heeding her mistress who cried to her: ‘Take care. You are mad!’ Then she inspected all the gardens of Pont-l’Évêque: and she stopped the passers-by: ‘You haven’t seen anywhere, by chance, my parrot?’ To those who did not know the parrot she described him. Suddenly she thought she distinguished, behind the mill, at the bottom of the slope, a green thing fluttering about. But at the top of the hill, nothing! A pedlar affirmed that he had just met it in Saint-Milaine in Mother Simon’s shop. She ran there. Nobody knew what she meant. Finally she came back, worn out, her slippers in rags, death in her soul; and, seated in the centre of the garden seat, near madame, she was recounting all her adventures, when a light weight fell on her shoulder—Loulou! What the deuce had he done? Maybe he had taken a stroll in the neighbourhood.

She had trouble in recovering from it, or rather, she never did recover.

As a result of a chill she got a sore throat; a little after, an ear-ache. Three years after, she was deaf; and she spoke very loud, even in the church. Although her sins might have been broadcast to all the corners of the parish, without dishonouring her, or inconveniencing the world, the priest thought it right to receive her confession only in the vestry.

Illusory buzzings in the ear completely confused her. Often her mistress would say: ‘Gracious! how stupid you are!’ And she would reply: ‘Yes, madame,’ looking for something round her.

The little circle of her ideas narrowed still more, and the ringing of the bells, the lowing of the herds no longer existed. All creatures functioned in ghostly silence. One noise alone now reached her ears, the voice of the parrot.

As if to amuse her, he would reproduce the tick-tack of the turnspit, the shrill cry of the fishmonger, the saw of the carpenter who lived opposite: and when the bell rang, imitated Madame Aubain: ‘Felicity! the door! the door!’

They had dialogues together; he reeling off to satiety the three phrases of his repertory, and she answering by words without coherence but in which her soul unbosomed itself. Loulou, in her isolation, was almost a son, a lover. He climbed up her fingers, nibbled at her lips, hung on to her neckerchief; and as she bent her forehead, shaking her head as children’s nurses do, the big wings of her bonnet and the wings of the bird shook together.

When the clouds gathered and the thunder growled, he would utter cries, recalling perhaps the deluges of his native forests.

The trickling of water excited him almost to delirium: he fluttered about madly, rose to the roof, turned over everything, and went through the window to dabble in the garden; but came back quickly to one of the andirons and, hopping about to dry his wings, showed now his tail, and now his beak.

One morning of the terrible winter of 1837, when she had put him before the hearth because of the cold, she found him dead in the middle of his cage, his head down, his claws in the wire meshing. A congestion had killed him, no doubt. She believed he had been poisoned by parsley; and, in spite of the absence of all proof, her suspicions centred on Fabu.

She wept so much that her mistress said to her: ‘Well, then, have him stuffed’.

She asked advice from the chemist, who had always been good to the parrot.

He wrote to Havre. A certain Fellacher undertook the business. But, as the stage coach sometimes mislaid parcels, she resolved to carry it herself as far as Honfleur.