The child was lying stretched out in his little, white bed, and his eyes, grown large through fever, looked straight before him, always with the strange fixity of the sick who already perceive what the living do not see. The mother at the foot of the bed, torn by suffering and wringing her hands to keep herself from crying, anxiously followed the progress of the disease on the poor, emaciated face of the little being. The father, an honest workman, kept back the tears which burned his eyelids. The day broke clear and mild, a beautiful morning in June, and lighted up the narrow room in the street of the Abessess where little François, the child of Jacques and Madeleine Legrand, lay dying. He was seven years old and was very fair, very rosy, and so lively. Not three weeks ago he was gay as a sparrow; but a fever had seized him and they had brought him home one evening from the public school with his head heavy and his hands very hot. From that time he had been here in this bed and sometimes in his delirium when he looked at his little well-blackened shoes, which his mother had carefully placed in a corner on a board, he said: “You can throw them away now, little François’ shoes! Little François will not put them on any more! Little François will not go to school any more—never, never!” Then the father cried out and said: “Wilt thou be still!” And the mother, very pale, buried her blond head in his pillow so that little François could not hear her weep. This night the child had not been delirious; but for the two days past the doctor had been uneasy over an odd sort of prostration which resembled abandon, it was as if at seven years the sick one already felt the weariness of life. He was tired, silent, sad, and tossed his little head about on the bolster. He had no longer a smile on his poor, thin lips, and with haggard eyes he sought, seeing they knew not what, something there beyond, very far off— In Heaven! Perhaps! thought Madeleine, trembling. When they wished him to take some medicine, some sirup, or a little soup, he refused. He refused everything. “Dost thou wish anything, François?” “No, I wish nothing!” “We must draw him out of this,” the doctor said. “This torpor frightens me!—you are the father and the mother, you know your child well—Seek for something to reanimate this little body, recall to earth this spirit which runs after the clouds!” Then he went away. “Seek!” Yes, without doubt they knew him well, their François, these worthy people! They knew how it amused him, the little one, to plunder the hedges on Sunday and to come back to Paris on his father’s shoulders laden with hawthorne—Jacques Legrand had bought some images, some gilded soldiers, and some Chinese shadows for François; he cut them out, put them on the child’s bed and made them dance before the bewildered eyes of the little one, and with a desire to weep himself he tried to make him laugh. “Dost thou see, it is the broken bridge—Tire tire tire!—And that is a general!—Thou rememberest we saw one, a general, once, in the Bois de Boulogne?—If thou takest thy medicine well I will buy thee a real one with a cloth tunic and gold epaulets—Dost thou wish for him, the general, say?” “No,” replied the child, with the dry voice which fever gives. “Dost thou wish a pistol, some marbles—a crossbow?” “No,” repeated the little voice, clearly and almost cruelly. And to all that they said to him, to all the jumping-jacks, to all the balloons that they promised him, the little voice—while the parents looked at each other in despair—responded: “No.”—“No.”—“No!” “But what dost thou wish, my François?” asked the mother. “Let us see, there is certainly something thou wouldst like to have—Tell it, tell it to me! to me!—thy mother!” And she laid her cheek on the pillow of the sick boy and whispered this softly in his ear as if it were a secret. Then the child, with an odd accent, straightening himself up in his bed and stretching out his hand eagerly toward some invisible thing, replied suddenly in an ardent tone, at the same time supplicating and imperative: “I want Boum-Boum!” Boum-Boum. Poor Madeleine threw a frightened look toward her husband. What did the little one say? Was it the delirium, the frightful delirium, which had come back again? Boum-Boum! She did not know what that meant, and she was afraid of these singular words which the child repeated with a sickly persistence as if, not having dared until now to formulate his dream, he grasped the present time with invincible obstinacy: “Yes, Boum-Boum! Boum-Boum! I want Boum-Boum!” The mother had seized Jacques’s hand and spoke very low, as if demented. “What does that mean, Jacques? He is lost!” But the father had on his rough, working man’s face a smile almost happy, but astonished too, the smile of a condemned man who foresees a possibility of liberty. Boum-Boum! He remembered well the morning of Easter Monday when he had taken François to the circus. He had still in his ears the child’s outbursts of joy, the happy laugh of the amused boy, when the clown, the beautiful clown, all spangled with gold and with a great gilded butterfly sparkling, many-colored, on the back of his black costume, skipped across the track, gave the trip to a rider or held himself motionless and stiff on the sand, his head down and his feet in the air. Or again he tossed up to the chandelier some soft, felt hats which he caught adroitly on his head, where they formed, one by one, a pyramid; and at each jest, like a refrain brightening up his intelligent and droll face, he uttered the same cry, repeated the same word, accompanied now and then by a burst from the orchestra: Boum-Boum! Boum-Boum! and each time that it rang out, Boum-Boum, the audience burst out into hurrahs and the little one joined in with his hearty, little laugh. Boum-Boum! It was this Boum-Boum, it was the clown of the circus, it was this favorite of a large part of the city that little François wished to see and to have and whom he could not have and could not see since he was lying here without strength in his white bed. In the evening Jacques Legrand brought the child a jointed clown, all stitched with spangles, which he had bought in a passageway and which was very expensive. It was the price of four of his working days! But he would have given twenty, thirty, he would have given the price of a year’s labor to bring back a smile to the pale lips of the sick child. The child looked at the plaything a moment as it glistened on the white cover of the bed, then said, sadly: “It is not Boum-Boum!