<^ m. F^ VB e^ n Ovn. Ot>%^l, h^r^ ilLOf^/ 2.SC {^ health to the bones.' 1U3 It was not so terrible an ordeal to him to descend into this lower grade as it must have been to a spoiled favourite of fortune. He had asso- ciated with peasants in his own home ; but these Parisian workmen seemed to him creatures of a coarser clay. They were infinitely cleverer; but their cleverness was unholy, devilish. They be- lieved in nothincr — neither in the goodness of God nor of man. They scoffed at all sacred things in the past and the present. Political feeling ran high. The Eepublic was not republican enough to please the majority. There were a few Bonapartists who would like to see the old Imperial eagle spread his wings over the greater part of the civilised world once more — who wanted the wars of Italy and Egypt, Germany and Spain over again. But these were in a weak minority. There were malcontents who had never forgiven the closing of the national workshops ; others who abused Louis Blanc for having promised a millennium which he was unable to realise. ' Charlatans all,' said one. ' What can these white-handed gentry know of the rights of labour ? Working men will never be properly governed till a working-man is President.' ' Down with presidents ! What do we want 104 ISHMAEL. with a President ? ' cried another, growing husky- over his quart of wine at twelve sous, and his garlic sausage. * Your President is only a monarch in disguise. He is a leech w^ho sucks the blood of the working-man. To-day his ministers modestly ask for two million francs out of the public purse — to-morrow^ they \vill ask twice as much. A few years ago he was an adventurer in America, depen- dent upon Louis Philippe's bounty ; after that a prisoner at Ham ; and then a gentleman at large in the streets of London, waiting upon fortune. And now he and his friends — Morny and Fialin, soi-disant Persigny — have all the trump cards in their hands. He has the army at his orders — can shoot us all down whenever the fancy seizes him. The Government of France should be a great confederation of w^orking-men — a small minority of men who w^ork with their brains, an enormous majority of men who work with their hands — every man to have a direct influence upon the legislature, every man ' ' If there were no court the higher branches of trade would stagnate/ said a cabinet-maker. 'Whether it is at the Elysee or the Tuileries, we must have a court. They say that if the Prince- President were Emperor, and had things his own SWEET TO THE SOUL, AND HEALTH TO THE BONES.' 105 way, trade would be better than it has been since the time of Louis XIV.' This provoked unanimous derision. It was the bourgeoisie who had a hankering for the glitter and swagger of an empire, not the working classes. What they wanted was trade union, otherwise trade despotism, international societies, syndicates, co-operation, the power to dictate terms to their employers. Sebastien, otherwise Ishmael, sat still and heard everything. His eager receptive intellect caught the spirit of the present moment, steeped itself in the surrounding atmosphere. He was of good blood ; bore an ancient name ; but pride of race had shown itself to him on its darker side. He was ready to be as much a leveller as the strongest democrat there. He listened, and believed the worst that was said against the man who held the reins of the state chariot — always a hated personage with one particular section of the Parisian world. He, who had nothing to look to but labour to win him a place in the world, friends, fortune, fame, was ready to exalt the nobility of labour, to assert the rights of the working-man as against heaven-born generals and senators paid by the state. Ishmael was on the ground at Belleville at six lOG ISHMAEL. o'clock next morning ; and before ten he was taken on to the works in the capacity of a gdcheur, the foreman instructing him in the rudimentary arts of that office. The Parisian workman is given to chojnage, rarely works more than four days a week, and a vacancy of this kind is not long in arising. Thus before he had been three days in the great city Sebastien found himself in the way of earning his bread. He was to be paid two francs and a half a day for his labour, and he was to give one franc out of the two and a half to the foreman for his bounty in taking on an untried hand, a youth without recommendation or papers. But the gain of thirty sous a day was a solid fact, and Sebastien felt that he had passed the first mile-post on the lono^ high-road that leads to fortune. Had he come to Paris crowned with laurels from a provincial university, rich in medals and diplomas, the writer of a prize poem, the discoverer of a new planet, the inventor of a new mode of locomotion, charged with science or poetry, as with the electric current — in a word a genius, he would inevitably have spent the first few years of his city life in rags and starvation ; perhaps to end his days untimely by a few sous' worth of charcoal, or a leap from one of the bridges. But as he was passing ignorant, and brought only his youth. ' SWEET TO THE SOUL, AND HEALTH TO THE BONES.' 