Читать книгу Twenty Prose Poems - Charles Baudelaire - Страница 6

THE LITTLE, shrivelled old woman felt quite overjoyed when she saw the pretty child whom everyone wished to amuse, whom everyone tried to please; that pretty creature, so fragile, like herself, the little old woman, and, like her also, without teeth and without hair.

And she approached the child, wishing to smile at it and make faces pleasantly.

But the terrified child struggled against the caresses of the good, decrepit woman, and filled the house with its yelping.

Then the kind old woman retired into her eternal solitude, and cried in a corner, saying to herself : ‘Oh! for us wretched old females, the age when we could please, if only the innocent, is past; and we fill with horror the little children whom we wish to love!’