THE CHILD WITH THE BREAD SHOES THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

Listen to this story which the grandmothers of Germany tell their grandchildren,—Germany, a beautiful country of legends and dreams, where the moonlight, playing on the mists of Old Rhine, creates a thousand fantastic visions.

At the end of the village a poor woman lived alone in a humble cottage: the house was very poor and contained but the barest necessities in the way of furniture.

An old bed with twisted columns whence hung serge curtains yellow with age; a bread-bin; a walnut chest, polished till it shone, but the numerous worm-eaten holes of which were stopped with wax, indicated a long period of service; an arm-chair, covered with tapestry from which the colours had faded and which had been worn thin by the shaking head of the old grandmother; a spinning-wheel polished with use: that was all.

We were about to forget a child’s cradle, quite new, very cosily padded and covered with a pretty flowered counterpane stitched by an indefatigable needle, that of a mother ornamenting the crib of her little Jesus.

All the wealth in the little house was centred there.

The child of a burgomaster or of an aulic councillor could not have been more softly couched. Sacred prodigality, sweet folly of the mother who deprives herself of everything to provide a little luxury, in the midst of her poverty, for her dear nursling!

The cradle gave a festal air to the poor hovel; nature, which is compassionate to the unfortunate, made the bareness of this white-washed cottage gay with tufts of houseleek and velvet moss. Kind plants, full of pity, although they looked like parasites, filled up the holes in the roof and made it as dazzling as a bride’s jewels, and prevented the rain from falling on the cradle; the pigeons alighted on the window and cooed until the child fell asleep.

A little bird, to which young Hans had given a crumb of bread in the winter, when the snow made the ground white, had, when spring came, let a grain fall from his beak at the foot of the wall, and thence had sprung a beautiful bindweed which, clinging to the stones with its green claws, had entered the room by a broken window-pane, and crowned the child’s cradle with its cluster, so that in the morning Hans’s blue eyes and the blue bells of the bindweed woke up at the same time, and looked at each other with an understanding air.

This home, then, was poor but not gloomy.

Hans’s mother, whose husband had died far away at the war, lived as best she could on vegetables from the garden, and the product of her spinning-wheel: very little, it is true, but Hans wanted for nothing and that was enough.

Hans’s mother was a truly pious and believing woman. She prayed, worked and practised virtue; but she had one fault: she looked upon herself with too much complacence and prided herself too much on her son.

It sometimes happens that mothers, seeing these beautiful rosy children, with dimpled hands, white skin and pink heels, think that they belong to them for ever.

But God gives nothing; he only lends, and, like a forgotten creditor, he sometimes comes to demand his own again all of a sudden.

Because this fresh bud had sprung from her stem, Hans’s mother believed that she had made him to be born: and God, who, from within his Paradise with its azure vaults starred with gold, watches everything that happens on earth, and hears from the ends of the infinite the sound that the blade of grass makes as it grows, was not pleased to see this.

He also saw that Hans was greedy and that his mother was too indulgent to this greediness; the naughty child often cried when he had, after grapes or an apple, to eat bread, object of envy to so many unfortunates, and his mother let him throw away the piece of bread he had commenced, or else finished it herself.

Now it happened that Hans fell ill: fever burned him, his breath whistled in his choking throat; he had croup, a terrible illness that has made the eyes of many mothers and fathers red.

At the sight the poor woman was filled with horrible anguish.

You have doubtless seen in some church the image of Our Lady, clothed in mourning and standing under the Cross, with her breast open and her bleeding heart, where lie plunged seven swords of silver, three on one side, four on the other. That means that there is no agony more terrible than that of a mother who sees her child dying.

And yet the Holy Virgin believed in the divinity of Jesus and knew that her son would come to life again.

Now Hans’s mother had not that hope.

During the last days of Hans’s illness his mother, even while watching him, continued to spin mechanically and the whirring of the wheel mingled with the rattle in the throat of the dying child.

If some rich people find it strange that a mother can spin by the bed-side of a dying child, it is because they do not understand what tortures poverty contains for the soul; alas! it does not only break the body, it also breaks the heart.

