THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 Professor Henry J. Quayle 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mrs Fannie Q. Paul 
 
 Mrs Annie 'Q. Hadley 
 
 Mrs Elizabeth Q. Flowers
 
 MASTER- TALES 
 
 TEN TALES 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCOIS COPPEE 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 WALTER LEARNED 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 I LLU STRAT ED BY 
 
 ALBERT E. STERNER 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON
 
 C E A 
 I 
 
 Copyright, 1890, by HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 
 All rigfits ratntd.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES 3 
 
 TWO CLOWNS 33 
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH 5 1 
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL 73 
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE 9! 
 
 AT TABLE 119 
 
 AN ACCIDENT 139 
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF . . .163 
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER 177 
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER ..... 203
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE conte is a form of fiction in which the 
 French have always delighted and in which 
 they have always excelled, from the days of 
 the jongleurs and the trouveres, past the peri- 
 ods of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to 
 the present. The conte is a tale, something 
 more than a sketch, it may be, and something 
 less than a short story. In verse it is at times 
 but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may at- 
 tain almost to the direct swiftness of a bal- 
 lad. The Canterbury Tales are contes, most 
 of them, if not all ; and so are some of the 
 Tales of a Wayside Inn. The free-and- 
 easy tales of Prior were written in imita- 
 tion of the French conte en vers ; and that, 
 likewise, was the model of more than one of 
 the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin 
 Dobson.
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 No one has succeeded more abundantly 
 in the conte en vers than M. Coppee. Where 
 was there ever anything better of its kind 
 than L Enfant de la Ballet that gentle 
 portrait of the Infant Phenomenon, framed 
 in a chain of occasional gibes at the sordid 
 ways of theatrical managers and at their hos- 
 tility towards poetic plays. Where is there 
 anything of a more simple pathos than 
 Z' Epavel that story of a sailor's son 
 whom the widowed mother strives vainly to 
 keep from the cruel waves that killed his 
 father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that 
 although the ship M. Coppee loves best is 
 that which sails the blue shield of the City 
 of Paris, he knows the sea also, and he de- 
 picts sailors with affectionate fidelity.) But 
 whether at the sea-side by chance, or more 
 often in the streets of the city, the poet seeks 
 out for the subject of his story some incident 
 of daily occurrence made significant by his 
 interpretation ; he chooses some character 
 common-place enough, but made firmer by 
 conflict with evil and by victory over self. 
 Those whom he puts into his poems are still 
 the humble, the forgotten, the neglected, the 
 unknown ; and it is the feelings and the
 
 INTRODUCTION. XI 
 
 struggles of these that he tells us, with no 
 maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead 
 set at our sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. 
 Stowe gave to Uncle Tom's Cabin would 
 serve to cover most of M. Coppee's contes 
 either in prose or verse ; they are nearly 
 all pictures of life among the lowly. But 
 there is no forcing of the note in his paint- 
 ing of poverty and labor ; there is no harsh 
 juxtaposition of the blacks and the whites. 
 The tone is always manly and wholesome. 
 
 La Marchande de "Journaiix and the other 
 little masterpieces of story - telling in verse 
 are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all 
 poems but a lyric or two, now and then, 
 by a happy accident. A translated poem is 
 a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it 
 brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee 
 has written in prose a true poet's prose, 
 nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm these 
 can be Englished by taking thought and 
 time and pains, without which a translation 
 is always a betrayal. Ten of these tales 
 have been rendered into English by Mr. 
 Learned ; and the ten chosen for translation 
 are among the best of the two score and 
 more of M. Coppee's contes en prose. These
 
 Xli INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ten tales are fairly representative of his range 
 and variety. Compare, for example, the pas- 
 sion in " The Foster Sister," pure, burning 
 and fatal, with the Black Forest naivete of 
 "The Sabots of Little Wolff." Contrast the 
 touching pathos of "The Substitute," poig- 
 nant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which 
 the man who has conquered his shameful 
 past goes back willingly to the horrible life 
 he has fled from that he may save from a 
 like degradation and from an inevitable mor- 
 al decay the one friend he has in the world, 
 all unworthy as this friend is contrast 
 this with the story of the gigantic deeds 
 " My Friend Meurtrier " boasts about unceas- 
 ingly, not knowing that he has been discov- 
 ered in his little round of daily domestic 
 duties, making the coffee of his good old 
 mother and taking her poodle out fpr a walk. 
 Among these ten there are tales of all 
 sorts, from the tragic adventure of "An Acci- 
 dent" to the pendent portraits of the "Two 
 Clowns," cutting in its sarcasm, but not 
 bitter from "The Captain's Vices," which 
 suggests at once George Eliot's Silas Mar- 
 ner and Mr. Austin Dobson's Tale of Poly- 
 pheme, to the sombre revery of the poet "At
 
 INTRODUCTION. Xlli 
 
 Table," a sudden and searching light cast on 
 the labor and misery which underlies the lux- 
 ury of our complex modern existence. Like 
 "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral " is a pict- 
 ure more than it is a story; it is a marvellous 
 reproduction of the factitious emotion of the 
 good-natured stage-folk, who are prone to 
 overact even their own griefs and joys. "A 
 Dramatic Funeral " seems to me always as 
 though it might be a painting of M. Jean 
 Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as 
 certain stories of M. Guy de Maupassant 
 inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. 
 Forain's sketches in black-and-white. 
 
 An ardent admirer of the author of the sto- 
 ries in The Odd Number has protested to me 
 that M. Coppee is not an etcher like M. de 
 Maupassant, but rather a painter in water- 
 colors. And why not ? Thus might we call 
 M. Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so 
 adroitly does he suggest the very bloom of 
 color. No doubt M. Coppee's contes have 
 not the sharpness of M. de Maupassant's, 
 nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's but what 
 of it? They have qualities of their own; they 
 have sympathy, poetry, and a power of sug- 
 gesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by
 
 those of either M. de Maupassant or M. 
 Daudet. M. Coppee's street views in Paris, 
 his interiors, his impressionist sketches of 
 life under the shadows of Notre Dame, are 
 convincingly successful. They are intensely 
 to be enjoyed by those of us who take the 
 same keen delight in the varied phases of 
 life in New York. They are not, to my mind, 
 really rivalled either by those of M. de Mau- 
 passant, who is a Norman by birth and a 
 nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, 
 who is a native of Provence, although now 
 for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Cop- 
 pee is a Parisian from his youth up, and even 
 in prose he is a poet ; perhaps this is why 
 his pictures of Paris are unsurpassable in 
 their felicity and in their verity. 
 
 It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a 
 finer morality in M. CoppeVs work than in 
 M. de Maupassant's or in M. Daudet's or in 
 that of almost any other of the Parisian 
 story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we 
 breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more 
 wholesome and more bracing. It is not 
 that M. Coppee probably thinks of ethics 
 rather than aesthetics ; in this respect his at- 
 titude is undoubtedly that of the others ;
 
 INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 there is no sermon in his song or at least 
 none for those who will not seek it for them- 
 selves ; there is never a hint of a preach- 
 ment. But for all that I have found in his 
 work a trace of the tonic morality which in- 
 heres in Moliere, for example, also a Parisian 
 by birth, and also in Rabelais, despite his 
 disguising grossness. This finer morality 
 comes possibly from a wider and a deeper 
 survey of the universe ; and it is as different 
 as possible from the morality which is exter- 
 nally applied and which always punishes 
 the villain in the fifth act. 
 
 It is of good augury for our own letters 
 that the best French fiction of to-day is get- 
 ting itself translated in the United States, 
 and that the liking for it is growing apace. 
 Fiction is more consciously an art in France 
 than anywhere else perhaps partly because 
 the French are now foremost in nearly all 
 forms of artistic endeavor. In the short 
 story especially, in the tale, in the conte, their 
 supremacy is incontestable ; and their skill 
 is shown and their aesthetic instinct exem- 
 plified partly in the sense of form, in the 
 constructive method, which underlies the 
 best short stories, however trifling these may
 
 XVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 appear to be, and partly in the rigorous sup- 
 pression of non-essentials, due in a measure, 
 it may be, to the example of Me'rimee. That 
 is an example we in America may study to 
 advantage ; and from the men who are writ- 
 ing fiction in France we may gain much. 
 From the British fiction of this last quarter 
 of the nineteenth century little can be learned 
 by any one less by us Americans in whom 
 the English tradition is still dominant. When 
 we look to France for an exemplar we may 
 find a model of value, but when we copy an 
 Englishman we are but echoing our own 
 faults. " The truth is," said Mr. Lowell in 
 his memorable essay On a Certain Conde- 
 scension in Foreigners " the truth is that we 
 are worth nothing except so far as we have 
 disinfected ourselves of Anglicism." 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS.
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES,
 
 CAPTAIN) 1 
 
 I. 
 
 IT is of no importance, 
 the name of the little pro- 
 vincial city where Captain 
 Mercadier twenty- six 
 years of service, twenty- 
 two campaigns, and three 
 wounds installed him- 
 self when 
 he was re- 
 tired on a 
 pension. 
 
 *,"
 
 4 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 It was quite like all those other little vil- 
 lages which solicit without obtaining it a 
 branch of the railway ; just as if it were not 
 the sole dissipation of the natives to go ev- 
 ery day, at the same hour, to the Place de 
 la Fontaine to see the diligence come in at 
 full gallop, with its gay cracking of the whips 
 and clang of bells. 
 
 It was a place of three thousand inhabi- 
 tants ambitiously denominated souls in the 
 statistical tables and was exceedingly proud 
 of its title of chief city of the canton. It 
 had ramparts planted with trees, a pretty 
 river with good fishing, a church of the 
 charming epoch of the flamboyant Gothic, 
 disgraced by a frightful station of the cross, 
 brought directly from the quarter of Saint 
 Sulpice. Every Monday its market was gay 
 with great red and blue umbrellas, and 
 countrymen filled its streets in carts and 
 carriages. But for the rest of the week it 
 retired with delight into that silence and
 
 THE CAPTAIN S VICES. 5 
 
 solitude which made it so dear to its rustic 
 population. Its streets were paved with 
 cobble-stones; through the windows of the 
 ground -floor one could see samplers and 
 wax-flowers under glass domes, and, through 
 the gates of the gardens, statuettes of Napo- 
 leon in shell-work. The principal inn was 
 naturally called the Shield of France ; and 
 the town -clerk made rhymed acrostics for 
 the ladies of society. 
 
 Captain Mercadier had chosen that place 
 of retreat for the simple reason that he had 
 been born there, and because, in his noisy 
 childhood, he had pulled down the signs and 
 plugged up the bell-buttons. He returned 
 there to find neither relations, nor friends, 
 nor acquaintances; and the recollections of 
 his youth recalled only the angry faces of 
 shop-keepers who shook their fists at him 
 from the shop -doors, a catechism which 
 threatened him with hell, a school which 
 predicted the scaffold, and, finally, his de-
 
 6 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 parture for his regiment, hastened by a pa- 
 ternal malediction. 
 
 For the Captain was not a saintly man ; 
 the old record of his punishment was black 
 with days in the guard -house inflicted for 
 breaches of discipline, absences from roll- 
 calls, and nocturnal uproars in the mess- 
 room. He had often narrowly escaped los- 
 ing his stripes as a corporal or a sergeant, 
 and he needed all the chance, all the license 
 of a campaigning life to gain his first epau- 
 let. Firm and brave soldier, he had passed 
 almost all his life in Algiers at that time when 
 our foot soldiers wore the high shako, white 
 shoulder-belts and huge cartridge-boxes. 
 He had had Lamoriciere for commander. 
 The Due de Nemours, near whom he re- 
 ceived his first wound, had decorated him, and 
 when he was sergeant-major, Pere Bugrand 
 had called him by his name and pulled his 
 ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el- 
 Kader, bearing the scar of a yataghan stroke
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 7 
 
 on his neck, of one ball in his shoulder and 
 another in his chest; and notwithstanding 
 absinthe, duels, debts of play, and almond- 
 eyed Jewesses, he fairly won, with the point 
 of the bayonet and sabre, his grade of cap- 
 tain in the First Regiment of Sharp-shooters. 
 
 Captain Mercadier twenty-six years of 
 service, twenty -two campaigns, and three 
 wounds had just retired on his pension, 
 not quite two thousand francs, which, joined 
 to the two hundred and fifty francs from his 
 cross, placed him in that estate of honorable 
 penury which the State reserves for its old 
 servants. 
 
 His entry into his natal city was without 
 ostentation. He arrived one morning on 
 the imperiale of the diligence, chewing an 
 extinguished cigar, and already on good 
 terms with the conductor, to whom, during 
 his journey, he had related the passage of 
 the Porte de Fer; full of indulgence, more- 
 over, for the distractions of his auditor, who
 
 8 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 often interrupted the recital by some oath 
 or epithet addressed to the off mare. When 
 the diligence stopped he threw on the side- 
 walk his old valise, covered with railway 
 placards as numerous as the changes of 
 garrison that its proprietor had made, and 
 the idlers of the neighborhood were aston- 
 ished to see a man with a decoration a 
 rare thing in the province offer a glass of 
 wine to the coachman at the bar of an inn 
 near by. 
 
 He installed himself at once. In a house 
 in the outskirts, where two captive cows 
 lowed, and fowls and ducks passed and re- 
 passed through the gate -way, a furnished 
 chamber was to let. Preceded by a mas- 
 culine-looking woman, the Captain climbed 
 the stair-way with its great wooden balusters, 
 perfumed by a strong odor of the stable, and 
 reached a great tiled room, whose walls were 
 covered with a bizarre paper representing, 
 printed in blue on a white background and
 
 THE CAPTAIN S VICES. 9 
 
 repeated infinitely, the picture of Joseph Po- 
 niatowski crossing the Elster on his horse. 
 This monotonous decoration, recalling nev- 
 ertheless our military glories, fascinated the 
 Captain without doubt, for, without concern- 
 ing himself with the uncomfortable straw 
 chairs, the walnut furniture, or the little bed 
 with its yellowed curtain, he took the room 
 without hesitation. A quarter of an hour 
 was enough to empty his trunk, hang up his 
 clothes, put his boots in a corner, and or- 
 nament the wall with a trophy composed of 
 three pipes, a sabre, and a pair of pistols. 
 After a visit to the grocer's, over the way, 
 where he bought a pound of candles and 
 a bottle of rum, he returned, put his pur- 
 chase on the mantle-shelf, and looked around 
 him with an air of perfect satisfaction. And 
 then, with the promptitude of the camp, he 
 shaved without a mirror, brushed his coat, 
 cocked his hat over his ear, and went for a 
 walk in the village in search of a cafe.
 
 10 TEN TALES BY'FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 II. 
 
 It was an inveterate habit of the Captain 
 to spend much of his time at a cafe. It was 
 there that he satisfied at the same time the 
 three vices which reigned supreme in his 
 heart tobacco, absinthe, and cards. It was 
 thus that he passed his life, and he could 
 have drawn a plan of all the places where 
 he had ever been stationed by their tobacco 
 shops, cafes, and military clubs. He never 
 felt himself so thoroughly at ease as when 
 sitting on a worn velvet bench before a 
 square of green cloth near a heap of beer- 
 mugs and saucers. His cigar never seemed 
 good unless he struck his match under the 
 marble of the table, and he never failed, 
 after hanging his hat and his sabre on a 
 hat-hook and settling himself comfortably, 
 by unloosing one or two buttons of his coat, 
 to breathe a profound sigh of relief, and ex- 
 claim,
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. it 
 
 " That is better !" 
 
 His first care was, therefore, to find an es- 
 tablishment which he could frequent, and 
 after having gone around the village with- 
 out finding anything that suited him, he 
 stopped at last to regard with the eye of a 
 connoisseur the Cafe Prosper, situated at 
 the corner of the Place du Marche and the 
 Rue de la Pavoisse. 
 
 It was not his ideal. Some of the details 
 of the exterior were too provincial : the 
 waiter, in his black apron, for example, the 
 little stands in their green frames, the foot- 
 stools, and the wooden tables covered with 
 waxed cloth. But the interior pleased the 
 Captain. He was delighted upon his en- 
 trance by the sound of the bell which was 
 touched by the fair and fleshy dame du 
 comptoir, in her light dress, with a poppy- 
 colored ribbon in her sleek hair. He sa- 
 luted her gallantly, and believed that she 
 sustained with sufficient majesty her trium-
 
 12 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 phal place between two piles of punch-bowls 
 properly crowned by billiard-balls. He 
 ascertained that the place was cheerful, 
 neat, and strewn evenly with yellow sand. 
 He walked around it, looking at himself in 
 the glasses as he passed; approved the pan- 
 els where guardsmen and amazons were 
 drinking champagne in a landscape filled 
 with red holly-hocks ; called for his absinthe, 
 smoked, found the divan soft and the ab- 
 sinthe good, and was indulgent enough not 
 to complain of the flies who bathed them- 
 selves in his glass with true rustic familiarity. 
 
 Eight days later he had become one of 
 the pillars of the Cafe Prosper. 
 
 They soon learned his punctual habits 
 and anticipated his wishes, while he, in turn, 
 lunched with the patrons of the place a 
 valuable recruit for those who haunted the 
 cafe, folks oppressed by the tedium of a 
 country life, for whom the arrival of that 
 new-comer, past master in all games, and
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 
 
 an admirable raconteur of his wars and his 
 loves, was a true stroke of good -fortune. 
 The Captain himself was delighted to tell his 
 stories to folks who were still ignorant of his 
 repertoire. There were ful- 
 ly six months before him in 
 which to tell of his games, 
 his feats, his battles, the 
 retreat of Constantine, the 
 capture of Bou-Maza, and 
 the officers' receptions 
 with the concomitant in- 
 toxication of rum-punch. 
 
 Human weakness ! He 
 was by no means sorry, on 
 his part, to be something 
 of an oracle ; he from whom the sub-lieu- 
 tenants, new-comers at Saint-Cyr, fled dis- 
 mayed, fearing his long stories. 
 
 His usual auditors were the keeper of 
 the cafe', a stupid and silent beer-cask, al- 
 ways in his sleeved vest, and remarkable
 
 14 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 only for his carved pipe ; the bailiff, a scof- 
 fer, dressed invariably in black, scorned for 
 his inelegant habit of carrying off what re- 
 mained of his sugar ; the 
 town-clerk, the gentleman 
 of acrostics, a person of 
 much amiability and a fee- 
 ble constitution, who sent 
 to the illustrated journals 
 solutions of enigmas and rebuses ; 
 and, lastly, the veterinary surgeon of 
 the place, the only one who, from his 
 position of atheist and democrat, was al- 
 lowed to contradict the Captain. This prac- 
 titioner, a man with tufted whiskers and 
 eye-glasses, presided over the radical com- 
 mittee of electors, and when the curd took 
 up a little collection among his devotees for 
 the purpose of adorning his church with 
 some frightful red and gilded statues, de- 
 nounced, in a letter to the Sihle, the cu- 
 pidity of the Jesuits.
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 15 
 
 The Captain having gone out one evening 
 for some cigars after an animated political 
 discussion, the aforesaid veterinary grum 
 bled to himself certain phrases of heavy ir- 
 ritation concerning "coming to the point," 
 and " a mere fencing-master," and " cutting 
 a figure." But as the object of these vague 
 menaces suddenly returned, whistling a 
 march and beating time with his cane, the 
 incident was without result. 
 
 In short, the group lived harmoniously 
 together, and willingly permitted themselves 
 to be presided over by the new-comer, whose 
 white beard and martial bearing were quite 
 impressive. And the small city, proud of so 
 many things, was also proud of its retired 
 Captain. 
 
 III. 
 
 Perfect happiness exists nowhere, and 
 Captain Mercadier, who believed that he
 
 1 6 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 had found it at the Cafe Prosper, soon re 
 covered from his illusion. 
 
 For one thing, on Mondays, the market- 
 day, the Cafe Prosper was untenantable. 
 
 From early morning it was overrun with 
 truck -peddlers, farmers, and poultrymen. 
 Heavy men with coarse voices, red necks, 
 and great whips in their hands, wearing blue 
 blouses and otter-skin caps, bargaining over 
 their cups, stamping their feet, striking their 
 fists, familiar with the servant, and bungling 
 at billiards. 
 
 When the Captain came, at eleven o'clock, 
 for his first glass of absinthe, he found this 
 crowd gathered, and already half-drunk, or- 
 dering a quantity of lunches. His usual place 
 was taken, and he was served slowly and 
 badly. The bell was continually sounding, 
 and the proprietor and the waiter, with nap- 
 kins under their arms, were running distract- 
 edly hither and thither. In short, it was an ill- 
 omened day, which upset his entire existence.
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 17 
 
 Now, one Monday morning, when he was 
 resting quietly at home, being sure that the 
 cafe would be much too full and busy, the 
 mild radiance of the autumn sun persuaded 
 
 him to go down and sit upon the stone seat 
 by the side of the house. He was sitting 
 there, depressed and smoking a damp cigar, 
 when he saw coming down the end of the
 
 1 8 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPER. 
 
 street it was a badly paved lane leading 
 out into the country a little girl of eight or 
 ten, driving before her a half-dozen geese. 
 
