed, and no doubt I went to sleep at once, for there end my souvenirs of that day. The next morning there was terrible grief in store for me. There was no window in the little room in which I slept, and I began to cry, and escaped from the arms of my nurse, who was dressing me, so that I could go into the adjoining room. I ran to the round window, which was an immense "bull's-eye" above the doorway, I pressed my stubborn brow against the glass and began to scream with rage on seeing no trees; no box-wood, no leaves falling, nothing, nothing but stone--cold, grey, ugly stone, and panes of glass opposite me. "I want to go away. I don't want to stay here. It is all black, black! It is ugly! I want to see the ceiling of the street!" and I burst into tears. My poor nurse took me up in her arms and, folding me in a rug, took me down into the courtyard. "Lift up your head, Milk Blossom, and look! See, there is the ceiling of the street!"