What she was spinning thus, was the thread for her little Hans’s shroud; she did not wish that any cloth that had been used should cover that dear body, and, as she had no money, she made her spinning-wheel hum with a mournful activity; but she did not pass the thread through her lips as was her custom: enough tears fell from her eyes to moisten it.

At the end of the sixth day, Hans expired. Whether from chance or from sympathy, the cluster of bindweed that caressed his cradle faded, dried up and let its last curled-up flower fall on the bed.

When the mother was quite convinced that the breath had for ever flown from his lips, on which the violets of death had replaced the roses of life, she covered the too dear head with the edge of the sheet, took her bundle of thread under her arm, and made her way towards the weaver’s house.

“Weaver,” she said to him, “here is some very fine thread, very regular and without knots; the spider does not spin any finer between the joists of the ceiling; let your shuttle come and go; from this thread I must have an ell of cloth as soft as the cloth of Friesland or Holland.”

The weaver took the skein, set the warp, and the busy shuttle, drawing the thread after it, began to run hither and thither.

The card strengthened the woof and the thread continued to grow evenly, and without breaking, on the loom; it was as fine as the shift of an archduchess or the linen with which the priest dries the communion-cup at the altar.

When all the thread was used, the weaver gave the cloth to the poor mother, and, as he had understood everything from the settled look of despair on the unhappy woman’s face, he said to her:

“The emperor’s son, who died last year while still an infant, was not wrapped in a finer or softer shroud in his little ebony coffin with silver nails.”

Having folded the cloth, the mother drew from her wasted finger a thin gold ring, all worn with use.

“Good weaver,” she said, “take this ring, my wedding-ring, the only gold I ever possessed.”

The kind weaver-man did not wish to take it; but she said to him:

“Where I am going I shall have no need of a ring; for I feel my Hans’s small arms pulling me into the ground.”

Then she went to the carpenter and said to him:

“Master, get me some oak from the heart of the tree, which will not rot and which the worms will not be able to eat; cut from it five boards and two little boards and make a coffin to these measurements.”

The carpenter took his saw and plane, trimmed the planks, and struck the nails as lightly as possible with his hammer, so as not to let the iron points enter farther into the poor woman’s heart than into the wood.

When the work was finished, it was so carefully and so well done that it might have been taken for a box to put jewels and laces in.

“Carpenter, as you have made so beautiful a coffin for my little Hans, I give you my house at the end of the village, and the little garden behind it, and the well with the vineyard.—You shall not wait long.”

With the shroud and the coffin, which she held under her arm, it was so small, she went through the village streets, and the children, who do not know what death is, said:

“Look at Hans’s mother taking him a beautiful box of toys from Nuremberg; it must be a town with its painted and varnished wooden houses, its steeple covered with tin-foil, its belfry and its tower with battlements, and its trees in the promenades, all curly and green; or else a beautiful violin with its sculptured pegs at the neck and its horsehair bow.—Oh, why have we not a box like it!”

And the mothers, growing pale, kissed them and told them to be quiet:

“Silly children that you are, you must not say that; do not wish for the box of toys, or the violin-case that one carries with tears under one’s arm: you will have it soon enough, poor little ones!”

When Hans’s mother got home, she took the dainty, still pretty, corpse of her son and began to make his last toilet—it must be made carefully, for it has to last for eternity.

She clothed him in his Sunday clothes, his silk dress and fur pelisse, so that he should not be cold in the damp place to which he was going. Beside him she put the doll with the enamel eyes, the doll he loved so much that he always took it to bed with him.

But, just as she was turning down the shroud on the body which she had kissed for the last time a thousand times, she saw that she had forgotten to place his pretty little red slippers on the child’s feet.

She looked for them in the room, for it hurt her to see the little feet bare that used to be so warm and pink, and were now so cold and white; but during her absence the rats had found the shoes under the bed, and for want of better food had nibbled them, gnawed at them, and cut holes in the leather.

It was a great grief to the poor mother that Hans should go away into the other world with bare feet; when the heart is all one wound, it only needs a touch to make it bleed.

She cried to see the slippers: from that inflamed, worn-out eye a tear could still gush.