 As the Captain looked carelessly at the 
 child he saw that she had a wooden leg. 
 
 There was nothing paternal in the heart 
 of the soldier. It was that of a hardened 
 bachelor. In former days, in the streets of 
 Algiers, when the little begging Arabs pur- 
 sued him with their importunate prayers, 
 the Captain had often chased them away 
 with blows from his whip ; and on those rare 
 occasions when he had penetrated the no- 
 madic household of some comrade who was 
 married and the father of a family, he had 
 gone away cursing the crying babies and 
 awkward children who had touched with their 
 greasy hands the gilding on his uniform. 
 
 But the sight of that particular infirmity, 
 which recalled to him the sad spectacle of 
 wounds and amputations, touched, on that 
 account, the old soldier. He felt almost a
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 19 
 
 constriction of the heart at the sight of that 
 sorry creature, half -clothed in her tattered 
 petticoats and old chemise, bravely running 
 along behind her geese, her bare foot in the 
 dust, and limping on her ill-made wooden 
 stump. 
 
 The geese, recognizing their home, turned 
 into the poultry-yard, and the little one was 
 about to follow them when the Captain 
 stopped her with this question : 
 
 " Eh ! little girl, what's your name ?" 
 
 " Pierette, monsieur, at your service," she 
 answered, looking at him with her great 
 black eyes, and pushing her disordered locks 
 from her forehead. 
 
 " You live in this house, then ? I haven't 
 seen you before." 
 
 " Yes, I know you pretty well, though, for 
 I sleep under the stairs, and you wake me 
 up every evening when you come home." 
 
 " Is that so, my girl ? Ah, well, I must walk 
 on my toes in future. How old are you ?"
 
 20 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 "Nine, monsieur, come All-Saints day." 
 " Is the landlady here a relative of yours ?" 
 " No, monsieur, I am in service." 
 " And they give you ?" 
 " Soup, and a bed under the stairs." 
 " And how came you to be lame like that, 
 my poor little one ?" 
 
 " By the kick of a cow when I was five." 
 " Have you a father or mother ?" 
 The child blushed under her sunburned 
 skin. "I came from the Foundling Hospi- 
 tal," she said, briefly. Then, with an awk- 
 ward courtesy, she passed limping into the 
 house, and the Captain heard, as she went 
 away on the pavement of the court, the hard 
 sound of the little wooden leg. 
 
 Good heavens ! he thought, mechanically 
 walking towards his cafe', that's not at all the 
 thing. A soldier, at least, they pack off to 
 the Invalides, with the money from his medal 
 to keep him in tobacco. For an officer, they 
 fix up a collectorship, and he marries some
 
 THE CAPTAINS VICES. 21 
 
 where in the provinces. But this poor girl, 
 with such an infirmity, that's not at all the 
 thing ! 
 
 Having established in these terms the in- 
 justice of fate, the Captain reached the 
 threshold of his dear cafe, but he saw there 
 such a mob of blue blouses, he heard such a 
 din of laughter and click of billiard-balls, 
 that he returned home in very bad humor. 
 
 His room it was, perhaps, the first time 
 that he had spent in it several hours of the day 
 looked rather shabby. His bed -curtains 
 were the color of an old pipe. The fireplace 
 was heaped with old cigar-stumps, and one 
 could have written his name in the dust on 
 the furniture. He contemplated for some 
 time the walls where the sublime lancer of 
 Leipsic rode a hundred times to a glorious 
 death. Then, for an occupation, he passed 
 his wardrobe in review. It was a lamentable 
 series of bottomless pockets, socks full of 
 holes, and shirts without buttons.
 
 22 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 "I must have a servant," he said. 
 
 Then he thought of the little lame girl. 
 
 "That's what I'll do. I'll hire the next 
 little room ; winter is coming, and the little 
 thing will freeze under the stairs. She will 
 look after my clothes and my linen and 
 keep the barracks clean. A valet, how's 
 that ?" 
 
 But a cloud darkened the comfortable pict- 
 ure. The Captain remembered that quarter- 
 day was still a long way off, and that his 
 account at the Cafe Prosper was assuming 
 alarming proportions. 
 
 " Not rich enough," he said to himself. 
 " And in the mean time they are robbing me 
 down there. That is positive. The board 
 is too high, and that wretch of a veterinary 
 plays bezique much too well. I have paid 
 his way now for eight days. Who knows ? 
 Perhaps I had better put the little one in 
 charge of the mess, soup au cafe' in the morn- 
 ing, stew at noon, and ragout every even-
 
 THE CAPTAINS VICES. 23 
 
 ing campaign life, in fact. I know all 
 about that. Quite the thing to try." 
 
 Going out he saw at once the mistress of 
 the house, a great brutal peasant, and the 
 little lame girl, who both, with pitchforks in 
 their hands, were turning over the dung-heap 
 in the yard. 
 
 " Does she know how to sew, to wash, to 
 make soup ?" he asked, brusquely. 
 
 " Who Pierette ? Why ?" 
 
 " Does she know a little of all that ?" 
 
 "Of course. She came from an asylum 
 where they learn how to take care of them- 
 selves." 
 
 " Tell me, little one," added, the Captain, 
 speaking to the child, " I am not scaring 
 you no ? Well, my good woman, will you 
 let me have her ? I want a servant." 
 
 " If you will support her." 
 
 " Then that is finished. Here are twenty 
 francs. Let her have to-night a dress and a 
 shoe. To-morrow we'll arrange the rest."
 
 24 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 And, with a friendly tap on Pierette's 
 cheek, the Captain went off, delighted that 
 everything was concluded. Possibly he 
 thought he would have to cut off some 
 glasses of beer and absinthe, and be cau- 
 tious of the veterinary's skill at bezique. 
 But that was not worth speaking of, and the 
 new arrangement would be quite the thing. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Captain, you are a coward ! 
 
 Such was the apostrophe with which the 
 caryatides of the Cafe Prosper hereafter 
 greeted the Captain, whose visits became 
 rarer day by day. 
 
 For the poor man had not seen all the 
 consequences of his good action. The sup- 
 pression of his morning absinthe had been 
 sufficient to cover the modest expense of 
 Pierette's keeping, but how many other re-
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 25 
 
 forms were needed to provide for the unfore- 
 seen expenses of his bachelor establishment ! 
 Full of gratitude, the little girl wished to 
 prove it by her zeal. Already the aspect of 
 his room was changed. The furniture was 
 dusted and arranged, the fireplace cleaned, 
 the floor polished, and spiders no longer 
 spun their webs over the deaths of Poniatow- 
 ski in the corner. When the Captain came 
 home the inviting odor of cabbage-soup sa- 
 luted him on the staircase, and the sight of 
 the smoking plates on the coarse but white 
 table-cloth, with a bunch of flowers and pol- 
 ished table-ware, was quite enough to give 
 him a good appetite. Pierette profited by 
 the good -humor of her master to confess 
 some of her secret ambitions. She wanted 
 andirons for the fireplace, where there was 
 now always a fire burning, and a mould for 
 the little cakes that she knew how to make 
 so well. And the Captain, smiling at the 
 child's requests, but charmed with the home-
 
 26 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 like atmosphere of his 
 room, promised to 
 think of it, and on the 
 morrow replaced his 
 Londres by cigars for 
 a sou each, hesitated 
 to offer five points at 
 ecarte, and refused his 
 third glass of beer or his second glass of 
 chartreuse. 
 
 Certainly the struggle was long ; it was 
 cruel. Often, when the hour came for the 
 glass that was denied him by economy, when 
 thirst seized him by the throat, the Captain 
 was forced to make an heroic effort to with- 
 draw his hand already reaching out towards 
 the swan's beak of the cafe ; many times he 
 wandered about, dreaming of the king turned 
 up and of quint and quatorze. But he al- 
 most always courageously returned home ; 
 and as he loved Pierette more through ev- 
 ery sacrifice that he made for her, he em-
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 27 
 
 braced her more fondly every day. For he 
 did embrace her. She was no longer his 
 servant. When once she stood before him 
 at the table, calling him " Monsieur," and 
 so respectful in her bearing, he could not 
 stand it, but seizing her by her two hands, 
 he said to her, eagerly : 
 
 " First embrace me, and then sit down 
 and do me the pleasure of speaking famil- 
 iarly, confound it !" 
 
 And so to-day it is accomplished. Meet- 
 ing a child has saved that man from an 
 ignominious age. 
 
 He has substituted for his old vices a 
 young passion. He adores the little lame 
 girl who skips around him in his room, 
 which is comfortable and well furnished. 
 
 He has already taught Pierette to read, 
 and, moreover, recalling his caligraphy as a 
 sergeant-major, he has set her copies in writ- 
 ing. It is his greatest joy when the child, 
 bending attentively over her paper, and some-
 
 28 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 times making a blot which she quickly licks 
 up with her tongue, has succeeded in copy- 
 ing all the letters of an interminable adverb 
 in ment. His uneasiness is in thinking that 
 he is growing old and has nothing to leave 
 his adopted child. 
 
 And so he becomes almost a miser; he 
 theorizes ; he wishes to give up his tobacco, 
 although Pierette herself fills and lights his 
 pipe for him. He counts on saving from 
 his slender income enough to purchase a 
 little stock of fancy goods. Then when he 
 is dead she can live an obscure and tranquil 
 life, hanging up somewhere in the back 
 room of the small shop an old cross of the 
 Legion of Honor, her souvenir of the Cap- 
 tain. 
 
 Every day he goes to walk with her on 
 the rampart. Sometimes they are passed by 
 folks who are strangers in the village, who 
 look with compassionate surprise at the old 
 soldier, spared from the wars, and the poor
 
 THE CAPTAIN'S VICES. 
 
 29 
 
 lame child. And he is moved oh, so pleas- 
 antly, almost to tears when one of the 
 passers-by whispers, as they pass : 
 
 " Poor father ! Yet how pretty his daugh- 
 
 ter is. 
 
 3
 
 TWO CLOWNS.
 
 PL-OWN) 
 
 SB " ~ 
 
 THE night was clear and 
 glittering with stars, and there 
 was a crowd upon the market-place. They 
 crowded in gaping delight around the tent 
 of some strolling acrobats, where red and 
 smoking lanterns lighted the performance 
 which was just beginning. Rolling their 
 muscular limbs in dirty wraps, and decorat- 
 ed from head to foot with tawdry ruffles of 
 fur, the athletes four boyish ruffians with 
 vulgar heads were ranged in line before 
 the painted canvas which represented their 
 exploits ; they stood there with their heads 
 down, their legs apart, and their muscular
 
 34 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 arms crossed upon their chests. Near them 
 the marshal of the establishment, an old 
 sub-officer, with the drooping mustache of 
 a brandy-drinker, belted in at the waist, a 
 heart of red cloth on his leather breastplate, 
 leaned on a pair of foils. The feminine 
 attraction, a rose in her hair, with a man's 
 overcoat protecting her against the fresh- 
 ness of the evening air over her ballet- 
 dancer's dress, played at the same time the 
 cymbals and the big bass-drum a desperate 
 accompaniment to three measures of a polka, 
 always the same, which were murdered by a 
 blind clarionet player; and the ringmaster, 
 a sort of Hercules with the face of a gal- 
 ley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers, roar- 
 ed out his furious appeal in a loud voice. 
 Mixed with the crowd of loafers, soldiers, 
 and women, I regarded the abject spectacle 
 with disgust the last vestige of the Olympic 
 games. 
 
 Suddenly the music ceased, and the crowd
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 
 
 35 
 
 broke into roars of laughter. The clown had 
 just made his appearance. 
 
 He wore the ordinary costume of his kind, 
 the short vest and many-colored stockings 
 of the peasants of the opera comique, the 
 three horns turned 
 backward, the red wig 
 with its turned -up 
 queue and its butter- 
 fly on the end. He 
 
 was a young man, but 
 alas, his face, whit- 
 ened with flour, was 
 already seamed with 
 
 vice. Planting himself before the public, 
 and opening his mouth in a silly grin, he 
 showed bleeding gums almost devoid of 
 teeth. The ringmaster kicked him violent- 
 ly from behind. 
 
 " Come in," he said, tranquilly. 
 
 Then the traditional dialogue, punctuated 
 by slaps in the face, began between the
 
 36 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 mountebank and his clown, and the entire 
 audience applauded these souvenirs of the 
 classic farce, fallen from the theatre to the 
 stage of the mountebank, and whose humor, 
 coarse but pungent, seemed a drunken echo 
 of the laughter of Moliere. The clown ex- 
 erted his low talent, throwing out at each 
 moment some low jest, some immodest pun, 
 to which his master, simulating a prudish 
 indignation, responded by thumps on the 
 head. But the adroit clown excelled in the 
 art of receiving affronts. He knew to per- 
 fection how to bend his body like a bow 
 under the impulse of a kick, and having re- 
 ceived on one cheek a full-armed blow, he 
 stuffed his tongue at once in that cheek 
 and began to whine until a new blow passed 
 the artificial swelling into the other cheek. 
 Blows showered on him as thick as hail, and, 
 disappearing under a shower of slaps, the 
 flour on his face and the red powder of his 
 wig enveloped him like a cloud. At last he
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 37 
 
 exhausted all his resources of low scurrility, 
 ridiculous contortions, grotesque grimaces, 
 pretended aches, falls at full length, etc., till 
 the ringmaster, judging this gratuitous show 
 long enough, and that the public were suffi- 
 ciently fascinated, sent him off with a final 
 cuff. 
 
 Then the music began again with such 
 violence that the painted canvas trembled. 
 The clown, having seized the sticks of a 
 drum fixed on one of the beams of the scaf- 
 folding, mingled a triumphant rataplan with 
 the bombardment of the bass -drum, the 
 cracked thunder of the cymbals, and the 
 distracted wail of the clarionet. The ring- 
 master, roaring again with his heavy voice, 
 announced that the show was about to be- 
 gin, and, as a sign of defiance, he threw two 
 or three old fencing -gloves among his fel- 
 low-wrestlers. The crowd rushed into the 
 tent, and soon only a small group of loungers 
 remained in front of the deserted stage.
 
 38 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 I was just going off, when I noticed by 
 my side an old woman who looked with 
 strange persistence at the empty stage where 
 the red lights were still burning. She wore 
 the linen bonnet and the crossed fichu of 
 the poorer class of women, and her whole 
 appearance was that of neatness and hon- 
 esty. Asking myself what powerful interest 
 could hold her in such a place, I looked at 
 her with more attention, and I saw that her 
 eyes were full of tears, and that her hands, 
 which she had crossed over her breast, were 
 trembling with emotion. 
 
 " What is the matter with you ?" I said, 
 coming near to her, impelled by an instinc- 
 tive sympathy. 
 
 "The matter, good sir?" cried the old 
 woman, bursting into tears. "Passing by 
 this market-place oh, quite by chance, I 
 tell you (I have no heart for pleasure) pass- 
 ing before that dreadful tent, I have just 
 seen in the wretch who has received all those
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 39 
 
 blows my only son, sir, my sole child ! It is 
 the grief of my life, do you see ? I never 
 knew what had become of him since oh, 
 since my poor husband sent him away to 
 sea as a cabin-boy. He was apprenticed to 
 an ironmonger, sir. He robbed his master 
 he, the son of two honest people. As for 
 me, I would have pardoned him. You know 
 what mothers are. But my man, when they 
 came and told him that his son had stolen, 
 he was like a madman. It was that that 
 killed him, I am sure. I have never seen 
 the unhappy child again. For five years I 
 have heard nothing from him. I sought to 
 deceive myself. I said experience will re- 
 form him, and there there just now " 
 
 And the poor old woman sobbed in a pit- 
 iful way. A crowd had formed. It was no 
 longer to me that she spoke ; it was not to 
 the crowd ; it was to herself, to the bitter- 
 ness of her own heart. 
 
 " He, my Adrien, the child that I nourish-
 
 40 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 ed at my own breast, a mountebank in a 
 travelling theatre ! struck and insulted be- 
 fore the whole world ! He, whom I saved 
 at four when he was so ill, a clown in a tent ! 
 He, the beautiful baby of whom I was so 
 proud, whom I made the neighbors admire 
 when he was so small that he rolled naked 
 on my knee, holding his little foot in his 
 hand !" 
 
 Suddenly at this point in her heart-break- 
 ing monologue the old woman perceived the 
 crowd listening to her. She looked on the 
 spectators in astonishment, as one who starts 
 from sleep. She recognized me who had 
 questioned her, and became frightfully pale. 
 
 " What have I said ?" she stammered. 
 " Let me pass." And brusquely putting us 
 aside with an imperious gesture, she went 
 off with a rapid step, and disappeared in the 
 night. 
 
 The adventure made a lively impression 
 on me. I thought often of it, and after that,
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 41 
 
 when I saw before my eyes some wretched 
 and degraded creature, some woman of the 
 street, trailing her light silk skirts in the flare 
 of a gas-jet, some drunken idler leaning on 
 the bar of a cafe and bending his bloated 
 face over his glass of absinthe, I have 
 thought, " Is it possible that that being can 
 ever have been a little child ?" 
 
 Now, some little time after that rencontre 
 let us be careful not to indicate the date 
 I was taken into a gallery of the Cham- 
 ber of Deputies to be present at a sensational 
 sitting. The law that they were discussing 
 on that day is of no importance, but it was 
 the old and tedious story : a Ministerial can- 
 didate, formerly in the Opposition, proposed 
 to strike a blow at some liberty I don't 
 know what which he had formerly demand- 
 ed with virulence and force. And, more 
 than that, the man in power was going to 
 forfeit his word to the tribune. In good 
 French that is called " to betray," but in
 
 42 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 parliamentary language they employ the 
 phrase, "accomplish a change of base." 
 Opinion was divided, the majority uncertain ; 
 and upon his speech would depend the po- 
 litical future of the speaker. Therefore, on 
 that day, the legislators were in their places, 
 and the Chamber did not resemble, as usual, 
 a class of noisy boys presided over by a 
 master without authority. The lunch-coun- 
 ter was deserted, and the deputies of the 
 Centre themselves were not absorbed in their 
 personal correspondence. 
 
 The orator mounted the tribune. He had 
 the commonplace figure of a verbose orator : 
 bold eye, protruding lips, as enlarged by the 
 abuse of words. He began by fingering his 
 notes with an important air, tasting the glass 
 of sweetened water, and settling himself in 
 his place ; then he started a babble of words 
 without sense, with the nauseous facility of 
 the bar ; misusing vague ideas, abstract 
 terms, and words in ly and ion, stereotyped
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 43 
 
 words, and ready-made phrases. A flattering 
 murmur greeted the end of his exordium ; 
 for the French people in general, and the 
 political world in particular, manifest a de- 
 praved taste for that sort of eloquence. En- 
 couraged, the fine speaker entered the heart 
 of his subject, and cynically sang his recan- 
 tation. He abjured none of his opinions, he 
 repudiated none of his ^cts ; he would al- 
 ways remain liberal (a blow on his chest), 
 but that which was good yesterday might 
 be dangerous to-day; truth on the other 
 side of the Alps, error on this side. The 
 forbearance of the Government was abused. 
 And he threatened the assembly; became 
 prophet; let loose the dogs of war. He 
 even risked a bit of poetry, flourished old 
 metaphors, which were worn out in the time 
 of Cicero, and compared by turn, in the 
 same phrase, his political career to a pilot, a 
 steed, and a torch. So much poetry could 
 only accentuate his success. There was a
 
 44 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 salvo of bravos, and the Opposition grum- 
 bled, foreseeing their defeat. Violent inter- 
 ruptions broke forth : furious voices recalled 
 the orator's past life, and threw as insults his 
 former professions in his face. He was un- 
 moved, and stood with a disdainful air, which 
 was very effective. 
 Then the bravos re- 
 doubled, and he 
 smiled vaguely, think- 
 ing, no doubt, of the 
 proof-sheets of the 
 Officiel, where he 
 could by-and-by in- 
 sert in the margin, 
 without too much ex- 
 aggeration, "profound sensation" and "pro- 
 longed applause." Then, when quiet was 
 re-established, sure of his success, he affect- 
 ed a serene majesty. He took up again his 
 discourse, soaring like a goose, launching 
 out with high doctrine, citing Royer-Collard.
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 45 
 
 But I heard no more. The scandalous 
 spectacle of that political mountebank, who 
 sacrificed eternal principles to the interests 
 of the day, recalled to my memory the tent 
 of the acrobats. The cold rhetoric of that 
 harangue, vibrating with neither truth nor 
 emotion, recalled to me the patter, learned 
 by heart, of the powdered clown on the 
 stage. The superb air which the orator as- 
 sumed under the rain of reproaches and in- 
 sults singularly resembled the indifference 
 of the clown to the loud slaps on his face. 
 Those sonorous phrases, whose echoes had 
 just died away, sounded as false as a stroll- 
 ing band. The word " liberty " rolled like 
 the bass-drum, "public interests" and "wel- 
 fare of the State " clanged discordantly like 
 the. cymbals, and when the comedian spoke 
 of his "patriotism" I almost heard the couac 
 of a clarionet. 
 