107 his strength, and the cunning of his hands to the great labour market, he obtained employment immediately. He not only found a place in the mighty wheel, but he kept it. He was sober where other men were given to drink — he was earnest, patient, industrious, ambitious, among men who for the most part were idle flaneurs on the boulevard or loungers in the street — for the Boulevard de la Chapelle and the Passage Me- nilmontant have their idlers as well as the Boulevard des Capucines or the Place de la Madeleine. He was scoffed at for his virtues, suspected for his superior air and manners, his reserve as to his antecedents. He was called Mouchard, Orleanist, Chouan, in disguise; but he held his peace, and went his way, offending no one ; yet with a look of reserved force which indicated that it were not over-safe to be offensive to him. To the fellow- work men who were inclined to be friendly he was civil, listened to their wi^ongs and discussed their claims, and the privileges for w^hich they clamoured. Little by little he caught the tone of his surroundings, and was almost as Parisian as his companions ; but he never sank to their level. Instinctively, without a hint from the man 108 ISHMAEL. himself — save that implied in the name which lie bore — they penetrated the secret of his existence. He was a gentleman by birth, the cast-off son of a noble father. They called him the marquis, not in derision, for at nineteen he had the tone of a man born to be the leader of men. He did not long remain a gdcheicr, condemned to stir lime and sand in a smoking heap. He showed himself skilful enough to be set to better work before he had been three weeks in the employment of the Belleville builder. The work upon which he was engaged was the erection of a block of workmen's houses, the beginning of a mighty boule- vard, great white stone mansioDS rising gigantic from the midst of a broad plateau, fringed on the further side by the squalid courts and alleys of Menilmontant ; wooden sheds, houses of plaster and canvas, the dens and lairs of abject poverty and reckless crime — seething boil-pot of want, vice, disease, misery, into which the police made an occasional raid in pursuit of some arch-offender at peril of their lives. The builder w^as not slow to notice a youth who would work, who worked as if his muscular arm delighted in its labour, as if the choral swing of the hammer were to him as the melody of a bridal song. He picked Sebastien out from the ' SWEET TO THE SOUL, AND HEALTE TO THE BONES.' 109 ruck, heard his story— hypothetical story— from the foreman, and observed him afterwards with a keener interest. After all there is something in good blood, and, when a gentleman does take it into his head to work, Jacques Bonhomme is handicapped against him. This was what the builder said to himself as lie watched the muscular form— straight, slim, and tall— the tinely shaped head so loftily posed upon the neck of a young Alcides, the clearly cut yet massive features, marked brows, aquiline nose, falcon eye, a mouth firm as if moulded out of marble. No common workman this assuredly, and yet he lived as the other men lived, went to his seven-sous ordinary or his tapis franc after his work, and had a nest high up in one of those dreary barracks yonder, near the new hospital, which had been built with the bequest of a benevolent lady, by name Laborissiere. One of Sebastien's first acts on finding him- self in the way of earning his bread was to send Father Bressant the bulk of his money. There was a deficiency of two louis and a half for the month's rent and the expenses of the journey, but this sum Sebastien meant to make good out of his savings before he was many months older. Life is passing cheap in a great city to vigorous, temperate, self-denying youth. Nas- 110 ISHMAKU myth, a young man reared in the comfort and elegance of a successful artist's household, had the courage to live the first year of his London life upon ten shillings a week — a voluntary sacri- fice to the spirit of manly independence, since larger means were well within his reach — and, in so doing, set an example to industrious youth which should endure for all time — a nobler thing' than even the hammer which made his name for ever famous. And Sebastien Caradec had the Nasmyth temper, the love of mechanical work for its own sake, the eye and the hand of the artist in stone or in iron. CHAPTER VI. 