How could she get shoes for Hans, when she had already given her ring and her house? That was the thought that troubled her. By dint of thinking she had an idea.

In the bread-bin there was still a whole loaf of bread, as, for a long time, the unhappy woman, kept alive by her sorrow, had been eating nothing.

She broke the loaf, remembering that, in the past, she had often made with the soft parts pigeons, geese, chickens, wooden shoes, boats, and other boys’ things to amuse Hans.

Placing the bread in the hollow of her hand, and kneading it with her thumb while she moistened it with her tears, she made a little pair of bread shoes, with which she covered the cold, bluish feet of the dead child, and, her heart consoled, she turned down the shroud and closed the coffin.—While she was kneading the bread, a poor man had come to the door and timidly asked for some bread; but she had signed to him with her hand to go away.

The grave-digger came to take away the box, and buried it in a corner of the cemetery under a clump of white rose-bushes: the air was warm, it was not raining and the ground was not wet; this was a comfort to the mother, who thought that her poor little Hans would not pass the first night in his tomb too uncomfortably.

When she returned home to her solitary house, she placed Hans’s cradle beside her bed, lay down and fell asleep.

Overtaxed nature succumbed.

As she slept, she had a dream or, at least, she believed it was a dream.

Hans appeared to her, clothed, as he was in his coffin, in his Sunday dress and his pelisse lined with swans’-down, in his hand his doll with the enamel eyes and on his feet his bread shoes.

He seemed to be sad.

He had not the halo that death ought to give to the little innocents; for, if a child is placed in the ground, it comes out an angel.

The roses of Paradise were not flourishing on his pale cheeks, coloured white by death; tears fell from his blond eyelashes, and great sighs swelled his little breast.

The vision disappeared, and the mother awoke, bathed in perspiration, delighted at having seen her child, terrified at having seen him so sad; but she reassured herself by saying, “Poor Hans! even in Paradise he cannot forget me.”

The following night, the apparition was repeated: Hans was still more sad and more pale.

His mother, stretching her arms out to him, said:

“Dear child, take comfort, and do not weary in Heaven; I shall soon rejoin you.”

The third night, Hans came again; he moaned and cried more than at the other times, and he disappeared with his little hands joined; he no longer had his doll, but he still had his bread shoes.

His mother, being uneasy, went to consult a venerable priest, who said to her:

“I will watch beside you to-night, and I will question the little ghost; he will answer me; I know what words to say to innocent or guilty spirits.”

Hans appeared at the usual hour, and the priest summoned him, in the consecrated words, to tell him what troubled him in the other world.

“It is the bread shoes which torment me, and hinder me from mounting the diamond staircase of Paradise; they are heavier on my feet than postilion’s boots and I cannot get past the first two or three steps, and that troubles me greatly, for I see above a cloud of beautiful cherubim with rosy wings who are calling to me to play with them and are showing me toys of silver and gold.”

Having said these words, he disappeared.

The good priest, to whom Hans’s mother had made her confession, said to her:

“You have committed a grave fault, you have profaned the daily bread, the sacred bread, our good God’s bread, the bread that Jesus Christ, at his last repast, chose to represent his body, and, after having refused a slice of it to the poor man who came to your door, you kneaded from it slippers for your Hans.

“You must open the coffin, take the bread shoes off the child’s feet, and burn them in the all-purifying fire.”

Accompanied by the grave-digger and the mother, the priest proceeded to the cemetery: with four blows of the spade the coffin was laid bare, and was opened.

Hans was lying inside, just as his mother had laid him there, but his face bore an expression of pain.

The holy priest gently removed the bread shoes from the dead child’s feet and burned them himself at the flames of a candle, reciting a prayer the while.

When night came, Hans appeared to his mother one last time, but he was gay, rosy and happy, and had with him two little cherubim with whom he had already made friends; he had wings of light and a fillet of diamonds.

“Oh, mother, what joy, what happiness, and oh, how beautiful are the gardens of Paradise! We play there all the time and our good God never scolds.”

Next day, the mother saw her son again, not on earth, but in heaven; for she died during the day, her brow pressed against the empty cradle.