 A long uproar woke me from my rev- 
 ery. The speech was finished, and the
 
 46 TEN TALES BY FRANQO1S COPPEE. 
 
 orator, having descended from the rostrum, 
 was receiving congratulations. They were 
 about to vote : the urns were being pass- 
 ed around, but the result was certain, and 
 the crowd of tribunes was already dispers- 
 ing. 
 
 As I went across the vestibule I saw an 
 elderly lady dressed in black. She was 
 dressed like a wealthy bourgeoise and ap- 
 peared radiant. I stopped one of the well- 
 groomed little chaps whom one sees trot- 
 ting around in the Ministerial corridors. I 
 knew him slightly, and I asked him who 
 that lady was. 
 
 " The mother of the orator," he replied, 
 with official emotion. " She must be very 
 proud." 
 
 Very proud ! The old mother who wept 
 so bitterly in the market-place was not that ; 
 and if the mother of his future Excellency 
 had reflected, she would have regretted she 
 too the time when her boy was very small,
 
 TWO CLOWNS. 
 
 47 
 
 and rolled naked on her knee, holding his 
 little foot in his hand. 
 
 But, bah ! everything is relative, even 
 shame.
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH.
 
 I KNEW the poet Louis Miraz very well, 
 in the old times in the Latin Quarter, where 
 we used to take our meals together at a 
 cremerie on the Rue de Seine, kept by an 
 old Polish woman whom we nicknamed the 
 Princess Chocolawska, on account of the 
 enormous bowl of cre'me and chocolate 
 which she exposed daily in the show-window 
 of her shop. It was possible to dine there 
 for ten sous, with "two breads," an "ordi- 
 naire for thirty centimes," and a "small 
 coffee."
 
 52 TEN TALES BY FRANQOI3 COPPEE. 
 
 Some who were very nice spent a sou 
 more for a napkin. 
 
 Besides some young men who were des- 
 tined to become geniuses, the ordinary 
 guests of the cremerie were some poor com- 
 patriots of the proprietress, who had all to 
 some exte-nt commanded armies. There 
 was, above all, an imposing and melancholy 
 old fellow with a white beard, whose old 
 befrogged cloak, shabby boots, and old hat, 
 which looked as if snails had crawled over 
 it, presented a poem of misery, and whom 
 the other Poles treated with a marked re- 
 spect, for he had been a dictator for three 
 days. 
 
 It was, moreover, at the Princess Choco- 
 lawska's that I knew a singular fool, who 
 gained his bread by giving German lessons, 
 and declared himself, a convert to Buddhism. 
 On the mantle of the miserable room, where 
 he lived with a milliner of Saint-Germain, 
 was enthroned an ugly little Buddha in jade,
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 53 
 
 fixing his hypnotized eyes on his navel, and 
 holding his great toes in his hands. The 
 German professor accorded to the idol the 
 most profound veneration, but on the epoch 
 of quarter-day he was sometimes forced to 
 carry him to the Mont-de-piete, upon which 
 he fell into a state of sombre chagrin, and 
 did not recover his serenity until he was 
 able to make amends for his impious act. 
 He never failed, moreover, to renew his 
 avowals in prosperous times, and finally to 
 take his god out of pawn. 
 
 As to Louis Miraz, he had the deep eyes, 
 the pale complexion, and the long and di- 
 shevelled hair of all those young men who 
 come to town in third-class carriages to 
 conquer glory, who spend more for midnight 
 oil than for beefsteaks, and who, rich already 
 with some manuscripts, have thrown out to 
 great Paris from the height of some hill in 
 its environs the classic defiance of Rastig- 
 nac. At that time my hair was archaic
 
 54 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 enough in length to grease the collar of my 
 coat. Thus we were made to understand 
 each other, and Louis Miraz soon took me 
 to his attic -room in the Rue des Quatre- 
 
 Vents, where he dragged two thousand alex- 
 andrines over me. 
 
 Seriously, they were fresh and charming 
 verses, with the inspiration of spring -tide, 
 having the perfume of the first lilacs, and 
 Forest Birds (the title of that collection of 
 poems which Louis Miraz published a little
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 55 
 
 while after he read them to me) will retain 
 a place among the volumes in the first rank 
 of belles-lettres, by the side of those poets of 
 a single book of the Daudet of the Amou- 
 reuses, for example. 
 
 For Miraz wrote no more verse. A young 
 eaglet seeking the upper air, he made his 
 eyrie on the summit of Montmartre, and for 
 quite a while we lost sight of him. Then I 
 found his name again in Sunday journals 
 and reviews, when he began to write those 
 short and exquisite sketches which have 
 made his reputation. Thus five years pass- 
 ed, when I met him one day in the editor's 
 
 office of a journal for which I worked. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Each of us was as much pleased as the 
 other at thus meeting again ; and after the 
 first " What, is that you ? Is that you ?" we 
 stood facing each other, shaking hands, and 
 exposing, in a laugh of cordial delight, our 
 teeth, which in old times we used to exercise
 
 5 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 on the same crust of poverty. He had not 
 changed. He had not even sacrificed his 
 long hair, which he threw back with the 
 graceful movement of a horse who tosses 
 his mane. Only he had the clear complex- 
 ion and calm eye of a contented man, and 
 his slim figure was clad in most fashionable 
 costume. 
 
 " We won't drift apart again, will we ?" 
 said he, affectionately, taking me by the arm ; 
 and he led me out in the boulevard, where 
 the April sun gilded the young leaves of the 
 plane-trees. 
 
 Ah, happy day ! How we exhausted the 
 " Don't you remembers ?" " Do you remem- 
 ber the fried eggs which tasted of straw, and 
 the dreadful rice-milk of the Princess Cho- 
 colawska? and the melancholy air of the 
 old dictator ? and the German who used to 
 pawn his god every three months ?" At last 
 those days of hardship were finished. He 
 had from afar applauded my success, as I
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 57 
 
 had watched his. But one thing I did not 
 know, and that was that he had married a 
 woman whom he adored, and that he had a 
 charming little girl. 
 
 " Come and see them ; you shall dine 
 with me." 
 
 I let myself be persuaded, and he carried 
 me down to the Enclos des Ternes, where 
 he lived in a cottage among the trees. 
 There everything made you welcome. No 
 sooner had we opened the door of the gar- 
 den than a young dog frisked about our 
 feet. 
 
 " Down, Gavroche ! He will soil your 
 clothes." 
 
 But at the sound of the bell Madame 
 Miraz appeared at the steps with her little 
 daughter in her arms. An imposing and 
 beautiful blond, her well - moulded figure 
 wrapped in a blue gown. 
 
 " Put on a plate more. I've an old com- 
 rade with me."
 
 58 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 And the happy father, keeping his hat on 
 his head and carrying his little girl, showed 
 me all over his establishment the dining- 
 room, brightened by light bits of faience , 
 the study, abounding in books, with its win- 
 dow opening out on the green turf, so that a 
 puff of wind had strewn with rose-leaves the 
 printer's proofs which were scattered on the 
 table. 
 
 " This is only a beginning, you know. It 
 wasn't so long ago that we were working 
 for three sous a line." 
 
 And while I luxuriated under a blossom- 
 ing Judas-tree which I saw in the garden, 
 Miraz, at ease in his home, had slipped into 
 his working- vest, put on his slippers, and, 
 lying on his sofa, caught little Helen in 
 his arms to toss her in the air " Houp 
 la! Houp la!" 
 
 I do not remember ever to have had a 
 more perfect impression of contentment. 
 We dined pleasantly two good courses,
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. J9 
 
 that was all ; a dinner without pretence, 
 where we served ourselves with the pepper- 
 mill. The charming Madame Miraz pre- 
 sided with her bright smile, having her child 
 by her side in a high-chair. She spoke but 
 little, but her sweet and intelligent atten- 
 tion followed our light and paradoxical chat, 
 the good-humored fooling of men of letters ; 
 and at the dessert she took a rose from the 
 bouquet which ornamented the table, and 
 placed it in her hair near her ear with a su- 
 preme grace. She was indeed that lovely 
 and silent friend whom a dreamer requires. 
 
 We took our coffee in the study they in- 
 tended to furnish the salon very soon with 
 the price of a story to be published by Levy 
 then, as the evening was cool, a fire of 
 sticks and twigs was built, and while we 
 smoked, Miraz and I, recalling old memories, 
 the mistress of the house, holding on her 
 knees little Helen, now ready for bed, made 
 her repeat " Our Father " and " Hail Mary,"
 
 60 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 which the little one lisped, rubbing her lit- 
 tle feet together before the warm flame. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 We saw each other again, often at first, 
 then less frequently, the difficult and com- 
 plicated life of literary labor taking us each 
 his own way. So the years passed. We 
 met, shook hands. " Everything going well?" 
 "Splendidly." And that was all. Then, 
 later, I found the name of Louis Miraz but 
 rarely in the journals and periodicals. " Hap- 
 py man ; he is resting," I said to myself, re- 
 membering that he was spoken of as having 
 made a small fortune. Finally, last autumn, 
 I learned that he was seriously ill. 
 
 I hurried to see him. He still lived at 
 the Enclos des Ternes ; but on this sombre 
 day of the last of November the little house 
 seemed cold, and looked naked among the 
 leafless trees. It seemed to me shrunken 
 and diminished, like everything that we have 
 not seen for a long time.
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 6 1 
 
 The dog was probably dead, for his bark 
 no longer answered the sound of the bell 
 when I passed the little gate and entered 
 the garden, all strewn with dead leaves where 
 the night's frost had withered the last chrys- 
 anthemums. 
 
 It was not Madame Miraz she was ab- 
 sent it was Helen who received me, Helen, 
 who had grown to be a great girl of four- 
 teen, with an awkward manner. She opened 
 for me the door of her father's study, 
 and brusquely lifting her great black eye- 
 lashes, turned on me a timid and distressed 
 glance. 
 
 I found Miraz huddled in an easy-chair 
 in the corner of the fireplace, wrapped in a 
 sort of bed-gown, with gray locks streaking 
 his long hair ; and by the cold, clammy hand 
 which he reached towards me, by the pallid 
 face which he turned upon me, I knew that 
 he was lost. Horrible ! I found in my un- 
 happy comrade that worn and rained look
 
 which used to strike us formerly among the 
 poor Poles of the crdmerie. 
 
 " Ah, well, old man, things are not going 
 well ?" 
 
 " Deucedly bad, my boy," he answered, 
 with a heart-breaking smile. " I am going 
 out stupidly with consumption, as they do 
 in the fifth act, you know, when the venera- 
 ble doctor, with a head like Be'ranger, feels 
 the first walking gentleman's pulse, and lifts 
 his eyes towards heaven, saying, 'The death-
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 63 
 
 struggle approaches !' Only the difference 
 is that with me it continues ; it will not con- 
 clude, the death-struggle. Smoke away; 
 that doesn't disturb me," he added, seeing 
 me put my cigar one side, his cough sound- 
 ing like a death-rattle. 
 
 I tried to find encouraging words. I talk- 
 ed with him, holding -him by the hand and 
 patting him affectionately on the shoulder; 
 but my voice had in my own ears the empty 
 hollowness of deceit, and Miraz, looking at 
 me, seemed to pity my efforts. 
 
 I was silent. 
 
 " Look," said he, pointing to his table ; 
 "see my work -bench. For six months I 
 have not been able to write." 
 
 It was true. Nothing could be more sad 
 than that heap of papers covered with dust, 
 and in an old Roman plate there was a bun- 
 dle of pens, crusted with ink, and like those 
 trophies of rusty foils which hang on the 
 walls of old fencers.
 
 64 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 I made a new attempt to revive him. Die ! 
 at his age. Nonsense ! He wasn't taking 
 care of himself. He must pass the winter 
 in the South, drink a good draught of sun- 
 light. He could. He was easy in his mon- 
 ey matters. 
 
 But he stopped me, putting his hand on 
 my arm. 
 
 "Listen," he said, gravely, " we have seen 
 each other seldom, but you are my oldest, 
 perhaps my best, friend. You have proved 
 me pen in hand. Well, I am going to tell 
 you something in confidence, for you to keep 
 to yourself, unless it may serve on some oc- 
 casion to discourage the young literary as- 
 pirants who bring their manuscripts to you 
 always a praiseworthy action. Yes, I have 
 been successful. Yes, I have been paid a 
 franc a line. Yes, I have made money, and 
 there in that drawer are a certain num- 
 ber of yellow, green, and red papers from 
 which a bit is clipped every six months,
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 65 
 
 and which represent three or four thousand 
 francs of income. It is rare in our profes- 
 sion, and to gain that poor hoard I have 
 been obliged I, a poet to imitate the un- 
 sociable virtues of a bourgeois, know how to 
 deny a jewel to my wife, a dress to my daugh- 
 ter. At last I have that money. And I 
 often said to myself, if I should die their 
 bread is assured, and here is a little mar- 
 riage portion for Helen ! And I was con- 
 tent I was proud ! for I know them, the 
 stories of our widows and our orphans, the 
 fourpenny help of the government, the to- 
 bacco shops for six hundred francs in the 
 province, and, if the daughter is intelligent 
 and pretty like mine, the dramatic author, 
 an old friend of the father, who advises her 
 to enter the Conservatoire, and who makes 
 of her mercy of God ! that shall never be. 
 But for all that, my boy, it is necessary that 
 I should not linger. Sickness is expensive, 
 and already it has been necessary to sell
 
 66 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 one or two bonds from that drawer. To 
 seek the sunlight, as you suggest, to bask 
 like a lizard at Cannes or at Menton, one 
 more bond must go, and there would not be 
 enough to last to the end, if I should wait 
 for seven or eight years more, now that I 
 can no longer write. Happily, there is noth- 
 ing to fear. But what I have suffered since 
 I have been incapable of writing, and have 
 felt my hoard of gold shrink and diminish 
 in my hand like the Magic Skin of Balzac, is 
 frightful. Now you understand me, do you 
 not ? and you will no longer bid me take 
 care of myself. No ; if you still pray to God, 
 ask him to send me speedily to the under- 
 taker's." 
 
 * 
 # # 
 
 Fifteen days later some thirty of us fol- 
 lowed the hearse which carried Louis Miraz 
 to the Cemetery Montmartre. It had snow- 
 ed the day before, and Doctor Arnould, the 
 old frequenter of painters' studios, the friend
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 67 
 
 and physician of the dead man, walking be- 
 hind me, called in his brusque voice, 
 
 "Very commonplace, but always terrible 
 the contrast : a burial in the snow black 
 on white. The Funeral of the Poor, by the 
 late Vigneron, isn't to be ridiculed. Brr !" 
 
 At last we came to the edge of the grave. 
 The place and the time were sad. Under a 
 cloudy sky the little yew-trees, swayed by the 
 wind, threw down their burdens of melted 
 snow. The by-standers had formed a circle, 
 and were watching the grave-diggers, who 
 were lowering the coffin by cords. Near a 
 cross-bearer, whose short surplice permitted 
 the bottom of his trousers to be seen, the 
 priest waited with a finger in his book; and, 
 having grasped the rim of his hat under his 
 left arm, the orator of the Society of Men of 
 Letters already held in his black-gloved hand 
 the funeral oration, hastily patched up by the 
 aid of a comrade over a couple of glasses at 
 the corner of a cafe table.
 
 68 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 Suddenly, as the priest began his Latin 
 prayers, Doctor Arnould seized me by the 
 arm and whispered in my ear, 
 
 " You know that he killed himself ?" 
 
 I looked at him with astonishment. But 
 he pointed to the group in black, composed 
 of Madame Miraz and her daughter, who 
 were sobbing under their long veils and 
 clasping each other in a tragic embrace, and 
 he added, 
 
 " For them. Yes, for six months he threw 
 all his medicines in the fire, and designedly 
 committed all sorts of imprudences. He 
 confessed it to me before his death. I had 
 not understood it at all I, who had expect- 
 ed to prolong his life at least three years by 
 creosote. At last the other night, when it 
 was freezing cold, he left his window open, 
 as if by forgetfulness, and was taken with 
 bleeding at the lungs. Yes, that he might 
 leave bread for those two women. The 
 cure does not dream that he is blessing a
 
 A VOLUNTARY DEATH. 
 
 6 9 
 
 suicide. But what of it, my good fellow? 
 Miraz is in the paradise of the brave. The 
 details of such a death. Eh ? It is tougher 
 than the passage of the Bridge of Arcole."
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL.
 
 FOR twenty-five years he had played the 
 role of the villain at the Boulevard du Crime,* 
 and his harsh voice, his nose like an eagle's 
 beak, his eye with its savage glitter, had 
 made him a good player of such parts. For 
 twenty-five years, dressed in the cloak and 
 encircled by the fawn- colored leather belt 
 of Mordaunt, he had retreated with the step 
 of a wounded scorpion before the sword of 
 D'Artagnan ; draped in the dirty Jewish 
 gown of Rodin, he had rubbed his dry 
 
 * A nickname given to the Boulevard du Temple, 
 on account of the numerous melodramatic theatres 
 situated there.
 
 74 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 hands together, muttering the terrible "Pa- 
 tience, patience !" and, curled on the chair 
 of the Due d'Este, he had said to Lucretia 
 Borgia, with a sufficiently infernal glance, 
 "Take care and make no 
 mistake. The flagon of gold, 
 madame." When, preceded 
 by a tremolo, he made his en- 
 try in the scene, the third 
 gallery trembled, and a sigh 
 of relief greeted the moment 
 when the first walking gentleman at last 
 said to him : " Between us two, now," and 
 immolated him for the grand triumph of 
 virtue. 
 
 But this sort of success, which is only be- 
 trayed by murmurs of horror, is not of the 
 kind to make a dramatic career seductive ; 
 and besides the old actor had always hidden 
 in a corner of his heart the bucolic ideal 
 which is in the heart of almost all artists. 
 He sighed for an old age of leisure, and the
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 75 
 
 comfortable dignity of a retired shopkeeper; 
 the house in the country, where he could live 
 with his family, with melons, under an arbor ; 
 cakes and wine in the winter evenings ; his 
 daughter a scholar in a convent ; his son in 
 the uniform of the Polytechnique ; and the 
 cross of the Legion. 
 
 Now, when we had occasion to know him, 
 he had already nearly realized his dreams. 
 
 After the failure of the theatre where he 
 had been for a long time engaged, some 
 capitalists had thought of him to put the 
 enterprise on its feet again. With his system- 
 atic habits, his good sense, his thorough and 
 practical knowledge of the business, and a 
 sufficiently correct literary instinct, he be- 
 came an excellent manager. He was the 
 owner of stocks and a villa at Montmorency ; 
 his son was a student at Sainte-Barbe, and 
 his daughter had just come out of Les Oi- 
 seaux ; and if the malice of small newspa- 
 pers had retarded his nomination in the
 
 76 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 Legion of Honor by recalling every year, 
 about the first of January, his old ranting 
 on the stage, when he played formerly the 
 villains' parts, he could yet hope that it would 
 not be long before the red ribbon would 
 flourish in his button -hole. He had still 
 preserved some of the habits of a strolling 
 player, such as being very familiar with ev- 
 erybody, and dyeing his mustaches ; but as 
 he was, on the whole, good, honest, and serv- 
 iceable, he conquered the esteem and friend- 
 ship of those with whom he came in contact. 
 
 So it was with sincere grief that the whole 
 dramatic world learned one day the terrible 
 sorrow which had smitten that excellent 
 man. His daughter, a girl of seventeen, 
 had died suddenly of brain-fever. 
 
 We knew how he adored the child ; how 
 he had brought her up in the strictest princi- 
 ples of family and religion, far from the thea- 
 tre, something as Triboulet hid his daughter 
 Blanche in the little house of the cul-de-
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 
 
 77 
 
 sac Bucy. We un- 
 derstood that all the 
 hopes and ambitions 
 of the man rested on 
 the head of that 
 charming girl, who, 
 near all the corrup- 
 tion of the theatre, 
 had grown up in inno- 
 cence and purity, as 
 one sees sometimes 
 in the scanty grass of 
 the faubourgs a field- 
 flower spring up by 
 the door of a hovel. 
 