'THE END OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVINESS.' Time out of mind the faubourg St. Antoine has been the quarter of furniture dealers and furniture makers. Of late years there has been an invasion of German workmen in the quarter, to the detri- ment of native talent ; but in 1850 the chenistes of Paris were for the most part Frenchmen who had succeeded to the primitive and scarcely improved tools of Boule and his sons. Here and there, even in these latter days, a native of Paris holds his own against the thrifty hard- working and hard-living square-heads, and by the delicacy of his workmanship and the grace of his designs demonstrates that the glory of the French ebe}iiste, the artist-artisan whose work was once renowned all the civilized world over, has not utterly departed. Such an one was Pere Lemoine, a man well on in his seventh decade, more or less of a drunkard always, and betimes an idler, but an artist to the tips of his finger-nails. Had Pere Lemoine abjured 112 ISHMAKL. the bottle and worked steadily in the years that were gone he would have occupied a very different lodging from that wretched ground-floor den looking into the yard of a huge barrack-like pile, between a patch of w^aste land and a little cluster of fdthy courts and alleys, the remnant of a past age — alleys that had seen the fall of the Bastille and the days of the Eed Terror; alleys in which the glorious memories of July w^ere still fresh, and which had sent forth their contingent of revolt in '32 and in '48. Pere Lemoine might have been at the top of the tree, an illustrious ornament to the furniture trade, said the dealers and the middlemen who knew the man and his work. But for that man who will only work when driven by absolute want, who loves not his art for its own sake, and who would rather wallow among a herd of other wallowers in some low drinking cellar, than sit beside the cheery hearth of a prosperous home, there is no hope. Upon the downward path which that man treads there is no end but the pauper's grave. Pere Lemoine might have been a master in the trade, and he was a slave — a rich man, and he was a beggar : but he had taken his own way of living, and he was wont in his cups to defend his choice between the two great high-roads of life. "Well, he would argue, he was as poor as Job. There were 'THE END OF THAT MIKTH IS HEAVINESS.' 113 men with not a tithe of his talent who had made fortunes ; but what would you ? — it was not his nature to be a drudge. The man who makes a fortune by his trade is your stolid, mindless mechanic, your mere machine of a man, your sordid plodder, who never shares a measure of vitriol or a litre of little-blue with a friend, or takes a night's pleasure — a fish-blooded creature, content to starve and pinch himself and his family, and to toil early and late for thirty years or so in order to be rich at the dull end of his dreary life, when such poor senses as he possessed at the beginning are half- dead within him. ' T don't envy such a slave his frock-coat and his fine house at Asnieres, or his money in the funds,' exclaimed Pere Lemoine contemptuously, lolling over the stained old marble table at his favourite brasserie, ' The Faithful Pig.' ' A man who has not enjoyed friendship, good company, a song or a dance, good wine, and his polichinelle of cognac now and then at a merry rendezvous like this — such a man, I say, has never lived. N0771 dhm caniche ! what should I do with a frock-coat or a villa in the suburbs? I detest the country, and I love to take my ease in my blouse and my slippers. I have worn a frock-coat in my day — I who talk to you ; and I tell you that the day is not far distant when VOL. I. I 114 ' ISHMAEL. we shall all wear blouses, when there will be no more fine gentlemen, and the frock-coat will go the way of red heels and hair powder — to the gutter, to the rag-heap, with all such trumpery ! There is no true nobility but in the man himself. Thews, sinews, heart, brains — there is your only patent of rank.' Not much nobility in the speaker sprawling across the table in that low den of 'The Faithful Pig' — an inner and sacred apartment devoted ex- clusively to regular customers. And such custo- mers ! There were men in dubious linen and sham jewellery, tawdry, fine, audacious, whose only trade was iniquity. There were girls still in the very dawn of girlhood, yet steeped to the lips in the knowledge of evil, hovering near the crowded tables, and exchanging imfamous jests with the drinkers : shabby finery, slipshod feet, glassy eyes, a hectic flush upon hollow cheeks — the livery of vice, the stamp of early death ; and amidst the Babel of voices, the crescendo of oaths, the reek of coarse tobacco and coarser spirits, there sounded the melancholy strains of a cracked tenor, as an old cahotin, at a table in a corner — thirty years ago a famous opera-singer and spoilt darling of duchesses — sano" a sentimental ballad about the old o house at home and the mother's grave, to a little 'THE END OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVINESS.' 