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I do not believe that there is anything sweeter in the world than the ideas which awake in a ht of her child's tiny shoe; especially if it is a shoe for festivals, for Sunday, for baptism, the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the infant has not yet taken a step That shoe has so race and daintiness, it is so ih she saw her child She smiles upon it, she kisses it, she talks to it; she asks herself whether there can actually be a foot so tiny; and if the child be absent, the pretty shoe suffices to place the sweet and fragile creature before her eyes She thinks she sees it, she does see it, co, joyous, with its delicate hands, its round head, its pure lips, its serene eyes whose white is blue If it is in winter, it is yonder, crawling on the carpet, it is laboriously cli upon an ottoman, and the mother trembles lest it should approach the fire If it is suarden, plucks up the grass between the paving-stones, gazes innocently at the big dogs, the big horses, without fear, plays with the shells, with the flowers, and rumble because he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth in the paths Everything laughs, and shines and plays around it, like it, even the breath of air and the ray of sun which vie with each other in disporting alets of its hair The shoe shows all this to the mother, and makes her heart melt as fire es of joy, of char around the little shoe, becos The pretty broidered shoe is no longer anything but an instrument of torture which eternally crushes the heart of the mother It is always the same fibre which vibrates, the tenderest andit, it is a de, when the sun was rising on one of those dark blue skies against which Garofolo loves to place his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels, of horses and irons in the Place de Grève She was somewhat aroused by it, knotted her hair upon her ears in order to deafen herself, and resumed her contemplation, on her knees, of the inanimate object which she had adored for fifteen years This little shoe was the universe to her, as we have already said Her thought was shut up in it, and was destined never more to quit it except at death The sombre cave of the Tour-Roland alone knecomplaints, prayers and sobs she had wafted to heaven in connection with that char bauble of rose-colored satin Never was