 We were among the first at the funeral, to 
 which we had been summoned by a black- 
 bordered billet. 
 
 A crowd of the people of the neighbor- 
 hood encumbered the street before the house 
 of the dead, attracted by the pomps of the 
 first-class funeral ordered by the old come-
 
 *jB TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 dian, who had preserved the taste of the mise 
 en scene even in his grief. The magnificent 
 hearse and cumbrous mourning -coaches 
 were already drawn up to the sidewalk, and 
 under the door, and in the shade of the 
 heavy fringed and silvered draperies, amid 
 the twinkling of burning candles, between 
 two priests reading prayers in their Prayer- 
 books, the form of the massive coffin could 
 be seen under its white cloth, covered with 
 Parma violets. 
 
 As we walked among the crowd we noticed 
 the groups formed of those who, like us, 
 were waiting the departure of the cortege. 
 There were almost all the actors, men and 
 women, of Paris, who had come to pay 
 their last respects to the daughter of their 
 comrade. Undoubtedly nothing could be 
 more natural ; but we experienced not the 
 less a strange sensation on seeing, around 
 the coffin of that pure young girl who had 
 breathed away her last breath in a prayer,
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 
 
 79 
 
 the gathering of all those faces marked by 
 the brand of the theatre. 
 
 They were all there : the stars, the come- 
 dians, the lovers, the traitors ; nobody was 
 
 lacking : soubrettes, duennas, coquettes, first 
 walking ladies. Wearing a sack-coat and a 
 felt hat on his long gray hair, the superb 
 adventurer of all the cloak and sword dramas
 
 8o TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 leaned against the shutter of a shop in his 
 familiar attitude, and crossed his arms to 
 show his handsome hands ; while a little 
 old fellow with the wrinkled face of a clown 
 spoke to him briskly in the broad, harsh 
 voice which had so often made us explode 
 with laughter. By the side of the aged first 
 young man, who, pinched in his scanty 
 frock-coat, and with trousers trailing under 
 foot, twirled in his gloved hands his locks 
 of over-black hair, stood a great handsome 
 fellow, beautiful as a model, who had not 
 been able to renounce even for that day his 
 eccentricities of costume, and strutted in a 
 black velvet cape and the boots of an 
 equerry. Oh, how sad, tired, and old they 
 seemed in the gray light of that winter 
 morning, all those pathetic heads, graceful 
 or laughable, which we were only in the 
 habit of seeing when transfigured by the 
 prestige of the stage. Chins had become 
 blue-black under too frequent shaving; hair
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 8 1 
 
 thin and dry under the hot 
 iron of the hair - dresser ; 
 skins rough under the inju- 
 rious action of unguents and 
 vinegar; eyes dull, burned 
 by the glare of foot-lights 
 blinded, almost fixed, like 
 those of an owl in the sun- 
 light. 
 
 The women were espe- 
 cially to be pitied. Obliged 
 by the occasion to rise at 
 a very early hour, and not 
 having had the time for a 
 careful and minute toilet, they gathered in 
 groups of four or five, chilled and shivering 
 in their fur mantles, muffs, and triple black 
 veils. Notwithstanding the hasty rouge and 
 powder of the morning, they were unrec- 
 ognizable, and it required an effort of im- 
 agination to find in them a memory of that 
 sublime seraglio of the Parisian theatres,
 
 8 2 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 exposed every evening to the desires of sev- 
 eral thousand men. On all of these charm 
 ing types appeared the mark of weariness 
 and age. Some ossified into faded skele- 
 
 tons, others grew dull with an unhealthy 
 weight of fat ; wrinkles crossed the fore- 
 heads and starred the temples ; lips were 
 livid and eyes circled with dark rings ; the
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 83 
 
 complexions were particularly frightful that 
 uniform tint, morbid and sickly, the work of 
 rouge and grease-paints. That heavy wom- 
 an, with the head and neck of a farmer's 
 wife (one almost sees a basket on her shoul- 
 der), is the terrible and fatal queen of grand, 
 romantic dramas ; and that small blonde and 
 pale creature, so faded under her laces, and 
 who would have completely filled a music- 
 teacher's carrying roll, was the artless young 
 woman whom all the vaudevillists married 
 at the denouement of their pieces. There 
 were the dying glances of the lorette in the 
 hospital, the pose of the old copyist of the 
 Louvre, and the theatrical sneer. 
 
 Soon the cabs drove up with the function- 
 aries connected with the administration of 
 the theatre, in black hats and coats, with an 
 official air of sadness ; young reporters, the 
 outflow of journalism, staring at everybody 
 and taking notes ; dramatic authors, Mon- 
 day feuilletonists in short, all of those
 
 84 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 nocturnal beings, tired and worn-out, who are 
 properly called the actives of Paris. 
 
 The groups became more compact, and 
 talked animatedly. Old friends found each 
 other ; they shook hands, and, in view of the 
 circumstances, smiled cordially, while the 
 women saluted each other through their 
 veils. 
 
 In passing, we could catch fragments of 
 conversation like this : 
 
 " When will the affair begin ?" 
 
 " Were you at the opening of the Varie'tes 
 yesterday ?" 
 
 Theatrical terms were heard " My tal 
 ents," " My charms," " My physique." Some 
 business, even, was done. A new manager 
 was quite surrounded ; an old actress organ- 
 ized her benefit. 
 
 Suddenly there was a movement in the 
 crowd. The undertaker's men had just 
 placed the coffin in the hearse, and the 
 young girls of the Sisterhood of the Virgin,
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 85 
 
 to which the dead girl had belonged, ar- 
 ranged themselves in two lines, in their 
 white veils, at the sides of the funeral-car. 
 Preceded by the master of ceremonies, in 
 silk stockings and a wand of office in his 
 hand, the poor father appeared on the pave- 
 ment in full mourning, with a white cravat, 
 broken down by grief and sustained by his 
 friends. 
 
 The procession set out and came to the 
 parish church, fortunately near. 
 
 There was a grand mass, with music which 
 was not finished. It was too warm in the 
 church stuffed with people, and the inatten- 
 tion was general. Men who recognized each 
 other saluted with a light movement of the 
 head ; conversation was exchanged in a low 
 voice ; some young actors struck attitudes 
 for the benefit of the women, and the pious 
 responded to Dominus Vobiscum droned by 
 the priest. At the elevation, from behind the 
 altar, rang out a magnificent Pie Jesu, sung
 
 86 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 by a celebrated baritone, who had never 
 put in his voice so much amorous languor 
 Outside the church-yard the small boys of 
 the quarter stood on tiptoe, and, hanging on 
 to the railings, pointed out the celebrities 
 with their fingers. 
 
 The office finished, the long defile com- 
 menced ; and every one went to the entrance 
 of the church to sprinkle some drops of holy- 
 water on the bier, and press the hand of the 
 old actor, who, broken by grief, and having 
 hardly strength to hold his hat, leaned against 
 a pillar. 
 
 That was the most horrible moment. 
 
 Carried away by the habit of playing up 
 to the situation, all these theatrical people 
 put into the token of sympathy which they 
 gave to their friend the character of their 
 employment. The star advanced gravely, and 
 with a three-quarter inclination of his head 
 flashed out the "Look of Fate." The old 
 tragedian with a gray beard assumed a sto-
 
 A DRAMATIC FUNERAL. 87 
 
 ical expression, and did not forget to " vi- 
 brate " in pronouncing a masculine " Cour- 
 age !" The clown approached with a short, 
 trotting step, and shaking his head until his 
 cheeks trembled, he murmured, " My poor 
 old fellow." And the fairy queen, with the 
 sensibility of a sensitive female, threw herself 
 impulsively on the neck of the unhappy fa- 
 ther, who, with swollen face, bloodshot eyes, 
 and hanging lip, blackened his face and his 
 gloved hands with the dye of his mustache, 
 diluted by tears. 
 
 And all the time, a few steps from this 
 grotesque and sinister scene, we could see 
 last word of this antithesis the white fig- 
 ures of the young girls of the sisterhood, 
 kneeling on the chairs nearest the coffin of 
 their companion, and who undoubtedly were 
 beseeching God, in their naive and original 
 prayers, to grant her the paradise of their 
 dreams : a pretty paradise in the Jesuitical 
 style, all in carved and gilded wood, and
 
 88 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 many-colored marble, where one could see 
 at the end a tableau in a transparent light ; 
 the Virgin crowned with stars, with a serpent 
 under her feet, while little cherubs suspend- 
 ed in mid-air over her head an azure stream- 
 er flaming with these words: " Eae Regina 
 Angelorum"
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE.
 
 HE was scarcely ten years old when he 
 was first arrested as a vagabond. 
 
 He spoke thus to the judge : 
 
 " I am called Jean Frangois Leturc, and 
 for six months I was with the man who 
 sings and plays upon a cord of catgut be- 
 tween the lanterns at the Place de la Bas- 
 tille. I sang the refrain with him, and after 
 that I called, ' Here's all the new songs, ten 
 centimes, two sous !' He was always drunk, 
 and used to beat me. That is why the po- 
 lice picked rne up the other night. Before
 
 92 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 that I was with the man who sells brushes. 
 My mother was a laundress ; her name was 
 Adele. At one time she lived with a man on 
 the ground-floor at Montmartre. She was a 
 good work-woman and liked me. She made 
 money because she had for customers wait- 
 ers in the cafes, and they use a good deal of 
 linen. On Sundays she used to put me to 
 bed early so that she could go to the ball. 
 On week-days she sent me to Les Freres, 
 where I learned to read. Well, the sergeant- 
 de-ville whose beat was in our street used 
 always to stop before our windows to talk 
 with her a good-looking chap, with a med- 
 al from the Crimea. They were married, 
 and after that everything went wrong. He 
 didn't take to me, and turned mother against 
 me. Every one had a blow for me, and so, 
 to get out of the house, I spent whole 
 days in the Place Clichy, where I knew the 
 mountebanks. My father-in-law lost his 
 place, and my mother her work. She used
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 93 
 
 to go out washing to take care of him ; this 
 gave her a cough the steam. . . . She is 
 dead at Lamboisiere. She was a good wom- 
 an. Since that I have lived with the seller 
 of brushes and the catgut scraper. Are you 
 going to send me to prison ?" 
 
 He said this openly, cynically, like a man. 
 He was a little ragged street-arab, as tall as 
 a boot, his forehead hidden under a queer 
 mop of yellow hair. 
 
 Nobody claimed him, and they sent him 
 to the Reform School. 
 
 Not very intelligent, idle, clumsy with his 
 hands, the only trade he could learn there 
 was not a good one that of reseating straw 
 chairs. However, he was obedient, natural- 
 ly quiet and silent, and he did not seem to be 
 profoundly corrupted by that school of vice. 
 But when, in his seventeenth year, he was 
 thrown out again on the streets of Paris, he 
 unhappily found there his prison comrades, 
 all great scamps, exercising their dirty pro-
 
 94 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 fessions : teaching dogs to catch rats in the 
 the sewers, and blacking shoes on ball nights 
 in the passage of the Opera amateur wres- 
 tlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown 
 by the Hercules of the booths or fishing at 
 noontime from rafts ; all of these occupa- 
 tions he followed to some extent, and, some 
 months after he came out of the house of 
 correction, he was arrested again for a petty 
 theft a pair of old shoes prigged from a 
 shop-window. Result: a year in the prison 
 of Sainte Pelagic, where he served as valet 
 to the political prisoners. 
 
 He lived in much surprise among this 
 group of prisoners, all very young, negligent 
 in dress, who talked in loud voices, and car- 
 ried their heads in a very solemn fashion. 
 They used to meet in the cell of one of the 
 oldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, 
 already a long time in prison and quite a 
 fixture at Sainte Pe'lagie a large cell, the 
 walls covered with colored caricatures, and
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 95 
 
 from the window of which one could see all 
 Paris its roofs, its spires, and its domes 
 and far away the distant line of hills, blue and 
 indistinct upon the sky. There were upon the 
 walls some shelves filled with volumes and 
 all the old paraphernalia of a fencing-room : 
 broken masks, rusty foils, breast-plates, and 
 gloves that were losing their tow. It was 
 there that the "politicians" used to dine to- 
 gether, adding to the everlasting "soup and 
 beef," fruit, cheese, and pints of wine which 
 Jean Francois went out and got by the can 
 a tumultuous repast interrupted by violent 
 disputes, and where, during the dessert, the 
 " Carmagnole " and " Ca Ira " were sung in 
 full chorus. They assumed, however, an air 
 of great dignity on those days when a new- 
 comer was brought in among them, at first 
 entertaining him gravely as a citizen, but on 
 the morrow using him with affectionate fa- 
 miliarity, and calling him by his nickname. 
 Great words were used there : Corporation,
 
 96 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 Responsibility, and phrases quite unintelli- 
 gible to Jean Franois such as this, for ex- 
 ample, which he once heard imperiously put 
 forth by a frightful little hunchback who 
 blotted some writing-paper every night : 
 
 " It is done. This is the composition of 
 the Cabinet : Raymond, the Bureau of Pub- 
 lic Instruction ; Martial, the Interior ; and 
 for Foreign Affairs, myself." 
 
 His time done, he wandered again around 
 Paris, watched afar by the police, after the 
 fashion of cockchafers, made -by cruel chil- 
 dren to fly at the end of a string. He be- 
 came one of those fugitive and timid beings 
 whom the law, with a sort of coquetry, ar- 
 rests and releases by turn something like 
 those platonic fishers who, in order that they 
 may not exhaust their fish-pond, throw im- 
 mediately back in the water the fish which 
 has just come out of the net. Without a 
 suspicion on his part that so much honor 
 had been done to so sorry a subject, he had
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 97 
 
 a special bundle of memoranda in the mys- 
 terious portfolios of the Rue de Jerusalem. 
 His name was written in round hand on the 
 gray paper of the cover, and the notes and 
 reports, carefully classified, gave him his 
 successive appellations : " Name, Leturc ;" 
 "the prisoner Leturc," and, at last, "the crim- 
 inal Leturc." 
 
 He was two years out of prison, dining 
 where he could, sleeping in night lodging- 
 houses and sometimes in lime-kilns, and tak- 
 ing part with his fellows in interminable 
 games of pitch -penny on the boulevards 
 near the barriers. He wore a greasy cap 
 on the back of his head, carpet slippers, and 
 a short white blouse. When he had five 
 sous he had his hair curled. He danced 
 at Constant's at Montparnasse ; bought for 
 two sous to sell for four at the door of 
 Bobino, the jack of hearts or the ace of 
 clubs serving as a countermark ; sometimes 
 opened the door of a carriage ; led horses
 
 98 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 to the horse -market. From the lottery of 
 all sorts of miserable employments he drew 
 a goodly number. Who can say if the at- 
 mosphere of honor which one breathes as a 
 soldier, if military discipline might not have 
 saved him. Taken, in a cast of the net, with 
 some young loafers who robbed drunkards 
 sleeping on the streets, he denied very ear- 
 nestly having taken part in their expeditions. 
 Perhaps he told the truth, but his antece- 
 dents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he 
 was sent for three years to Poissy. There 
 he made coarse playthings for children, was 
 tattooed on the chest, learned thieves' slang 
 and the penal-code. A new liberation, and 
 a new plunge into the sink of Paris ; but 
 very short this time, for at the end of six 
 months at the most he was again compro- 
 mised in a night robbery, aggravated by 
 climbing and breaking a serious affair, in 
 which he played an obscure role, half dupe 
 and half fence. On the whole his complicity
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 99 
 
 was evident, and he was sent for five years 
 at hard labor. His grief in this adventure 
 was above all in being separated from an 
 old dog which he had found on a dung-heap, 
 and cured of the mange. The beast loved 
 him. 
 
 Toulon, the ball and chain, the work in 
 the harbor, the blows from a stick, wooden 
 shoes on bare feet, soup of black beans dat- 
 ing from Trafalgar, no tobacco money, and 
 the terrible sleep in a camp swarming with 
 convicts; that was what he experienced for 
 five broiling summers and five winters raw 
 with the Mediterranean wind. He came 
 out from there stunned, was sent under sur- 
 veillance to Vernon, where he worked some 
 time on the river. Then, an incorrigible 
 vagabond, he broke his exile and came again 
 to Paris. He had his savings, fifty-six francs, 
 that is to say, time enough for reflection. 
 During his absence his former wretched 
 companions had dispersed. He was well
 
 100 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 hidden, and slept in a loft at an old wom- 
 an's, to whom he represented himself as a 
 sailor, tired of the sea, who had lost his pa- 
 pers in a recent shipwreck, and who wanted 
 to try his hand at some- 
 thing else. His tanned 
 face and his calloused 
 brands, together with some 
 sea phrases which he drop- 
 ped from time to time, 
 made his tale seem prob- 
 able enough. 
 
 One day when he risked 
 a saunter in the streets, 
 and when chance had led 
 him as far as Montmartre, 
 where he was born, an un- 
 expected memory stopped him before the 
 door of Les Freres, where he had learned to 
 read. xAs it was very warm the door was 
 open, and by a single glance the passing out- 
 cast was able to recognize the peaceable
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. IOI 
 
 school-room. Nothing was changed : nei- 
 ther the bright light shining in at the great 
 windows, nor the crucifix over the desk, nor 
 the rows of benches with the tables fur- 
 nished with ink-stands and pencils, nor the 
 table of weights and measures, nor the map 
 where pins stuck in still indicated the opera- 
 tions of some ancient war. Heedlessly and 
 without thinking, Jean Francois read on the 
 blackboard the words of the Evangelist 
 which had been set there as a copy : 
 
 "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner 
 that repenteth, more than over ninety and 
 nine just persons, which need no repent- 
 ance." 
 
 It was undoubtedly the hour for recrea- 
 tion, for the Brother Professor had left his 
 chair, and, sitting on the edge of a table, he 
 was telling a story to the boys who sur- 
 rounded him with eager and attentive eyes. 
 What a bright and innocent face he had, that 
 beardless young man, in his long black
 
 IO2 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 gown, and white necktie, and great ugly 
 shoes, and his badly cut brown hair stream- 
 ing out behind! All the simple figures of 
 the children of the people who were watch- 
 ing him seemed scarcely less childlike than 
 his ; above all when, delighted with some of 
 his own simple and priestly pleasantries, he 
 broke out in an open and frank peal of 
 laughter which showed his white and regu- 
 lar teeth, a peal so contagious that all the 
 scholars laughed loudly in their turn. It 
 was such a sweet, simple group in the bright 
 sunlight, which lighted their dear eyes and 
 their blond curls. 
 
 Jean Francois looked at them for some 
 time in silence, and for the first time in that 
 savage nature, all instinct and appetite, there 
 awoke a mysterious, a tender emotion. His 
 heart, that seared and hardened heart, un- 
 moved when the convict's cudgel or the 
 heavy whip of the watchman fell on his 
 shoulders, beat oppressively. In that sight
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 103 
 
 he saw again his infancy ; and closing his 
 eyes sadly, the prey to torturing regret, he 
 walked quickly away. 
 
 Then the words written on the blackboard 
 came back to his mind. 
 
 "If it wasn't too late, after all !" he mur- 
 mured ; "if I could again, like others, eat 
 honestly my brown bread, and sleep my fill 
 without nightmare ! The spy must be sharp 
 who recognizes me. My beard, which I 
 shaved off down there, has grown out thick 
 and strong. One can burrow somewhere in 
 the great ant-hill, and work can be found. 
 Whoever is not worked to death in the hell 
 of the galleys comes out agile and robust, 
 and I learned there to climb ropes with loads 
 upon my back. Building is going on every- 
 where here, and the masons need helpers. 
 Three francs a day ! I never earned so 
 much. Let me be forgotten, and that is all 
 I ask." 
 
 He followed his courageous resolution ; he
 
 104 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 was faithful to it, and after three months he 
 was another man. The master for whom he 
 worked called him his best workman. After 
 a long day upon the scaffolding, in the hot 
 sun and the dust, constantly bending and 
 raising his back to take the hod from the 
 man at his feet and pass it to the man over 
 his head, he went for his soup to the cook- 
 shop, tired out, his legs aching, his hands 
 burning, his eyelids stuck with plaster, but 
 content with himself, and carrying his well- 
 earned money in a knot in his handkerchief. 
 He went out now without fear, since he 
 could not be recognized in his white mask, 
 and since he had noticed that the suspicious 
 glances of the policeman were seldom turned 
 on the tired workman. He was quiet and 
 sober. He slept the sound sleep of fatigue. 
 He was free! 
 
 At last oh, supreme recompense! he 
 had a friend ! 
 
