Then the woman, in a broken, trembling voice, began: “My good people, I have come to see you, because I should like-I should like to take-your little boy with me-” One morning, on arriving, her husband alighted with her, and without stopping to talk to the children, who now knew her well, she entered the farmer's cottage.
She returned again made the acquaintance of the parents, and reappeared every day with her pockets full of dainties and pennies. Springing down from the carriage, she ran toward the children, took one of the two youngest-a Tuvache child-and lifting it up in her arms, she kissed him passionately on his dirty cheeks, on his tousled hair daubed with earth, and on his little hands, with which he fought vigorously, to get away from the caresses which displeased him. The young woman continued: “I must hug them! Oh, how I should like to have one of them-that one there-the little tiny one!” One afternoon, in the month of August, a phaeton stopped suddenly in front of the cottages, and a young woman, who was driving the horses, said to the gentleman sitting at her side: “Oh, look at all those children, Henri! How pretty they are, tumbling about in the dust, like that!” The first of the two cottages, as you came up from the bathing beach, Rolleport, was occupied by the Tuvaches, who had three girls and one boy the other house sheltered the Vallins, who had one girl and three boys. The two mothers could hardly distinguish their own offspring among the lot, and as for the fathers, they were altogether at sea. The two peasants labored hard on the unproductive soil to rear their little ones, and each family had four. The two cottages stood beside each other at the foot of a hill near a little seashore resort.
Adapted from “The Adopted Son” by Guy de Maupassant
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