Little Pierre - v. 2 Author:Anatole France Volume: v. 2 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: Dodd, Mead Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com wher... more »e you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV LITTLE PIERRE GETS INTO THE NEWSPAPERS O long as I was unable to read, newspapers had a mysterious attraction for me. When I used to see my father spreading out their big sheets covered all over with little black signs, when passages were read aloud and connected ideas were produced from those same signs, it seemed to me as though I were a party to some work of magic. From this sheet so thin and covered with lines so tiny, lines that had no signification in my eyes, there issued tidings of crimes, disasters, adventures, festivals -- of Napoleon Bonaparte escaping from the fort of Ham; of Tom Thumb dressed up like a general; of the stalled Ox Dagobert being led through Paris; of the murder of the Duchesse de Praslin. All these things were contained in a single sheet of paper, all these things and numberless others besides, things not so solemn but more homely, whereby my curiosity was aroused. There were "Misters" who gave blows or received them, who got run over by vehicles, who fell off roofs or picked up purses and took them to thepolice. How came it that there were all these "Misters" about when I never set eyes on a single one? I tried, but in vain, to imagine what a "Mister" was like. I asked people about it, but never got any satisfactory answer. In those far distant times Madame Mathias used to come to our house to help Melanie, with whom she didn't get on at all well. Madame Mathias was grim, hot-tempered and easily ruffled, but she took a lot of interest in me. She invented all sorts of subtle devices to make a better boy of me. She pr...« less