—I want to see Boum-Boum!” Ah! if Jacques could have wrapped him up in his blankets, could have carried him to the circus, could have shown him the clown dancing under the lighted chandelier and have said to him, Look! He did better, Jacques, he went to the circus, demanded the address of the clown, and timidly, his legs shaking with fear, he climbed, one by one, the steps which led to the apartment of the artist, at Montmartre. It was very bold this that Jacques was going to do! But after all the comedians go to sing and recite their monologues in drawing-rooms, at the houses of the great lords. Perhaps the clown—oh! if he only would—would consent to come and say good-day to François. No matter, how would they receive him, Jacques Legrand, here at Boum-Boum’s house? He was no longer Boum-Boum! He was Monsieur Moreno, and, in the artistic dwelling, the books, the engravings, the elegance was like a choice decoration around the charming man who received Jacques in his office like that of a doctor. Jacques looked, but did not recognize the clown, and turned and twisted his felt hat between his fingers. The other waited. Then the father excused himself. “It was astonishing what he came there to ask, it could not be—pardon, excuse—But in short, it was concerning the little one—A nice little one, monsieur. And so intelligent! Always the first at school, except in arithmetic, which he did not understand—A dreamer, this little one, do you see! Yes, a dreamer. And the proof—wait—the proof—” Jacques now hesitated, stammered; but he gathered up his courage and said bruskly: “The proof is that he wishes to see you, that he thinks only of you, and that you are there before him like a star which he would like to have, and that he looks—” When he had finished the father was deadly pale and he had great drops on his forehead. He dared not look at the clown who remained with his eyes fixed on the workman. And what was he going to say, this Boum-Boum? Was he going to dismiss him, take him for a fool and put him out the door? “You live?” asked Boum-Boum. “Oh! very near! Street of the Abessess!” “Come!” said the other. “Your boy wants to see Boum-Boum? Ah, well, he is going to see Boum-Boum.” When the door opened and showed the clown, Jacques Legrand cried out joyfully to his son: “François, be happy, child! See, here he is, Boum-Boum!” A look of great joy came over the child’s face. He raised himself on his mother’s arm and turned his head toward the two men who approached, questioning, for a moment, who it was by the side of his father; this gentleman in an overcoat, whose good, pleasant face he did not know. When they said to him: “It is Boum-Boum!” he slowly fell back on the pillow and remained there, his eyes fixed, his beautiful large, blue eyes, which looked beyond the walls of the little room, and were always seeking the spangles and the butterfly of Boum-Boum, like a lover who pursues his dream. “No,” replied the child with a voice which was no longer dry, but full of despair, “no, it is not Boum-Boum.” The clown, standing near the little bed, threw upon the child an earnest look, very grave, but of an inexpressible sweetness. He shook his head, looked at the anxious father, the grief-stricken mother, and said, smiling, “He is right, this is not Boum-Boum!” and then he went out. “I can not see him, I will never see Boum-Boum any more!” repeated the child, whose little voice spoke to the angels. “Boum-Boum is perhaps there, there, where little François will soon go.” And suddenly—it was only a half-hour since the clown had disappeared—the door opened quickly, and in his black, spangled clothes, his yellow cap on his head, the gilded butterfly on his breast and on his back, with a smile as big as the mouth of a money-box and a powdered face, Boum-Boum, the true Boum-Boum, the Boum-Boum of the circus, the Boum-Boum of the popular neighborhood, the Boum-Boum of little François—Boum-Boum appeared. Lying on his little white bed the child clapped his thin, little hands, laughing, crying, happy, saved, with a joy of life in his eyes, and cried “Bravo!” with his seven-year gaiety, which all at once kindled up like a match: “Boum-Boum! It is he, it is he, this time! Here is Boum-Boum! Long live Boum-Boum! Good-day, Boum-Boum.” And when the doctor came back, he found, seated by little François’s bedside, a clown with a pale face, who made the little one laugh again and again, and who said to the child while he was stirring a piece of sugar into a cup of medicine: “Thou knowest, if thou dost not drink, little François, Boum-Boum will not come back any more.” So the child drank. “Is it not good?” “Very good!—thanks, Boum-Boum!” “Doctor,” said the clown to the doctor, “do not be jealous—It seems to me that my grimaces will do him as much good as your prescriptions!” The father and the mother wept, but this time from joy. Until little François was on his feet again a carriage stopped every day before the dwelling of a workman in the street of the Abessess, at Montmartre, and a man got out with a gay powdered face, enveloped in an overcoat with the collar turned back, and underneath it one could see a clown’s costume. “What do I owe you, monsieur?” said Jacques, at last, to the master-clown when the child took his first walk, “for now I owe you something!” The clown stretched out his two soft, Herculean hands to the parents. “A shake of the hand!” said he. Then placing two great kisses on the once more rosy cheeks of the child: “And (laughing) permission to put on my visiting-card: “Boum-Boum Acrobatic Doctor and Physician in ordinary to little François!”