 He was a fellow-workman like himself,
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 105 
 
 named Savinien, a little peasant with red 
 lips who had come to Paris with his stick 
 over his shoulder and a bundle on the end 
 of it, fleeing from the wine-shops and going 
 to mass every Sunday. Jean Frangois loved 
 him for his piety, for his candor, for his hon- 
 esty, for all that he himself had lost, and so 
 long ago. It was a passion, profound and 
 unrestrained, which transformed him by fa- 
 therly cares and attentions. Savinien, him- 
 self of a weak and egotistical nature, let 
 things take their course, satisfied only in 
 finding a companion who shared his horror 
 of the wine-shop. The two friends lived to- 
 gether in a fairly comfortable lodging, but 
 their resources were very limited. They were 
 obliged to take into their room a third com- 
 panion, an old Auvergnat, gloomy and ra- 
 pacious, who found it possible out of his 
 meagre salary to save something with which 
 to buy a place in his own country. Jean 
 Frangois and Savinien were always together.
 
 IO6 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 On holidays they together took long walks 
 in the environs of Paris, and dined under 
 an arbor in one of those small country 
 inns where there are a great many mush- 
 rooms in the sauces and innocent rebusses 
 on the napkins. There Jean Francois learn- 
 ed from his friend all that lore of which they 
 who are born in the city are ignorant : 
 learned the names of the trees, the flowers, 
 and the plants ; the various seasons for har- 
 vesting; he heard eagerly the thousand de- 
 tails of a laborious country life the autumn 
 sowing, the winter chores, the splendid cel- 
 ebrations of harvest and vintage days, the 
 sound of the mills at the water-side, and the 
 flails striking the ground, the tired horses 
 led to water, and the hunting in the morn- 
 ing mist ; and, above all, the long evenings 
 around the fire of vine -shoots, that were 
 shortened by some marvellous stories. He 
 discovered in himself a source of imagina- 
 tion before unknown, and found a singular
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 107 
 
 delight in the recital of events so placid, so 
 calm, so monotonous. 
 
 One thing troubled him, however : it was 
 the fear lest Savinien might learn something 
 of his past. Sometimes there escaped from 
 him some low word of thieves' slang, a vul- 
 gar gesture vestiges of his former horrible 
 existence and he felt the pain one feels 
 when old wounds re-open ; the more because 
 he fancied that he sometimes saw in Savin- 
 ien the awakening of an unhealthy curiosity. 
 When the young man, already tempted by 
 the pleasures which Paris offers to the poor- 
 est, asked him about the mysteries of the 
 great city, Jean Francois feigned ignorance 
 and turned the subject ; but he felt a vague 
 inquietude for the future of his friend. 
 
 His uneasiness was not without founda- 
 tion. Savinien could not long remain the 
 simple rustic that he was on his arrival in 
 Paris. If the gross and noisy pleasures of 
 the wine-shop always repelled him, he was
 
 Io8 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 profoundly troubled by other temptations, full 
 of danger for the inexperience of his twenty 
 years. When spring came he began to go 
 off alone, and at first he wandered about 
 the brilliant entrance of some dancing-hall, 
 watching the young girls who went in with 
 their arms around each others' waists, talk- 
 ing in low tones. Then, one evening, when 
 lilacs perfumed the air and the call to qua- 
 drilles was most captivating, he crossed the 
 threshold, and from that time Jean Frangois 
 observed a change, little by little, in his 
 manners and his visage. He became more 
 frivolous, more extravagant. He often bor- 
 rowed from his friend his scanty savings, 
 and he forgot to repay. Jean Frangois, feel- 
 ing that he was abandoned, jealous and for- 
 giving at the same time, suffered and was 
 silent. He felt that he had no right to re- 
 proach him, but with the foresight of affec- 
 tion he indulged in cruel and inevitable 
 p r esentiments.
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 109 
 
 One evening, as he was mounting the 
 stairs to his room, absorbed in his thoughts, 
 he heard, as he was about to enter, the sound 
 of angry voices, and he recognized that of 
 the old Auvergnat who lodged with Savinien 
 and himself. An old habit of suspicion made 
 him stop at the landing-place and listen to 
 learn the cause of the trouble. 
 
 " Yes," said the Auvergnat, angrily, " I am 
 sure that some one has opened my trunk 
 and stolen from it the three louis that I 
 had hidden in a little box ; and he who has 
 done this thing must be one of the two 
 companions who sleep here, if it were not 
 the servant Maria. It concerns you as much 
 as it does me, since you are the master of 
 the house, and I will drag you to the courts 
 if you do not let me at once break open the 
 valises of the two masons. My poor gold ! 
 It was here yesterday in its place, and I will 
 tell you just what it was, so that if we find 
 it again nobody can accuse me of having
 
 110 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 lied. Ah, I know them, my three beautiful 
 gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly 
 as I see you ! One piece was more worn 
 than the others ; it was of greenish gold, 
 with a portrait of the great emperor. The 
 other was a great old fellow with a queue 
 and epaulettes ; and the third, which had 
 on it a Philippe with whiskers, I had marked 
 with my teeth. They don't trick me. Do 
 you know that I only wanted two more like 
 that to pay for my vineyard ? Come, search 
 these fellows' things with me, or I will call 
 the police ! Hurry up !" 
 "All right," said the voice of the landlord; 
 " we will go and search with Maria. So 
 much the worse for you if we 
 find nothing, and the masons 
 get angry. You have forced 
 me to it." 
 
 Jean Franois' soul 
 was full of fright. He 
 remembered the em-
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. Ill 
 
 barrassed circumstances and the small loans 
 of Savinien, and how sober he had seemed 
 for some days. And yet he could not be- 
 lieve that he was a thief. He heard the 
 Auvergnat panting in his eager search, and 
 he pressed his closed fists against his breast 
 as if to still the furious beating of his 
 heart. 
 
 " Here they are !" suddenly shouted the 
 victorious miser. " Here they are, my louis, 
 my dear treasure ; and in the Sunday vest 
 of that little hypocrite of Limousin ! Look, 
 landlord, they are just as I told you. Here 
 is the Napoleon, the man with a queue, and 
 the Philippe that I have bitten. See the 
 dents ? Ah, the little beggar with the sanc- 
 tified air. I should have much sooner sus- 
 pected the other. Ah, the wretch ! Well, he 
 must go to the convict prison." 
 
 At this moment Jean Francois heard the 
 well-known step of Savinien coming slowly 
 up the stairs.
 
 112 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 He is going to his destruction, thought he. 
 Three stories. I have time ! 
 
 And, pushing open the door, he entered 
 the room, pale as death, where he saw the 
 landlord and the servant stupefied in a cor- 
 ner, while the Auvergnat, on his knees, in the 
 disordered heap of clothes, was kissing the 
 pieces of gold. 
 
 " Enough of this," he said, in a thick voice ; 
 " I took the money, and put it in my com- 
 rade's trunk. But that is too bad. I am a 
 thief, but not a Judas. Call the police ; I 
 will not try to escape, only I must say a 
 word to Savinien in private. Here he is." 
 
 In fact, the little Limousin had just ar- 
 rived, and seeing his crime discovered, be- 
 lieving himself lost, he stood there, his eyes 
 fixed, his arms hanging. 
 
 Jean Francois seized him forcibly by the 
 neck, as if to embrace him ; he put his mouth 
 close to Savinien's ear, and said to him in a 
 low, supplicating voice,
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 113 
 
 " Keep quiet." 
 
 Then turning towards the others : 
 
 " Leave me alone with him. I tell you I 
 won't go away. Lock us in if you wish, but 
 leave us alone." 
 
 With a commanding gesture he showed 
 them the door. 
 
 They went out. 
 
 Savinien, broken by grief, was sitting on 
 the bed, and lowered his eyes without un- 
 derstanding anything.
 
 114 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPED. 
 
 "Listen," said Jean Francois, who came 
 and took him by the hands. " I understand ! 
 You have stolen three gold pieces to buy 
 some trifle for a girl. That costs six months 
 in prison. But one only comes out from 
 there to go back again, and you will become 
 a pillar of police courts and tribunals. I 
 understand it. I have been seven years at 
 the Reform School, a year at Sainte Pelagic, 
 three years at Poissy, five years at Toulon. 
 Now, don't be afraid. Everything is ar- 
 ranged. I have taken it on my shoulders." 
 
 " It is dreadful," said Savinien ; but hope 
 was springing up again in his cowardly heart. 
 
 "When the elder brother is under the 
 flag, the younger one does not go," replied 
 Jean Franois. " I am your substitute, that's 
 all. You care for me a little, do you not? 
 I am paid. Don't be childish don't refuse. 
 They would have taken me again one of 
 these days, for I am a runaway from exile. 
 And then, do you see, that life will be less
 
 THE SUBSTITUTE. 115 
 
 hard for me than for you. I know it all, 
 and I shall not complain if I have not done 
 you this service for nothing, and if you swear 
 to me that you will never do it again. Savin- 
 ien, I have loved you well, and your friend- 
 ship has made me happy. It is through it 
 that, since I have known you, I have been 
 honest and pure, as I might always have 
 been, perhaps, if I had had, like you, a father 
 to put a tool in my hands, a mother to teach 
 me my prayers. It was my sole regret that 
 I was useless to you, and that I deceived 
 you concerning myself. To-day I have un- 
 masked in saving you. It is all right. Do 
 not cry, and embrace me, for already I hear 
 heavy boots on the stairs. They are com- 
 ing with the posse, and we must not seem 
 to know each other so well before those 
 chaps." 
 
 He pressed Savinien quickly to his breast, 
 then pushed him from him, when the door 
 was thrown wide open.
 
 Il6 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 It was the landlord and the Auvergnat, 
 who brought the police. Jean Francois 
 sprang forward to the landing-place, held 
 out his hands for the handcuffs, and said, 
 laughing, " Forward, bad lot !" 
 
 To-day he is at Cayenne, condemned for 
 life as an incorrigible.
 
 AT TABLE.
 
 WHEN the maitre (T hotel oh, what a re- 
 spectable paunch in an ample kerseymere 
 vest ! What a worthy and red face, well 
 framed by white whiskers ! (an English phy- 
 sique, I assure you) when the imposing 
 mattre cT hotel opened with two raps the door 
 of the salon, and announced in his musical 
 bass voice, at the same time sonorous and 
 respectful, " The dinner of madame la com- 
 tesse is served," hats were hung on the
 
 120 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 corners of brackets, while the more distin- 
 guished of the guests offered their arms to 
 the ladies, and all passed into the dining- 
 room, silent, almost meditative, like a pro- 
 cession. 
 
 The table glittered. What flowers ! What 
 lights ! Each guest found his place without 
 difficulty. As soon as he had read his name 
 on the glazed card, a grand lackey in silk 
 stockings pushed gently behind him a lux- 
 urious chair embroidered with a count's cor- 
 onet. Fourteen at the table, not more : four 
 young women in full toilets, and ten men 
 belonging to the aristocracy of blood or of 
 merit, who had put on that evening all their 
 orders in honor of a foreign diplomat sit- 
 ting at the right hand of the mistress of the 
 house. Clusters of jewelled decorations 
 hung from button-holes, plaques of diamonds 
 glittered in the lapel of one or two black 
 coats, a heavy commander's cross sparkled 
 on the starched front of a general with a
 
 AT TABLE. 
 
 121 
 
 red cravat. As to the ladies, they bore all 
 the splendors of their jewel-boxes. 
 
 An elegant and exquisite reunion ! What 
 an atmosphere of good -living in the high 
 hall splendidly decorated and ornamented 
 on its four panels with studies for a dining- 
 hall in the fine style of olden days where
 
 122 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 were fruits, venison, and eatables of all sorts. 
 The service of the table was noiseless ; the 
 domestics seemed to glide upon the thick 
 carpet. The butler whispered the wines in 
 the ears of the guests with a confidential 
 tone, and as if he were revealing a secret 
 upon which life depended. 
 
 At the soup a consomme at the same 
 time mild and stimulating, giving force and 
 youthful vigor to the digestion chat be- 
 tween neighbors began. Undoubtedly these 
 were the merest trifles that were at first so 
 low spoken. But what politeness in the 
 grave gestures ! What affability in looks 
 and smiles! Soon after the Chateau-yquem, 
 wit sparkled. These men, for the most part 
 old or very mature, all remarkable through 
 birth or through talent, had lived much; full 
 of experience and memories, they were made 
 for conversation, and the beauty of the wom- 
 en present inspired them with a desire to 
 shine, and excited them to a courteous rival-
 
 AT TABLE. 123 
 
 ry. There was a snapping of bright words, 
 a flight of sudden sallies, and the conversa- 
 tionalists broke into groups of two or three. 
 A famous voyager with bronzed skin, recent- 
 ly returned from the farthest deserts, told his 
 two neighbors of an elephant hunt, without 
 any boasting, with as much tranquillity as 
 though he were speaking of shooting rabbits. 
 Farther off, the fine profile and white hair of 
 an illustrious savant was gallantly inclined 
 towards the comtesse, who listened to him 
 laughing a very slender blonde, her eyes 
 young and intent, with a collar of splendid 
 emeralds on a bosom like a professional 
 beauty, and the neck and shoulders of the 
 Venus de Medici. 
 
 Decidedly the dinner promised to be 
 charming as well as sumptuous. Ennui, 
 that too frequent guest at mundane feasts, 
 would not come to sit at that table. These 
 fortunate ones were going to pass a deli
 
 cious hour, drinking enjoyment through ev- 
 ery pore, by every sense. 
 
 Now, at that same table, at the lower end, 
 in the most modest place, a man still young, 
 the least qualified, the most obscure of all 
 who were there, a man of reverie and imag- 
 ination, one of those dreamers in whom is 
 something of philosophy, something of poe- 
 try, sat silent. 
 
 Admitted into that high society by virtue 
 of his renown as an artist, one of nature's 
 aristocrats but without vanity, sprung from 
 the people and not forgetting it, he breathed 
 voluptuously that flower of civilization which 
 is called good company.
 
 AT TABLE. 125 
 
 He knew none better than he how ev- 
 erything in this environment the charm of 
 the women, the wit of the men, the glitter- 
 ing table, the furnishing of the hall, to the 
 exquisite wine which he had just touched 
 to his lips how everything was choice and 
 rare, and he rejoiced that a concourse of 
 things so lovely and so harmonious existed. 
 He was plunged in a bath of optimism ; it 
 seemed to him good that there should be, 
 sometimes and somewhere in the weary 
 world, beings almost happy. Provided that 
 they were accessible to pity, charitable and 
 these happy people probably were that 
 who could distress them ? what could injure 
 them? Ah, beautiful and consoling chime- 
 ra to believe that for such as these life is 
 pleasant ; that they retain always or al- 
 most always that gay, happy light in the 
 eye, that half -blossomed smile upon the 
 lips ; that they have blotted out, as far 
 as possible, from their existence, imperious
 
 126 TEN TALES BY FRANQOiS COPPfcE. 
 
 and discreditable desires and abject infirmi- 
 ties. 
 
 He whom we will call the Dreamer was 
 pursuing that train of thought, when the 
 maltre d'Mtel the superb malt re d'hbtel en- 
 tered with solemnity, carrying in a great sil- 
 ver plate a turbot of fabulous dimensions 
 one of those phenomenal fish which are only 
 seen in the old paintings representing the 
 miraculous draught of fish, or perhaps in 
 the window of Chevet, before a row of as- 
 tonished street-boys who flatten their noses 
 against the glass window. 
 
 Dinner is served. But when the Dreamer 
 had before him on his plate a portion of 
 the monstrous turbot, the light odor of the 
 sea evoked in his mind, prone to unexpected 
 suggestions, that corner of Breton, that poor 
 village of sailors, where he had been belated 
 the other autumn until the equinox, and 
 where he had rendered assistance in some
 
 AT TABLE. 127 
 
 dreadful storms. He suddenly called to 
 mind that terrible night when the fishing- 
 boats could not come back to port, the night 
 that he had passed on the mole amid a 
 group of frightened women, standing where 
 the sea-spray streamed down his face, and 
 the cold and furious wind seemed striving 
 to tear his clothes from his back. What 
 a life was theirs, those poor men ! Down 
 there how many widows, young and old, 
 wearing always the black shawl, went at 
 break of day, with their swarms of chil- 
 dren, to earn their bread oh, nothing but 
 bread ! working in the sickening smell of 
 hot oil in the sardine factories ! He saw 
 again in memory the church above the vil- 
 lage, half-way up the cliff, the steeple paint- 
 ed white to show to the distant boats the 
 passage between the reefs ; and he saw, 
 also, in the short grass of the cemetery 
 nibbled by the sheep, the gravestones on 
 which this sinister inscription was so often
 
 128 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 repeated: "Lost at sea" "Lost at sea" "Lost 
 at sea." 
 
 The enormous turbot was of savory and 
 delicate taste, and the shrimp sauce with 
 which it was served proved that the chef of 
 the comte had followed a course in cook- 
 ing at the Cafd Anglais and profited by it. 
 For our refined civilization reaches even this 
 point. One takes degrees in culinary sci- 
 ence. There are doctors in roasts and bach- 
 elors in sauces. All of the guests eat as if 
 they appreciated, and with delicate gestures, 
 but without showing special favor for excep- 
 tional dishes, through good form and because 
 they were habituated to exquisite food. 
 
 The Dreamer himself had no appetite. 
 He was still in thought with the Bretons, 
 with the sons of the sea, who had caught, per- 
 haps, this magnificent turbot. He remember- 
 ed the day that followed the tempest that 
 morning, rainy and gray when, walking by
 
 AT TABLE. 
 
 I2 9 
 
 the heavy, leaden sea, he had found a body 
 at his feet and recognized it as that of an old 
 sailor, the father of a family, who had been 
 lost at sea three days before mournful jet- 
 sam, stranded in the wrack and foam, so 
 heart-rending to see, with the gray hair of 
 the drowned full of sand and shells ! 
 
 A shudder passed over his heart. 
 
 But the lackeys had already removed the 
 plates ; every trace of the giant fish had dis- 
 appeared, and while they were serving an- 
 other course, the diners, elegant triflers, had 
 taken up their chat again. 
 Hunger being already some- 
 what appeased, they were 
 more animated, they spoke 
 with more abandon light 
 laughs ran round. Oh, charm- 
 ing and gracious company ! 
 
 Then the Dreamer, the si- 
 lent guest, was seized with an
 
 130 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 infinite sadness ; for all the work and dis- 
 tress that were required to create this com- 
 fort and well-being came surging on his 
 imagination. 
 
 That these men of the world might wear 
 light dress-coats in mid-December, that these 
 women might expose their arms and their 
 shoulders, the temperature of the room was 
 that of a spring morning. And who fur- 
 nished the coal ? The poor devils of the 
 black country, the subterranean workmen 
 who lived in hellish mines. How white and 
 fresh is the complexion of that young wom- 
 an against her corsage of pink satin ! But 
 who had woven that satin ? The human 
 spider of Lyons, the weaver, always at his 
 trade in the leprous houses of the Croix 
 Rousse. She wears in her tiny ears two 
 beautiful pearls. What brilliancy! what opal- 
 ine transparence ! Almost perfect spheres ! 
 The pearl which Cleopatra dissolved in vine- 
 gar and swallowed, and which was worth
 
 AT TABLE. 13! 
 
 ten thousand sesterces, was not more pure. 
 But does she know, that young woman, that 
 in far-off Ceylon, on the pearl-oyster banks 
 of Arripo and Condatchy, the Indians of the 
 Indian Company plunge heroically down in 
 twelve fathoms of water, one foot in the 
 heavy stone weight which drags them down 
 to the bottom, a knife in the left hand for 
 defence against the shark ? 
 
 But what of that ? One is lovely and co- 
 quettish. The air of the dining-hall is warm 
 and perfumed. There one can dine gaily, 
 adorned and half nude, flirting with one's 
 neighbors. What has one to do, I ask you, 
 with a dark workman, who digs fifty feet 
 under the ground, with a weaver sitting with 
 stiffened joints before the loom, with a savage 
 who emerges from the sea and sometimes 
 reddens it with his blood ? Why should one 
 think of things so sad, so ugly ? What an ab- 
 surdity !
 
 132 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 Meanwhile the Dreamer pursued his train 
 of thought. 
 
 An instant ago, without taking thought, 
 mechanically he crumbled on the cloth a bit 
 of the gilded bread which was placed near 
 his napkin. As a viand, a mere bit of fancy, 
 insignificant in such a repast, it made him 
 think of the naif phrase of the great lady 
 concerning the starving wretches "Let 
 them eat cake." Nevertheless, this little 
 cake is bread all the same bread made of 
 flour, which in turn is made of wheat. Great 
 heaven ! yes, it is bread, simply bread, like 
 the loaf of the peasant, like the bran-roll of 
 the soldier; and that it might be here, on 
 the table of the rich, required the patient la- 
 bor of many poor. 
 
