Despite the coldness of the day and against the advice of the house-surgeon, ‘Blue Eyes’ vacates the hospital bed where she has been recovering to put flowers on the grave of her lover on All Saints Day. It is almost a year since he died, and in answer to the house-surgeon’s question she explains that her lover was executed for murder. If she doesn’t put flowers on his grave, no one else will.
As she nears the cemetery she passes the flower-sellers, but she has no money and her heart almost breaks as she thinks of the bare mound of his grave. But there is always a way for a girl to make money on these streets.
Elegantly and sparely written, the narrative avoids obvious traps like a careful walker avoiding puddles, to conclude on a note of ghastly irony. Hugh Lamb describes this as ‘one of the finest examples ever of the French speciality, the conte cruel.’
From Maurice Level's collection Crises (1920); reprinted in Hugh Lamb's Return From The Dead (1976)
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