A third time the chaplain bends over the little prince, and talks a long time in whispering tones. The royal child interrupts him in anger, in the midst of his discourse, and cries, "Then it is no use to be Dauphin,--it is nothing at all;" and not wishing to hear more, he turns toward the wall weeping.
JACK IS INVITED TO TAKE UP A "PROFESSION"
"Do you hear, Jack?" resumed D'Argenton, with flashing eyes and outstretched arm. "In four years you will be a good workman; that is to say, the noblest, grandest thing that can exist in this world of slavery and servitude. In four years you will be that sacred, venerated thing, a good workman!"
Yes, indeed he heard it!--"a good workman." Only he was bewildered and was trying to understand.
The child had seen workmen in Paris. There were some who lived in the Passage des Douze Maisons, and not far from the Gymnase there was a factory, from which he often watched them as they left work at about six o'clock; a crowd of dirty-looking men with their blouses all stained with oil, and their rough hands blackened and deformed by work.
The idea that he would have to wear a blouse struck him at once. He remembered the tone of contempt with which his mother would say: "Those are workmen, men in blouses,"--the care she took in the streets to avoid the contact of their soiled garments. Labassindre's fine speeches on the duties and influence of the working-man in the nineteenth century attenuated and contradicted, it is true, these vague impressions. But what he did understand, and that most clearly and bitterly, was that he must go away, leave the forest whose tree-tops he saw from the window, leave the Rivalses, leave his mother, his mother whom he had recovered at the cost of so much pain, and whom he loved so tenderly.
What on earth was she doing at that window all this time, seeming so indifferent to all that was going on around her? Within the last few minutes, however, she had lost her immovable indifference. A convulsive shudder seemed to shake her from head to foot, and the hand she held over her eyes closed over them as if she were hiding tears. Was it then so sad a sight that she beheld yonder in the country, on the far horizon where the sun sets, and where so many dreams, so many illusions, so many loves and passions sink and disappear, never to return?