 The peasant labored, sowed, reaped. He 
 pushed his plough or led his harrow across 
 the fertile field, under the cold needles of 
 the autumn rain ; he started from sleep, full 
 of terror for his crop, when it thundered by
 
 AT TABLE. 133 
 
 night; he trembled, seeing the passage of 
 great violet clouds charged with hail ; he 
 went forth, dissatisfied and gloomy, to the 
 heavy work and exhausting labor of har- 
 vest. 
 
 And when the old miller, twisted by rheu- 
 matism which he has caught in the river 
 fogs, has sent the flour to Paris, the market- 
 porters with the great white hats have car- 
 ried the crushing sacks on their broad backs, 
 and last night, even, in the baker's cellar the 
 workmen toiled until morning. 
 
 Verily, yes ! It has cost all these efforts, 
 all these pains the bit of bread carelessly 
 broken by the white hands of these pa- 
 tricians. 
 
 And now the incorrigible Dreamer was 
 possessed by these things. The delicacies 
 of the repast only recalled to him the suf- 
 fering of humanity. Presently, when the 
 butler poured for him a glass of Chambertin, 
 did he not remember that certain glass-
 
 134 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 blowers became consumptive through blow- 
 ing bottles ? 
 
 Let it pass it is absurd. He well knows 
 that so the world is made. An economist 
 would have laughed in his face. Would he 
 become a Socialist, perhaps ? There will al- 
 ways be rich and poor, as there will always 
 be well-formed men and hunchbacks. 
 
 Besides, the fortunates before him were 
 not unjustly so. These were not vulgar fa- 
 vorites of the Gilded Calf parvenus gross 
 and conceited. The nobleman who pre- 
 sides at the table bears with honor and dig- 
 nity a name associated with all the glories 
 of France ; the general with the gray mus- 
 tache is a hero, and charged at Rezonville 
 with the intrepidity of a Murat ; the paint- 
 er, the poet, have faithfully served Art and 
 Beauty; the chemist, a self-made man who 
 began life as a shop-boy in a drug-store, and 
 to whom the learned world listens to-day as 
 to an oracle, is simply a man of genius ;
 
 AT TABLE. 135 
 
 these high-born dames are generous and 
 good, and they will often dip their fair hands 
 courageously in the depth of misfortune. 
 Why should not these members of the Mite 
 have exceptional enjoyment ? 
 
 The Dreamer said to himself that he had 
 been unjust. These were old sophisms 
 good, at the best, for the clubs of the fau- 
 bourgs, which had been awakened in his 
 memory, and by which he had been duped. 
 Is it possible? He was ashamed of him- 
 self. 
 
 But the dinner neared its end ; and while 
 the lackeys refilled for the last time the 
 champagne-glasses, the table grew silent 
 the guests felt the apathy of digestion. The 
 Dreamer looked at them, one after the oth- 
 er, and all the faces had satiated, blase ex- 
 pressions which disturbed and disquieted 
 him. A sentiment, obscure, inexplicable, but 
 so bitter ! protested even from the depth of 
 his soul against that repast ; and when they
 
 136 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 rose at last from the table, he repeated soft- 
 ly and stubbornly to himself : 
 
 " Yes ; they are within their rights. But 
 do they know, do they understand, that their 
 luxury is made from many miseries ? Do 
 they think of it sometimes ? Do they think 
 of it as often as they should ? Do they think 
 of it?"
 
 AN ACCIDENT.
 
 I. 
 
 SAINT MEDARD, the old church of the Rue 
 Mouffetard, once well known as the scene of 
 the Convulsionnaires, is a very poor parish. 
 The " Faubourg Marceau," as they call it 
 there, has not much religion, and the vestry- 
 board must have hard work to make both 
 ends meet. On Sundays, at the hours of 
 service, there are but few there, and they are
 
 140 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 for the most part women : some twenty of the 
 folk of the quarter and some servants in their 
 round caps. As for the men, there are not at 
 the most more than three or four old men 
 in peasant jackets, who kneel awkwardly on 
 the stone floor, near a pillar, their caps un- 
 der their arms, rolling a great chaplet of 
 beads between their fingers, moving their 
 lips, and raising their eyes towards the arch- 
 ed roof, with an air as if they had given the 
 stained-glass windows. On week days, no- 
 body. On Thursdays, in the winter, the 
 aisles resounded for an instant with the 
 clang of wooden shoes, when the students 
 of the catechism came and went. Some- 
 times a poor woman, leading one or two 
 children and carrying a baby in her arms, 
 came to burn a little candle on the stand 
 at the chapel of the Virgin, or perhaps one 
 heard by the baptismal font the wailing of 
 a new-born babe ; or, more often, the funeral 
 of some poor wretch : a deal box, covered
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 141 
 
 with a black cloth and resting on two tres- 
 tles, hastily blessed by the priest, before a 
 little group of women, the men being free- 
 thinkers, and waiting the conclusion of the 
 ceremony in the drinking -shop across the 
 way, where they played bagatelle for drinks. 
 Therefore, the old Abbe' Faber, one of the 
 vicars of the parish, is sure that twice out of 
 three times he will find no penitent before 
 his confessional, and has only to hear, for 
 the most part of the time, the uninteresting 
 confession of some good women. But he is 
 conscientious, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, 
 and Saturdays, at seven o'clock precisely, 
 he betakes himself regularly to the chapel 
 of St. John, only to make a short prayer and 
 return should there be nobody there. 
 
 II. 
 
 One day last winter, struggling against a 
 heavy wind with his open umbrella, the Abb
 
 142 TEN TALES 6V FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 Faber toiled painfully up the Rue Mouffe- 
 tard, on the way to his parish, and, almost 
 certain that his toil was useless, he regretted 
 to himself the warm fire he had just quitted 
 in his little room in the Rue D'homond, and 
 the folio Bollandiste which he had left lying 
 on the table, with his eye-glasses on its open 
 pages. But it was Saturday night, the day 
 when certain old widows, who earned their 
 scant income in the neighboring boarding- 
 houses, sometimes sought absolution for the 
 morrow's communion. The honest priest 
 could not, therefore, excuse himself from 
 entering his oak box and opening, with the 
 punctuality of a cashier, that wicket where 
 the devotees, for whom the confessional is a 
 spiritual savings - bank, make a weekly de- 
 posit of their venial sins. 
 
 The Abbe Faber was the more sorry to 
 go out, because that particular Saturday was 
 pay - day, and on such occasions the Rue 
 Mouffetard swarmed with people, and a peo-
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 143 
 
 pie not well disposed toward his cloth. How- 
 ever good a man one may be, it is far from 
 agreeable to be forced to lower the eyes to 
 avoid malevolent looks, and to stop the ears 
 against insolent words heard in passing. 
 There was a certain drinking-shop which the 
 abbe particularly dreaded a shop brilliant 
 with gas and exhaling an odor of alcohol 
 through its open doors, through which one 
 could see a perspective of barrels labelled: 
 "Absinthe," "Bitter," " Madere," "Ver- 
 mouth," etc. Here, leaning against the bar, 
 were always a band of loafers in long blouses 
 and high hats, who saluted the poor abbe, 
 walking quickly along the pavement, with 
 ribald jests. 
 
 However, on this night the streets were 
 deserted on account of the bad weather, and 
 the abbd reached his church without inter- 
 ruption. He dipped his finger in the holy 
 water, crossed himself, made a brief rever- 
 ence before the grand altar, and went tow-
 
 144 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 ards his confessional. At least he had not 
 come for nothing. A penitent was waiting. 
 
 III. 
 
 A male penitent ! a rare and exceptional 
 thing at Saint Medard. But, distinguishing 
 by the red light of the lamp hanging from 
 the roof of the chapel the short white jacket 
 and the heavy nailed shoes of the kneeling 
 man, the Abbe Faber believed him to be 
 some workman who had kept his rustic 
 faith and his early habits of religious ob- 
 servance. Without doubt the confession that 
 he was about to hear would be as stupid as 
 that of the cook of the Rue Monge, who, after 
 having accused himself of petty thefts, ex- 
 claimed loudly against a single word of res- 
 titution. The priest even smiled to himself 
 as he remembered the formal confession of 
 one of the inhabitants of the faubourg, who
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 145 
 
 came to ask for a billet of confession that 
 he might marry. " I have neither killed or 
 robbed. Ask me about the rest." And so 
 the vicar entered very tranquilly into his 
 confessional, and, after having taken a copi- 
 ous pinch of snuff, opened without emotion 
 the little curtain of green serge which closed 
 the wicket. 
 
 " Monsieur le curd," stammered a rough 
 voice, which was making an effort to speak 
 low. 
 
 "I am not a cure", my friend. Say your 
 confiteor, and call me father." 
 
 The man, whose face the abbe" could not 
 see among the shadows, stumbled through 
 the prayer, which he seemed to have great 
 difficulty in recalling, and he began again in 
 a hoarse whisper : 
 
 " Monsieur le cure no my father ex- 
 cuse me if I do not speak properly, but I 
 have not been to confession for twenty-five 
 years no, not since I quitted the country
 
 146 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 you know how it is a man in Paris, and 
 yet I have not been worse than other peo- 
 ple, and I have said to myself, ' God must 
 be a good sort of fellow.' But to-day what 
 I have on my conscience is too heavy to car- 
 ry alone, and you must hear me, monsieur le 
 curd : I have killed a man !" 
 
 The abbd half rose from his seat. A mur- 
 derer ! There was no longer any question 
 of his mind wandering from the duties of 
 his office, of half annoyance at the garrulity 
 of the old women, to whom he listened with 
 a half attentive ear, and whom he absolved 
 in all confidence. A murderer ! That head 
 which was so near his had conceived and 
 planned such a crime ! Those hands, crossed 
 on the confessional, were perhaps still stained 
 with blood ! In his trouble, perhaps not un- 
 mixed with a certain amount of fear, the 
 Abbd Faber could only speak mechanically. 
 
 " Confess yourself, my son. The mercy of 
 God is infinite.''
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 147 
 
 " Listen to my whole story," said the man, 
 with a voice trembling with profound grief. 
 " I am a workingman, and I came to Paris 
 more than twenty years ago with a fellow- 
 countryman, a companion from childhood. 
 We robbed birds'-nests, and we learned to 
 read in school together almost a brother, 
 sir. He was called Philip ; I am called Jack, 
 myself. He was a fine big fellow; I have al- 
 ways been heavy and ill-formed. There was 
 never a better workman than he while I am 
 only a 'botcher ' and so generous and good- 
 natured, wearing his heart on his sleeve. I 
 was proud to be his friend, to walk by his 
 side proud when he clapped me on the back 
 and called me a clumsy fellow. I loved him 
 because I admired him, in fact. Once here, 
 what an opportunity ! We worked together 
 for the same employer, but he left me alone 
 in the evenings more than half the time. 
 He preferred to amuse himself with his com- 
 panions natural enough, at his age. He
 
 148 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 loved pleasure, he was free, he had no re- 
 sponsibilities. All this was impossible for me. 
 I was forced to save my money, for at that 
 time I had an invalid mother in the coun- 
 try, and I sent her all my savings. As for 
 me, I stayed at the fruiterer's where I lodged, 
 and who kept a lodging-house for masons. 
 Philip did not dine there ; he used to go 
 somewhere else, and, to tell the truth, the 
 dinners were not particularly good. But the 
 fruiterer was a widow, far from happy, and I 
 saw that my payments were of help to her ; 
 and then, to be frank, I fell at once in love 
 with her daughter. Poor Catherine ! You 
 will soon know, monsieur le cure, what came 
 from it all. I was there three years without 
 daring to tell her of the love I had for her. 
 I have told you that I am not a good work- 
 man, and the little that I gained hardly suf- 
 ficed for me and for the support of my 
 mother. There could be no thought of 
 marrying. At last my good mother left this
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 149 
 
 world for a better. I was somewhat less 
 pressed for money, and I began to save, and 
 when it seemed to me that I had enough 
 to begin with, I told Catherine of my love. 
 She said nothing at first neither yes nor 
 no. Well, I knew that no one would fall 
 upon my neck; I am not attractive. In the 
 mean time Catherine consulted her mother, 
 who thought well of me as a steady work- 
 man, as a good fellow, and the marriage was 
 decided upon. Ah, I had some happy weeks ! 
 I saw that Catherine barely accepted me, and 
 that she was by no means carried away with 
 me ; but as she had a good heart, I hoped 
 that she would love me some day I would 
 make her love me. As a matter of course, I 
 told everything to Philip, whom I saw every 
 day at the work-yard, and as Catherine and 
 I were engaged, I wanted him to meet her. 
 Perhaps you have already guessed the end, 
 monsieur le cure. Philip was handsome, 
 lively, good-tempered everything that I
 
 150 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 was not; and without attempting it, inno- 
 cently enough, he fascinated Catherine. Ah, 
 Catherine had a frank and honest heart, and 
 as soon as she recognized what had hap- 
 pened she at once told me everything. Ah, 
 
 I can never forget that moment ! It was 
 Catherine's birthday, and in honor of it T 
 had bought a little cross of gold which I had 
 arranged in a box with cotton. We were 
 alone in the back shop, and she had just 
 brought me my soup. I took my box from
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 151 
 
 my pocket, and, opening it, I showed her 
 the jewel. Then she burst into tears. 
 
 "'Forgive me, Jack/ she said, 'and keep 
 that for her whom you will marry. As for 
 me, I can never become your wife. I love 
 another I love Philip.' 
 
 IV. 
 
 " Believe me, I had trouble enough then, 
 monsieur le cure ; my soul was full of it. 
 But what could I do, since I loved them 
 both ? Only what I believed was for their 
 happiness let them marry. And as Philip 
 had always lived freely, and spent as he 
 made, I lent him my hoard to buy the fur- 
 niture. 
 
 " Then they were married, and for a while 
 all went well. They had a little boy, and I 
 stood sponsor for him and named him Ca- 
 mille, in remembrance of his mother. It
 
 152 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 was a little after the birth of the baby that 
 Philip began to go wrong. I was mistaken 
 in him he was not made for marriage ; he 
 was too fond of frivolity and pleasure. You 
 live in a poor quarter, monsieur le curd, and 
 you must know the sad story by heart the 
 workman who glides little by little from idle- 
 ness into drunkenness, who is off on a spree 
 for two or three days, who does not bring 
 home his week's wages, and who only returns 
 to his home, broken up by his spree, to make 
 scenes and to beat his wife. In less than 
 two years Philip became one of these wretch- 
 es. At first I tried to reform him, and some- 
 times, ashamed of himself, he would attempt 
 to do better; but that did not last long. 
 Then my remonstrances only irritated him ; 
 and when I went to his house, and he saw 
 me look sadly around the chamber made 
 bare by the pawn-shop, at poor Catherine, 
 thin and pale with grief, he became furious. 
 One day he had the audacity to be jealous
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 153 
 
 of me on account of his wife, who was as 
 pure as the blessed Virgin, reminding me 
 that I was once her lover and accusing me 
 of still being so, with slanders and infamies 
 that I should be ashamed to repeat. We 
 almost flew at each other's throats. I saw 
 what I must do. I would see Catherine and 
 my godson no more ; and as for Philip, I 
 would only meet him when by chance we 
 worked on the same job. 
 
 " Only, you will understand, I loved Cath- 
 erine and little Camille too well to lose sight 
 of them entirely. On Saturday evenings, 
 when I knew that Philip was drinking up his 
 wages with his comrades, I used to prowl 
 about the quarter, and chat with the boy 
 when I found him ; and if it was too misera- 
 ble at home, he did not return with empty 
 hands, you know. I believe that the wretch- 
 ed Philip knew that I was helping his wife, 
 and that he closed his eyes to the fact, find- 
 ing it rather convenient. I will hurry on,
 
 154 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 for the story is too miserable. Some years 
 have passed ; Philip plunging deeper in vice ; 
 but Catherine, whom I had helped all I 
 could, has educated her son, who is now a 
 fellow of twenty years, good and courageous 
 like herself. He is not a workman ; he is 
 educated; he has learned to draw at the 
 evening schools, and he is now with an ar- 
 chitect, where he gets good wages. And 
 though the house is saddened by the pres- 
 ence of the drunkard, things go fairly well, 
 for Camille is a great comfort to his mother ; 
 and for a year or two, when I see Catherine 
 she is so changed, the poor woman ! lean- 
 ing on the arm of her manly son, it warms 
 my heart. 
 
 " But yesterday evening, coming out of 
 my cook-shop, I met Camille ; and shaking 
 hands with him oh, he is not ashamed of 
 me, and he doesn't blush at a blouse covered 
 with plaster I saw that something was the 
 matter.
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 155 
 
 " ' Let's see what's the matter now ?' 
 " ' I drew the lot yesterday,' he replied, 
 ' and I drew the number ten a number that 
 sends you to die with fever in the colonies 
 with the marines. That will, at all events, 
 send me there for five years, to leave moth- 
 er alone, without resources, with father, who 
 has never been drinking so much, who has 
 never been so wicked. And it will kill her 
 it will kill her ! How cursed it is to be 
 poor !' 
 
 " Oh, what a horrible night I passed ! 
 Think of it, monsieur le curd, that poor 
 woman's labor for twenty years destroyed 
 in a minute by an unhappy chance ; because 
 a child, rummaging in a sack, has drawn an 
 unfortunate number ! In the morning I was 
 broken as by age when I went to the house 
 we were building on the Boulevard Arago. 
 Of what use is sorrow? we must work all 
 the same. So I mounted the scaffolding. 
 We had already built the house to the fourth
 
 156 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 story, and I began to place my mortar. Sud- 
 denly I felt some one strike me on the shoul- 
 der. It was Philip. He only worked now 
 when the inclination seized him, and he was 
 apparently putting in a day's work to get 
 something to drink ; but the builder, having 
 a forfeit to pay if the building was not fin- 
 ished by a certain date, accepted the first- 
 comers. 
 
 V. 
 
 "I had not seen Philip for a long time, 
 and it was with difficulty that I recognized 
 him. Burned and fevered by brandy, his 
 beard gray, his hands trembling, he was 
 more than an old man he was a ruin. 
 
 " ' Well,' I said to him, ' the boy has drawn 
 a bad number.' 
 
 " ' What of it ?' he replied, with an angry 
 look. 'Are you going to worry me about 
 that, too, like Catherine and Camille ? The
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 157 
 
 boy will do as others have done : he will 
 serve his country. I know what worries 
 them, both my wife and son. If I were dead 
 he would not have to go. But, so much the 
 worse for them, I am still solid at my post, 
 and Camille is not the son of a widow.' 
 
 "The son of a widow! Ah, monsieur le 
 cure, why did he use that unhappy phrase ? 
 The evil thought came to me at once, and it 
 never quitted me all the morning that I 
 worked at the wretch's side. I imagined all 
 that she was about to suffer poor Catherine ! 
 when she no longer had her son to care for 
 and protect her, and she must be alone with 
 the miserable drunkard, now completely bru- 
 talized, ugly, and capable of anything. A 
 neighboring clock struck eleven, and the 
 workmen all descended to lunch. We re- 
 mained until the last, Philip and I, but in 
 stepping on the ladder to descend, he turned 
 to me with a leer, and said, in his hoarse, 
 dissipated voice :
 
 158 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 " ' You see, steady as a sailor ; Camille is 
 not nearly the son of a widow.' 
 
 " The blood mounted to my head. I was 
 beside myself. I seized with both hands 
 the rounds of the ladder to which Philip 
 clung shouting ' Help !' and with a single 
 effort I toppled it over. 
 
 " He was instantly killed by an accident, 
 they said and now Camille is the son of a 
 widow and need not go. 
 
 " That is what I have done, monsieur le 
 cure, and what I want to tell to you and to 
 the good God. I repent, I ask pardon, of 
 course ; but I must not see Catherine in her 
 black dress, happy on the arm of her son, or 
 I could not regret my crime. To prevent 
 that I will emigrate I will lose myself in 
 America. As to my penance see, monsieur 
 le cure*, here is the little cross of gold that 
 Catherine refused when she told me that she 
 was in love with Philip. I have always kept 
 it, in memory of the only happy days that I
 
 AN ACCIDENT. 
 
 159 
 
 ever knew in my life. Take it and sell it. 
 Give the money to the poor." 
 
 Jack rose absolved by the Abbe Faber. 
 
 One thing is certain, and that is that the 
 priest never sold the little cross of gold. 
 After having paid its price into the Treasury 
 of the Church, he hung the jewel, as an ex- 
 voto, on the altar of the chapel of the Virgin, 
 where he often went to pray for the poor 
 mason.
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF.
 
