[A Romance of Youth by Francois Coppee]@TWC D-Link bookA Romance of Youth CHAPTER III 1/19
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PAPA AND MAMMA GERARD. One, two, three years rolled by without anything very remarkable happening to the inhabitants of the fifth story. The quarter had not changed, and it still had the appearance of a suburban faubourg.
They had just erected, within gunshot of the house where the Violettes and Gerards lived, a large five-story building, upon whose roof still trembled in the wind the masons' withered bouquets. But that was all.
In front of them, on the lot "For Sale," enclosed by rotten boards, where one could always see tufts of nettles and a goat tied to a stake, and upon the high wall above which by the end of April the lilacs hung in their perfumed clusters, the rains had not effaced this brutal declaration of love, scraped with a knife in the plaster: "When Melie wishes she can have me," and signed "Eugene." Three years had passed, and little Amedee had grown a trifle.
At that time a child born in the centre of Paris--for example, in the labyrinth of infected streets about the Halles--would have grown up without having any idea of the change of seasons other than by the state of the temperature and the narrow strip of sky which he could see by raising his head.
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