 ONCE upon a time it was so long ago that 
 the whole world has forgotten the date in 
 a city in the north of Europe whose name 
 is so difficult to pronounce that nobody re- 
 members it once upon a time there was a 
 little boy of seven, named Wolff, an orphan 
 in charge of an old aunt who was hard and 
 avaricious, who only embraced him on New- 
 Year's Day, and who breathed a sigh of re- 
 gret every time that she gave him a porrin- 
 ger of soup. 
 
 But the poor little chap was naturally so 
 good that he loved the old woman just the 
 same, although she frightened him very
 
 164 TEN TALES BV FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 much, and he could never see without trem- 
 bling the great wart, ornamented with four 
 gray hairs, which she had on the end of her 
 nose. 
 
 As the aunt of Wolff was known through 
 all the village to have a house and an old 
 stocking full of gold, she did not dare send 
 her nephew to the school for the poor. But 
 she so schemed to obtain a reduction of the 
 price with the school-master whose school 
 little Wolff attended, that the bad teacher, 
 vexed at having a scholar so badly dressed 
 and who paid so poorly, punished him very 
 often and unjustly with the backboard and 
 fool's cap, and even stirred his fellow-pupils 
 against him, all sons of well-to-do men, who 
 made the orphan their scapegoat. 
 
 The poor little fellow was therefore as 
 miserable as the stones in the street, and hid 
 himself in out-of-the-way corners to cry; 
 when Christmas came. 
 
 The night before Christmas the school-
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF. 165 
 
 master was to take all of his pupils to the 
 midnight mass, and bring them back to their 
 homes. 
 
 Now, as the winter was very severe that 
 year, and as for several days a great quanti- 
 ty of snow had fallen, the scholars came to 
 the rendezvous warmly wrapped and bun- 
 dled up, with fur caps pulled down over 
 their ears, double and triple jackets, knitted 
 gloves and mittens, and good thick nailed 
 boots with strong soles. Only little Wolff 
 came shivering in the clothes that he wore 
 week-days and Sundays, and with nothing 
 on his feet but coarse Strasbourg socks and 
 heavy sabots, or wooden shoes. 
 
 His thoughtless comrades made a thou- 
 sand jests over his sad looks and his peas- 
 ant's dress. But the orphan was so occupied 
 in blowing on his fingers, and suffered so 
 much from his chilblains, that he took no no- 
 tice of them ; and the troop of boys, with the 
 master at their head, started for the church.
 
 1 66 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 It was fine in the church, which was re- 
 splendent with wax-candles ; and the schol- 
 ars, excited by the pleasant warmth, profited 
 by the noise of the organ and the singing to 
 talk to each other in a low voice. They 
 boasted of the fine suppers that were wait- 
 ing for them at home. The son of the 
 burgomaster had seen, before he went out, 
 a monstrous goose that the truffles marked 
 with black spots like a leopard. At the 
 house of the first citizen there was a little 
 fir-tree in a wooden box, from whose branch- 
 es hung oranges, sweetmeats, and toys. And 
 the cook of the first citizen had pinned be- 
 hind her back the two strings of her cap, as 
 she only did on her days of inspiration when 
 she was sure of succeeding with her famous 
 sugar-candy. And then the scholars spoke, 
 too, of what the Christ-child would bring to 
 them, of what he would put in their shoes, 
 which they would, of course, be very careful 
 to leave in the chimney before going to bed.
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF. 167 
 
 And the eyes of those little chaps, lively as 
 a parcel of mice, sparkled in advance with 
 the joy of seeing in their imagination pink 
 paper bags of burnt almonds, lead soldiers 
 drawn up in battalions in their boxes, men- 
 ageries smelling of varnished wood, and mag- 
 nificent jumping-jacks covered with purple 
 and bells. 
 
 Little Wolff knew very well by experience 
 that his old miserly aunt would send him 
 supperless to bed. But in the simplicity of 
 his soul, and knowing that he had been all 
 the year as good and industrious as possi- 
 ble, he hoped that the Christ-child would not 
 forget him, and he, too, looked eagerly for- 
 ward by-and-by to putting his wooden shoes 
 in the ashes of the fireplace. 
 
 The midnight mass concluded, the faith- 
 ful went away, anxious for supper, and the 
 band of scholars, walking two by two after 
 their teacher, left the church. 
 
 Now, under the porch, sitting on a stone
 
 1 68 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 seat under a Gothic niche, a child was sleep- 
 ing a child covered by a robe of white linen, 
 and whose feet were bare, notwithstanding 
 the cold. He was not a beggar, for his robe 
 was new and nice, and near him on the 
 ground were seen, lying in a cloth, a square, 
 a hatchet, a pair of compasses, and the other 
 tools of a carpenter's apprentice. Under 
 the light of the stars, his face, with its closed 
 eyes, bore an expression of divine sweetness, 
 and his long locks of gold- 
 en hair seemed like an au- 
 reole about his head. But 
 the child's feet, blue in 
 the cold of that December 
 night, were sad to see. 
 
 The scholars, so well 
 clothed and shod for the 
 winter, passed heedlessly 
 before the unknown child. 
 One of them, even, the son 
 of one of the principal
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF. 169 
 
 men in the village, looked at the waif with 
 an expression in which could be seen all the 
 scorn of the rich for the poor, the well-fed 
 for the hungry. 
 
 But little Wolff, coming the last out of the 
 church, stopped, full of compassion, before 
 the beautiful sleeping infant. 
 
 " Alas !" said the orphan to himself, " it is 
 too bad : this poor little one going barefoot 
 in such bad weather. But what is worse than 
 all, he has not to-night even a boot or a wood- 
 en shoe to leave before him while he sleeps, 
 so that the Christ-child could put something 
 there to comfort him in his misery." 
 
 And, carried away by the goodness of his 
 heart, little Wolff took off the wooden shoe 
 from his right foot, and laid it in front of 
 the sleeping child ; and then, as best he 
 could, limping along on his poor blistered 
 foot and dragging his sock through the 
 snow, he went back to his aunt's. 
 
 " Look at the worthless fellow !" cried his
 
 170 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 aunt, full of anger at his return without one 
 of his shoes. "What have you done with 
 your wooden shoe, little wretch ?" 
 
 Little Wolff did not know how to deceive, 
 and although he was shaking with terror at 
 seeing the gray hairs bristle up on the nose 
 of the angry woman, he tried to stammer 
 out some account of his adventure. 
 
 But the old woman burst into a frightful 
 peal of laughter. 
 
 " Ah, monsieur takes off his shoes for 
 beggars ! Ah, monsieur gives away his wood- 
 en shoe to a barefoot ! That is something 
 new for example ! Ah, well, since that is so, 
 I am going to put the wooden shoe which 
 you have left in the chimney, and I promise 
 you the Christ-child will leave there to-night 
 something to whip you with in the morning. 
 And you shall pass the day to-morrow on 
 dry bread and water. We will see if next 
 time you give away your shoes to the first 
 vagabond that comes."
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF. 171 
 
 And the wicked woman, after having given 
 the poor boy a couple of slaps, made him 
 climb up to his bed in the attic. Grieved 
 to the heart, the child went to bed in the 
 dark, and soon went to sleep on his pillow 
 steeped with tears. 
 
 But on the morrow morning, when the old 
 woman, awakened by the cold and shaken 
 by her cough, went down stairs oh, wonder- 
 ful sight ! she saw the great chimney full 
 of beautiful playthings, and sacks of mag- 
 nificent candies, and all sorts of good things ; 
 and before all these splendid things the 
 right shoe, that her nephew had given to the 
 little waif, stood by the side of the left shoe, 
 that she herself had put there that very 
 night, and where she meant to put a birch- 
 rod. 
 
 And as little Wolff, running down to learn 
 the meaning of his aunt's exclamation, stood 
 in artless ecstasy before all these splendid 
 Christmas presents, suddenly there were loud
 
 172 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 cries of laughter out-of-doors. The old 
 woman and the little boy went out to know 
 what it all meant, and saw all the neighbors 
 gathered around the public fountain. What 
 had happened ? Oh, something very amus- 
 ing and very extraordinary. The children 
 of all the rich people of the village, those 
 whose parents had wished to surprise them 
 by the most beautiful gifts, had found only 
 rods in their shoes. 
 
 Then the orphan and the old woman, 
 thinking of all the beautiful things that were 
 in their chimney, were full of amazement. 
 But presently they saw the cure coming with 
 wonder in his face. Above the seat, placed 
 near the door of the church, at the same 
 place where in the evening a child, clad in a 
 white robe, and with feet bare notwithstand- 
 ing the cold, had rested his sleeping head, 
 the priest had just seen a circle of gold in- 
 crusted with precious stones. 
 
 And they all crossed themselves devoutly,
 
 THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF. 173 
 
 comprehending that the beautiful sleeping 
 child, near whom were the carpenter's tools, 
 was Jesus of Nazareth in person, become 
 for an hour such as he was when he worked 
 in his parents' house, and they bowed them- 
 selves before that miracle that the good 
 God had seen fit to work, to reward the 
 faith and charity of a child.
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER.
 
 SITTING in her office at the end of the 
 shop, shut off from it by glass windows, pret- 
 ty Madame Bayard, in a black gown and 
 with her hair in sober braids, was writing 
 steadily in an enormous ledger with leather 
 corners, while her husband, following his 
 morning custom, stopped at the door to 
 scold his workmen, who had not finished 
 unloading a dray from the Northern Rail- 
 way, which blocked the road, and carried to
 
 178 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 the druggist of the Rue 
 Vieille du Temple a doz- 
 en casks of glucose. 
 
 " I have bad news to 
 tell you," said Madame 
 Bayard, sticking her pen 
 in a cup of leaden shot, 
 when her husband had 
 entered the glass cage. 
 " Poor Voisin is dead." 
 " The nurse of Leon ? Poor woman ! And 
 her little daughter ?" 
 
 " That is the saddest part, my dear. A 
 relative of poor Voisin writes me that they 
 are too poor to take charge of the child, and 
 she must be sent to an orphan asylum." 
 " Oh, those peasants !" 
 The druggist was silent for a moment, 
 rubbing his thick blond beard ; then sud- 
 denly looking at his wife with kindly eyes : 
 
 " Say, Mimi, the child is the foster sister 
 of our Leon. Suppose we give her a home ?"
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 179 
 
 "I should think so," was the quiet reply 
 of the. pretty wife. 
 
 " Well done," cried Bayard, as, caring lit- 
 tle if he were seen by his clerks and store- 
 boys, he leaned towards his wife and kissed 
 her forehead, " well done ! you're a good 
 woman, Mimi. We will take little Norine 
 with us, and bring her up with Leon. That 
 won't ruin us, eh ? Besides, I have just made 
 a good stroke in quinine. We will go after 
 the child Sunday to Argenteuil, sha'n't we ?" 
 
 "We will make that our Sunday excur- 
 sion." 
 
 II. 
 
 Good people, these Bayards ; an honor to 
 the drug trade. Their marriage had united 
 two houses which had been for a long time 
 rivals ; for Bayard was the son of The Sil- 
 ver Pill, founded by his great-great grandfa- 
 ther in 1756 in the Rue Vieille du Temple,
 
 l8o TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 and had espoused the daughter of the Offer* 
 ing to Esculapius, of the Rue des Lombards, 
 an establishment which dated from the First 
 Empire, as was shown by the sign, copied 
 from the celebrated painting of Guerin. 
 Honest people, excellent people and there 
 are many more, like them, whatever folks 
 may say, among the older Paris houses, con- 
 servators of old traditions ; going to the sec- 
 ond tier, on Sunday, at the opera comique, 
 and ignorant of false weights and measures. 
 It was the cure of Blancs-Manteaux who had 
 managed that marriage with his confrere of 
 Saint- Merry. The first had ministered at 
 the death-bed of the elder Bayard, and was 
 dismayed to see a young man of twenty-five 
 all alone in a house so gloomy as that of The 
 Silver Pill, justly famed for its ipecac ; and 
 the second was anxious to establish Made- 
 moiselle Simonin, to whom he had adminis- 
 tered her first communion, and whose father 
 was one of his most important parishioners,
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. l8l 
 
 old Simonin of the Offering to Esculafiius, 
 celebrated for its camphor. The negotia- 
 tions were successful ; camphor and ipecac, 
 two excellent specialties, were united in the 
 holy bonds of matrimony, there was a dinner 
 and ball at the Grand Vefour, and now for 
 ten years, tranquilly working every day, sunv 
 mer and winter, in her glass cage, Madame 
 Bayard, with her pale brown face and her 
 plaited hair, had smitten the hearts of all 
 the young clerks of the quarter Sainte-Croix 
 de la Bretonnerie. 
 
 And yet for a long time there had been a 
 disappointment in that happy household, a 
 cloud in that bright sky. An heir was want- 
 ed, and it was five years before little Leon 
 came into the world. One can imagine with 
 what joy he was received. Now one day 
 they might write over the door of The Silver 
 Pill these words, " Bayard & Son." But as 
 the infant arrived at the time of a boom in 
 isinglass, Madame Bayard, whose presence
 
 1&2 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 in the shop was indispensable, could not 
 think of nursing him. She even gave up the 
 idea of taking a nurse in the house, fearing 
 for the new-born the close air of that corner 
 of old Paris, and contented herself with tak- 
 ing every Sunday with her husband a little 
 excursion to Argenteuil to see her son with 
 his nurse Voisin, who was overwhelmed with 
 coffee, sugar, soap, and other dainties. At 
 the end of eighteen months Mother Voisin 
 brought back the baby in a magnificent 
 state, and for two years a child's nurse, 
 chosen with great care, had taken the child 
 out for his airings in the square of the Tour 
 Saint-Jacques, and had exhibited for the ad- 
 miration of her companion-nurses, the pout- 
 ing lips, the high color, and the dimpled 
 back of the future druggist. 
 
 And now these good Bayards, learning of 
 the death of Mother Voisin, could not bear 
 the thought that the little girl who had been 
 nourished at the same breast with their boy
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 183 
 
 should be abandoned to public charity, so 
 they went to Argenteuil for Norine. 
 
 Poor little one ! Since the fifteen days 
 that her mother slept in the cemetery she had 
 been taken charge of by a cousin who kept 
 a billiard-saloon ; and though she was not 
 
 yet five years old, she had been put to work 
 washing the beer-glasses. 
 
 The Bayards found her charming, with 
 great eyes as blue as the summer sun, and 
 her thick blond tresses escaping from her 
 ugly black bonnet. Leon, who had been
 
 184 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 brought with his nurse, embraced his foster 
 sister ; and the cousin, who that very morn- 
 ing had boxed the orphan's ears for negli- 
 gence in sweeping out the hall, appeared 
 before the Parisians to be as much touched 
 as if parting with Norine was a heart-break- 
 ing affair. 
 
 The order for an ample breakfast restored 
 his serenity. 
 
 It was a beautiful Sunday in June, and 
 they were in the country "an occasion 
 which should be improved," declared Bay- 
 ard, "by taking the air ; shouldn't it, Mimi?" 
 
 And while pretty Madame Bayard, having 
 pinned up her skirts, went out with the chil- 
 dren and the nurse to pick flowers in a neigh- 
 boring field, the druggist, who was less am- 
 bitious, treated the saloon - keeping cousin 
 to a glass of vermouth, seated at the billiard- 
 table, which was covered with dead flies. 
 They breakfasted under a vineless arbor, 
 which the hot noonday sun riddled with its
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 
 
 '85 
 
 rays. But what of that ? They were pleased 
 and contented all the same. Madame Bay- 
 ard had hung her hat on the lattice ; and 
 her husband, wearing a bargeman's straw 
 helmet, which had been lent to him by the 
 saloon-keeper, cut up the duck in the best 
 of spirits. Little Leon and Norine, who 
 had immediately become the best of friends, 
 emptied the salad-bowl of its cream-cheese. 
 Then they all romped in the grass, went 
 boating on the stream, and, intoxicated with 
 the fresh country air, the 
 indwellers of the city, 
 coming from the close 
 Paris streets, pushed to 
 its fullest extreme this 
 idyl in the fashion of 
 Paul de Kock. 
 
 For, yes ; there was a 
 moment, as they came 
 back in the boat, in a 
 delicious sunset, when
 
 l86 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 tinted clouds floated in a glowing sky, when 
 Madame Bayard the serious Madame Bay- 
 ard whose frown turned to stone the shop- 
 boys of the druggist, sang the air called 
 " To the Shores of France," to the rhythmic 
 fall of the oars, plied by her husband in his 
 shirt-sleeves. They dined in the arbor where 
 they had breakfasted, but the second repast 
 was a shade less happy. The night-moths, 
 which dashed in to burn themselves at the 
 candles, frightened the children ; and Ma- 
 dame Bayard was so tired that she could 
 not even guess the simple rebus on her des- 
 sert napkin. 
 
 Never mind ; it has been a good day; and 
 on their return in a first-class carriage this 
 was not a time for petty economies Ma- 
 dame Bayard, with her head on her hus- 
 band's shoulder, watching Leon and Norine, 
 limp with sleep on the lap of the nurse, half 
 asleep herself, murmured to her husband, in 
 a happy voice :
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 187 
 
 " See, Ferdinand ; we have done well to 
 take the little one. She will be a comrade 
 for Leon. They will be like brother and 
 sister." 
 
 III. 
 
 In fact, they did thus grow up together. 
 
 They were most kind-hearted people, these 
 Bayards. They made no difference between 
 the humble orphan and their own dear boy, 
 who would one day in the firm of " Bayard 
 & Son " work monopolies in rhubarb and 
 corners in castor-oil ; indeed, they loved as 
 their own child little Norine, who was as in- 
 telligent as she was charming, as fair in mind 
 as she was delicate in body. 
 
 Now the nurse took the two children to 
 the square of the Tour Saint-Jacques when 
 the weather was pleasant, and in the even- 
 ing at the family table there were two high- 
 chairs side by side for the boy and his fos- 
 ter sister.
 
 i88 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 In addition to which, the Bayards were 
 not slow to perceive the good influence which 
 Norine had upon Leon. Quicker, of a more 
 nervous temperament, more easy of compre- 
 hension than the lymphatic boy, whose wits 
 were "wool-gathering," according to his fa- 
 ther, she seemed to communicate to him 
 something of her own spirit and fire. " She 
 jogs him up," said Madame Bayard. 
 
 And since he had lived with his foster 
 sister Leon had perceptibly grown brighter 
 and quicker. When they were of an age to 
 learn to read, Leon, who made but little 
 progress, and stumbled along with one of 
 those alphabets with pictures where the let- 
 ter E is by the side of an elephant and the 
 letter Z by the side of a zouave, was the de- 
 spair of his mother. But as soon as Norine, 
 who in a very short time learned to spell 
 and read, came to the aid of the little man, 
 he immediately made rapid progress. 
 
 So things went on, until both children
 
 were sent to a school for little children kept 
 by a gentlewoman named Merlin, in the Rue 
 de 1'Homme Arme*. According to the falla- 
 cious circular which Mademoiselle Merlin 
 sent to the folks of the quarter, there was a 
 garden that is to say, four broomsticks in
 
 190 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPfiE. 
 
 a sandy court; and it was there, the first 
 day during recess, that the innocent Leon 
 burst into cries of terror when he saw the 
 school-mistress, forced by some accident to 
 interrupt her knitting, stick one of her great 
 knitting-needles in her capacious head-dress. 
 A " senior," who was more familiar with her 
 head-dress, explained the phenomenon in 
 vain to Leon and Norine, for the boy, none 
 the less, preserved in the presence of Mad- 
 emoiselle Merlin an impression of supersti- 
 tious terror. 
 
 She would have paralyzed his infant facul- 
 ties, and have prevented him in the class 
 from following the pointer of Mademoiselle 
 Merlin, as she sniffled through her sing-song 
 lecture before the map of Europe, or the 
 table of weights and measures, if Norine 
 had not been there to reassure and encour- 
 age him. She was at once the first scholar 
 in the school, and became for slow and lazy 
 Leon a sort of sisterly counsellor and affec-
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. IQI 
 
 tionate under-teacher. Towards four o'clock 
 Madame Bayard had the two children, whom 
 the nurse had brought back to the store, 
 placed near her in the glass office ; and No- 
 rine, opening a copy-book or a book, ex- 
 plained to Leon the uncomprehended task 
 or made him repeat the lesson that he had 
 not understood. 
 
 " The good God has rewarded us," Ma- 
 dame Bayard sometimes whispered to her 
 husband in the evening. "That little No- 
 rine is a treasure, and so good, so industri- 
 ous ! Only to-day I listened to her helping 
 Leon again. I believe that without her he 
 would never have learned the multiplica- 
 tion-table." 
 
 " I believe you, Mimi," responded Bayard. 
 " I have observed it. Things go on marvel- 
 lously well with us, and we will portion her 
 and marry her, shall we not, when she comes 
 to a suitable age ?"
 
 IQ2 TEN TALES BY FRANCOIS COPPEE. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Age comes ah, how fast age comes ! And 
 behold ! now in the glass cage of the shop 
 there is a slender and beautiful young girl 
 sitting at the side of Madame Bayard, who 
 already shows some silver threads in her 
 black bands. It is Norine now who writes 
 in the great ledger with leather corners, while 
 her adopted mother plies her needles on 
 some embroidery. 
 
 Seven o'clock ! Time that they came 
 home, and the shop must be closed against 
 the November wind which is twisting and 
 turning the flames of the gas-jets. 
 
 Look at them now : Bayard grown stout, 
 portly, and covered with trinkets, while Leon, 
 who has just entered the first class in phar- 
 macy, has actually become a fine -looking 
 young fellow. 
 
 " Good-day, Mimi ; good-day, Norine ! Let 
 us go right in to dinner. I will tell you all
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 193 
 
 the news while we are eating the soup," said 
 the druggist. 
 
 They went up to the dining-room, and 
 while Madame Bayard, sitting under a ba- 
 rometer in the shape of a lyre, served the 
 thick soup, Bayard, tucking his napkin in his 
 vest and regarding his wife with a knowing 
 look, said, 
 
 " You know it is all right." 
 
 " The Forgets agree ?'* 
 
 "Exactly; and Leon will espouse Hortense 
 in six months, and our daughter-in-law will 
 come and live with us. Yes, Norine, you 
 have known nothing about it, because one 
 does not speak of such things before young 
 girls; but for more than a year Leon has 
 been in love with Hortense Forget, and has 
 been teasing us to arrange the marriage 
 not such a difficult thing after all, since it 
 only required a word. Leon is a good catch. 
 The only difficulty was that we wanted to 
 keep our son with us. At last it is all ar-
 
 194 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 ranged, and your foster brother will have the 
 wife he wants. I hope you are pleased." 
 
 "Very much pleased," replied Norine. 
 
 Oh, deaf and blind ! They never heard the 
 voice of Norine when she replied to them 
 that low, pathetic tone, which is the echo of 
 a broken heart. Nor did they see how pale 
 she became, and that her head, suddenly 
 grown heavy, swayed from side to side as if 
 Norine were about to faint. They saw noth- 
 ing, comprehended nothing ; and for a long 
 time they had seen and comprehended noth- 
 ing. Yet they dearly loved this Norine, who 
 was the grace, the charm of the house. They 
 dreamed, these good people, of marrying her 
 one of these days to their head-clerk, a wid- 
 ower of prudent and economical habits, and 
 "all that is necessary to make a woman hap- 
 py." Leon loved her, too, with all his heart; 
 but as a dear, good sister. Nor did the great 
 spoiled boy suspect that Norine loved him, 
 and suffered from her love aye, to death
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 195 
 
 itself. No ; even that evening, when they had 
 unconsciously inflicted upon her the worst 
 of torture, they never suspected the truth; 
 and they would sleep peacefully, indulging 
 in beautiful dreams of the future, at the very 
 hour when, shut in her chamber the cham- 
 ber separated by such a thin partition from 
 that of her adopted parents Norine would 
 fall upon her bed, fainting with grief, and 
 bury her head in her pillow to stifle her 
 sobs. 
 
 V. 
 
 The ball is finished ; and in the empty 
 rooms the candles, burned to the very end, 
 have broken some of the sconces and the 
 fragments lie upon the waxed floors. 
 
 The Bayards have insisted that the wed- 
 ding should be celebrated at their house; 
 but by the aid of many flowers (it is mid- 
 summer) they have given a holiday appear-
 
 196 TEN TALES BY FRANQO1S COPPEE. 
 
 ance to the apartment in the Rue Vieille du 
 Temple where they have triumphantly in- 
 stalled their daughter-in-law. 
 
 At last it is finished ; the young couple 
 have retired to their nuptial chamber, where 
 Madame Bayard has gone for a moment 
 with them. Coming out she found Norine 
 still in the little salon, helping the servants 
 extinguish the lights. She embraced the 
 young girl tenderly, saying, 
 
 " Go to bed, my child. You must be very 
 tired." And she added, with a smile, "Well, 
 it will be your turn before long." 
 
 And Norine was at last alone in the room, 
 now so gloomy, and lighted only by her sin- 
 gle candle resting on the piano. 
 
 Heavens ! how heavy was the odor of the 
 flowers, and how her head ached. 
 
 Ah, that horrible day ! What torment she 
 had endured since the moment when she 
 knelt, impressed into service as a lady's- 
 maid, with pins in her lips, at the feet of
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 
 
 197 
 
 her rival Hortense, and ar- 
 ranged her white satin train, 
 to the hour when Leon, 
 holding his wife by the 
 waist, drew her towards her, 
 Norine, and the lips of the 
 young couple met almost 
 upon her very forehead ! 
 
 Oh, the odor of the flow- 
 ers is insupportable, and she 
 is so giddy and faint. 
 
 She fell upon a sofa, un- 
 nerved by a frightful head- 
 ache, her head thrown back, clasping her 
 forehead with her two hands, but with open 
 eyes staring always at the door the door 
 of that chamber which was shut upon the 
 young couple, closed upon the mystery which 
 was breaking her heart. A sort of delirium 
 overwhelmed her. How the heavy perfume 
 of those flowers overpowered her, and how 
 a thousand memories assailed her at once.
 
 198 TEN TALES BY FRANgOIS COPPEE. 
 
 She was a child again in the saloon at Ar- 
 genteuil, and the kind Parisians came and 
 caressed her. She was embraced by the 
 dear little boy wearing a white plume in his 
 hat. Rapid pictures flashed upon her soul. 
 The pension of the Rue de 1'Homme Arme, 
 and Mademoiselle Merlin, with her knitting- 
 needle stuck in her head-dress, pointed with 
 the end of her stick to the table of weights 
 and measures. The drug-store on Sundays, 
 all dark, the shutters closed, and she playing 
 catch with Leon among the barrels and sacks. 
 Good God ! was she losing her head ? She 
 could not help humming that waltz, during 
 which Leon once held her in his arms. She 
 was stifled. Oh, the flowers ! She must go 
 out, or at least open a window. But she 
 could not rise ; her strength had deserted 
 her. Could she die thus ? Two iron fingers 
 seemed to be pressing her temples. Oh, the 
 roses and the orange-flowers those orange- 
 flowers above all I
 
 THE FOSTER SISTER. 199 
 
 At last she made a great effort. She rose 
 upright and pale pale as her white robe. 
 But suddenly her strength left her, and fall- 
 ing first upon her knees, and then with her 
 head and shoulders upon the wood floor, 
 poor Norine lay stretched at the threshold 
 of the bridal chamber, killed by disappointed 
 love and by the flowers.
 
 1WY FRIEND MEURTR1ER.
 
 I. 
 
 I WAS at one time employed in a govern- 
 ment office. Every day from ten o'clock 
 until four I became a voluntary prisoner 
 in a depressing office, adorned with yellow 
 pasteboard boxes, and filled with the musty 
 odor of old papers. There I lunched on 
 Italian cheese and apples which I roasted 
 at the grate. I read the morning papers, 
 even to the advertisements ; I rhymed verses, 
 and I attended to the affairs of state to the 
 extent of drawing at the end of each month
 
 204 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 a salary which barely kept me from starv- 
 ing. 
 
 I recall to-day one of my companions in 
 captivity at that epoch. 
 
 He was called Achille Meurtrier, and cer- 
 tainly his fierce look and tall form seemed 
 to warrant that name. He was a great big 
 fellow, about forty years old, not too much 
 chest or shoulders, but who increased his 
 apparent size by wearing felt hats with wide 
 brims, ample and short coats, large plaid 
 trousers, and neckties of a sanguine red un- 
 der rolling collars. He wore a full beard, 
 long hair, and was very proud of his hairy 
 hands. 
 
 The chief boast of Meurtrier, otherwise 
 the best and most amiable of companions, 
 was to trifle with an athletic constitution, to 
 possess the biceps of a prize-fighter, and, as 
 he said himself, not to know his own strength. 
 He never made a gesture, even in the exer- 
 cise of his peaceful profession, that did not
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 205 
 
 have for its object to convince the spectators 
 of his prodigious vigor. Did he have to 
 take from its case a half-empty pasteboard 
 box, he advanced towards the shelf with the 
 heavy step of a street porter, grasped the 
 box solidly with a tight hand, and carried it 
 with a stiff arm as far as the next table, with 
 a shrugging of shoulders and frowning of 
 brow worthy of Milo of Crotona. He car- 
 ried this manner so far that he never used 
 less apparent effort even to lift the lightest 
 objects, and one day when he held in his 
 right hand a basket of old papers I saw him 
 extend his left arm horizontally as if to make 
 a counterpoise to the tremendous weight. 
 
 I ought to say that this robust creature 
 inspired me with a profound respect, for I 
 was then, even more than to-day, physically 
 weak and delicate, and in consequence filled 
 with admiration for that energetic physique 
 which I lacked. 
 
 The conversations of Meurtrier were not
 
 2o6 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 of a nature to diminish the admiration with 
 which he inspired me. 
 
 In the summer, above all, on Monday 
 mornings, when we had returned to the office 
 after our Sunday holiday, he had an inex- 
 haustible fund of stories concerning his ad- 
 ventures and feats of strength. After taking 
 off his felt-hat, his coat, and his vest, and 
 wiping the perspiration from his forehead 
 with the sleeve of his shirt, to indicate his 
 sanguine and ardent temperament, he would 
 thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his 
 trousers, and, standing near me in an atti- 
 tude of perpendicular solidity, begin a mono- 
 logue something as follows : 
 
 " What a Sunday, my boy ! Positively no 
 fatigue can lay me up. Think of it : yester- 
 day was the regatta at Joinville-le-Pont ; at 
 six o'clock in the morning the rendezvous at 
 Bercy, at The Mariners, for the crew of the 
 Marsouin; the sun is up; a glass of white wine 
 and we jump into our rowing suits, seize an
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 207 
 
 oar and give way one-two, one-two as far 
 as Joinville ; then overboard for a swim be- 
 fore breakfast strip to swimming drawers, a 
 jump overboard, and look out for squalls. 
 After my bath I have the appetite of a tiger. 
 Good ! I seize the boat by one hand and I 
 call out, ' Charpentier, pass me a small ham.' 
 Three motions in one time and I have fin- 
 ished it to the bone. 'Charpentier, pass 
 me the brandy-flask.' Three swallows and 
 it is empty." 
 
 So the description would con- 
 tinuedazzling, Homeric. 
 
 " It is the hour for the regatta 
 noon the sun just overhead. 
 The boats draw up in line on 
 the sparkling river, before a tent 
 gaudy with streamers. On the 
 bank the mayor with his staff 
 of office, gendarmes in yellow 
 shoulder-belts, and a swarm of 
 summer dresses, open parasols,
 
 2O8 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 and straw hats. Bang! the signal- gun is 
 fired. The Marsouin shoots ahead of all 
 her competitors and easily gains the prize 
 and no fatigue ! We go around Marne, 
 and, returning, dine at Creteil. How cool 
 the evening in the dusky arbor, where pipes 
 glow through the darkness, and moths singe 
 their wings in the flame of the omelette ail 
 kirsch. At the end of a dessert, served on 
 decorated plates, we hear from the ball-room 
 the call of the cornet ' Take places for the 
 quadrille !' But already a rival crew, beaten 
 that same morning, has monopolized the 
 prettiest girls. A fight ! teeth broken, eyes 
 blackened, ugly falls, and whacks below the 
 belt ; in a word, a poem of physical enthu- 
 siasm, of noisy hilarity, of animal spirits, 
 without speaking of the return at midnight, 
 through crowded stations, with girls whom 
 we lift into the cars, friends separated call- 
 ing from one end of the train to the other, 
 and fellows playing a horn upon the roof."
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 209 
 
 And the evenings of my astonishing com- 
 panion were not less full of adventure than 
 his Sundays. Collar- and -elbow wrestling 
 in a tent, under the red light of torches, be- 
 tween him simple amateur and Du Bois, 
 the iron man, in person ; rat - chases near 
 the mouths of sewers, with dogs as fierce as 
 tigers ; sanguinary encounters at night, in 
 the most dangerous quarters, with ruffians 
 and nose-eaters, were the most insignificant 
 episodes of his nightly career. Nor do I 
 dare relate other adventures of a more in- 
 timate character, from which, as the writ- 
 ers of an earlier day would say in noble 
 style, a pen the least timorous would recoil 
 with horror. 
 
 However painful it may be to confess an 
 unworthy sentiment, I am obliged to say 
 that my admiration for Meurtrier was not 
 unmixed with regret and bitterness. Per- 
 haps there was mingled with it something 
 of envy. But the recitation of his most mar-
 
 210 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 vellous exploits had never awakened in me 
 the least feeling of incredulity, and Achille 
 Meurtrier easily took his place in my mind 
 among heroes and demigods, between Ro- 
 land and Pirithous. 
 
 II. 
 
 At this time I was a great wanderer in 
 the suburbs, and I occupied the leisure of 
 my summer evenings by solitary walks in 
 those distant regions, as unknown to the 
 Parisians of the boulevards as the country 
 of the Caribbees, and of whose sombre 
 charm I endeavored later to tell in verse. 
 
 One evening in July, hot and dusty, at the 
 hour when the first gas-lights were beginning 
 to twinkle in the misty twilight, I was walk- 
 ing slowly from Vaugirard through one of 
 those long and depressing suburban streets 
 lined on each side by houses of unequal 
 height, whose porters and porteresses, in
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 211 
 
 shirt sleeves and in calico, sat on the steps 
 and imagined that they were taking the fresh 
 air. Hardly any one passing in the whole 
 street ; perhaps, from end to end, a mason, 
 white with plaster, a sergeant-de-ville, a child 
 carrying home a four-pound loaf larger than 
 himself, or a young girl hurrying on in hat 
 and cloak, with a leather bag on her arm ; 
 and every quarter-hour the half-empty om- 
 nibus coming back to its place of departure 
 with the heavy trot of its tired horses. 
 
 Stumbling now and then on the pavement 
 for asphalt is an unknown luxury in these 
 places I went down the street, tasting all 
 the delights of a stroller. Sometimes I stop- 
 ped before a vacant lot to watch, through 
 the broken boards of the fence, the fading 
 glories of the setting sun and the black sil- 
 houettes of the chimneys thrown against a 
 greenish sky. Sometimes, through an open 
 window on the ground-floor, I caught sight 
 pf an interior, picturesque and familiar : here
 
 212 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 a jolly-looking laundress holding her flat-iron 
 to her cheek; there workmen sitting at ta- 
 bles and smoking in the basement of a cab- 
 aret, while an old Bohemian with long gray 
 hair, standing before them, sang something 
 about " Liberty," accompanying himself on 
 a guitar about the color of bouillon the 
 scenes of Chardin and Van Ostade. 
 
 Suddenly I stopped. 
 
 One of these personal pictures had caught 
 my eye by its domestic and charming sim- 
 plicity. 
 
 She looked so happy and peaceful in her 
 quiet little room, the dear old lady in her 
 black gown and widow's cap, leaning back 
 in an easy-chair covered with green Utrecht 
 velvet, and sitting quietly with her hands 
 folded on her lap. Everything around her 
 was so old and simple, and seemed to have 
 been preserved, less through a wise economy 
 than on account of hallowed memories, since 
 the honey-moon with monsieur of the high
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 213 
 
 complexion, in a frock - coat and flowered 
 waistcoat, whose oval crayon ornamented 
 the wall. By two lamps on the mantle-shelf 
 every detail of the old-fashioned furniture 
 
 could be distinguished, from the clock on a 
 fish of artificial and painted marble to the 
 old and antiquated piano, on which, without 
 doubt, as a young girl, in leg-of-mutton sleeves 
 and with hair dressed a la Greeqiie, she had 
 played the airs of Romagnesi.
 
 214 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 Certainly a loved and only daughter, re- 
 maining unmarried through her affection for 
 her mother, piously watched over the last 
 years of the widow. It was she, I was sure, 
 who had so tenderly placed her dear moth- 
 er ; she who had put the ottoman under her 
 feet, she who had put near her the inlaid ta- 
 ble, and arranged on it the waiter and two 
 cups. I expected already to see her coming 
 in carrying the evening coffee the sweet, 
 calm girl, who should be dressed in mourning 
 like the widow, and resemble her very much. 
 
 Absorbed by the contemplation of a scene 
 so sympathetic, and by the pleasure of imag- 
 ining that humble poem, I remained stand- 
 ing some steps from the open window, sure 
 of not being noticed in the dusky street, 
 when I saw a door open and there appeared 
 oh, how far he was from my thoughts at 
 that moment my friend Meurtrier himself, 
 the formidable hero of tilts on the river and 
 frays in unknown places.
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 215 
 
 A sudden doubt crossed me. I felt that 
 I was on the point of discovering a mystery. 
 
 It was indeed he. His terrible hairy 
 hand held a tiny silver coffee- pot, and he 
 was followed by a poodle which greatly em- 
 barrassed his steps a valiant and classic 
 poodle, the poodle of blind clarionet-players, 
 a poor beggar's poodle, a poodle clipped like 
 a lion, with hairy ruffles on his four paws, 
 and a white mustache like a general of the 
 Gymnase. 
 
 " Mamma," said the giant, in a tone of in- 
 effable tenderness, "here is your coffee. I 
 am sure that you will find it nice to-night. 
 The water was boiling well, and I poured it 
 on drop by drop." 
 
 " Thank you," said the old lady, rolling 
 her easy- chair to the table with an air; 
 "thank you, my little Achille. Your dear 
 father said many a time that there was not 
 my equal at making coffee he was so kind 
 and indulgent, the dear, good man but I
 
 2l6 T,EN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPEE. 
 
 begin to believe that you are even better 
 than I." 
 
 At that moment, and while Meurtrier was 
 pouring out the coffee with all the delicacy 
 of a young girl, the poodle, excited no doubt 
 by the uncovered sugar, placed his forepaws 
 on the lap of his mistress. 
 
 " Down, Medor," she cried, with a benevo- 
 lent indignation, " Did any one ever see 
 such a troublesome animal ? Look here, 
 
 sir ! you know very well that 
 <^v 
 ._ - \' your master never fails to give 
 
 you the last of his cup. By- 
 the-way," added the widow, 
 addressing her son, "you have 
 taken the poor fellow out, have 
 you not ?" 
 
 " Certainly, mamma," he re- 
 plied, in a tone that was almost infantile. 
 " I have just been to the creamery for your 
 morning milk, and I put the leash and col- 
 lar on Mddor and took him with me."
 
 MY FRIEND MEURTRIER. 217 
 
 ''And he has attended to all his little 
 wants?" 
 
 " Don't be disturbed. He doesn't want 
 anything." 
 
 Reassured on this point, important to ca- 
 nine hygiene, the good dame drank her cof- 
 fee, between her son and her dog, who each 
 regarded her with an inexpressible tender- 
 ness. 
 
 It was assuredly unnecessary to see or 
 hear more. I had already descried what a 
 peaceful family life upright, pure, and de- 
 voted my friend Meurtrier hid under his 
 chimerical gasconades. But the spectacle 
 with which chance had favored me was at 
 once so droll and so touching that I could 
 not resist the temptation to watch for some 
 moments longer. That indiscretion sufficed 
 to show me the whole truth. 
 
 Yes, this type of roisterers, who seemed to 
 have stepped from one of the romances of 
 Paul de Kock this athlete, this despot of
 
 2l8 TEN TALES BY FRANQOIS COPPfiE. 
 
 bar-rooms and public -houses performed 
 simply and courageously, in these lowly 
 rooms in the suburbs, the sublime duties of 
 a sister of charity. This intrepid oarsman 
 had never made a longer voyage than to 
 conduct his mother to mass or vespers every 
 Sunday. This billiard expert knew only how 
 to play bezique. This trainer of bull-dogs 
 was the submissive slave of a poodle. This 
 Mauvaise-Philibert was an Antigone. 
 
 III. 
 
 The next morning, on arriving at the office, 
 I asked Meurtrier how he had employed the 
 previous evening, and he instantly impro- 
 vised, without a moment's hesitation, an ac- 
 count of a sharp encounter on the boulevard 
 at two in the morning, when he had knocked 
 down with a single blow of his fist, having 
 passed his thumb through the ring of his
 
 MY FRIEND MEUkTRIER. 
 
 219 
 
 keys, a terrible street rough. I listened, 
 smiling ironically, and thinking to confound 
 him ; but remembering how respectable a 
 virtue is which is hidden even under an ab- 
 surdity, I struck him amicably on the shoul- 
 der, and said, with conviction : 
 " Meurtrier, you are a hero !"
 
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