115 circle of half-tipsy amateurs. The fouler the atmo- sphere, the viler the place and the people, the more certain was the success of that plaintive ditty. The old cahotin had lived upon it for the last seven years, ever since he left off trying to exist respectably as a teacher of singing — coureur de cachets — in the faubourg St.-Germain. It was in this low haunt that the trolleur spent his evenings — for him veritable nodes amhrosiancB. After all, the atmosphere of man's happiness does not depend upon the laws of abstract beauty: or who would not set sail for the spicy isles of the Indian Ocean, or the silent forests beside the Amazon ? A man's idea of happiness is the life which suits him best ; and to drink, and talk, and laugh, and denounce the powers that be, in a low tavern, was Pere Lemoine's ideal existence. He came to ' The Faithful Pig ' with alacrity every evening, in fair weather or foul. He left late in the night with fond regret. There were nights, indeed, when he never left at all, but lay all his length among the sawdust beside the pewter counter, cuvant son vin, till the cold gray dawn stared in at him through the holes in the shutter, and the gargon came, sleepy and unwashed, to open the windows and broom away the traces of last night's orgy, 1 ] 6 ISHMAEL. Pere Lemoine, taking his life thus easily, had never yet been able to extricate himself from the clutches of the middle- man. He worked as he liked, when he liked, in his own den. When he had finished a piece of furniture — cabinet, escritoire, bo7iheur du jour, as the case might be — he sum- moned his agent and ally, an Auvergnat, known in Parisian slang as a charahia, who put the article on his truck and carried it round to the furniture- dealers, to dispose of it for the best price he could get; and then there was played, over and over again, a neat little comedy in three acts, wherein the trolleur enacted the pigeon and the charahia the hawk — a little plot so transparent that old Lemoine, who was no fool, must have seen through it after very few repetitions ; only it suited his temper better to be duped over and over again, to be the prey of an ignorant peasant who had begun life as a shoeblack on the boulevard du Temple, than to work hard and live temperately. The first act of the comedy consisted of two scenes. Scene 1, the departure of the charahia in the morning with the piece of furniture, cheery, jocund, full of hope ; scene 2, the return of that faithful Auvergnat at eventide, gloomy and despair- ing. The furniture trade is going to the dogs, he declares. France is on the eve of a revolution, and 'THE END OF THA.T MIRTH IS IIPAVINESS.' 117 people are afraid to furnish houses which may be consumed in the general bonfire next week. He has hawked that escritoire, a masterpiece, all over Paris, and not a dealer would bid for it. End of act i. Act ii. consists of a single scene : return of the charabia three days after to say that he has found a dealer who will give just half the price Lemoine has asked for that escritoire. Lemoine, in low water, but not quite run dry, declines. Act iii. occurs a week later. By this time Lemoine has exchanged his last sous for cheap cognac, alias vitriol, and is an easy prey for the Auvergnian hawk. The benevolent charabia comes to offer a kindness. He is only a poor messenger, a hewer of wood and a carrier of water ; he cannot pay as the rich merchant would pay, he does not want the furniture at all, and if he offers anything for it he does so out of pure good nature, to oblige his employer. He will not offer as little as that miserly dealer in the rue Vivien ne, a man who has half the nobility for his customers ; no, he will give ten per cent, more than that Harpagon offered. Lemoine, languishing for more vitriol and the intellectual society of ' The Faithful Pig,' accepts the offer, parts with his handiwork, for half its value, and thus affords the charabia the oppor- 118 ISHMAEL. tunity of growing rich, and of blossoming some day into a prosperous furniture-dealer in the faubourg St. Antoine. Naturally, this little comedy cannot be played too frequently. The charabia must sometimes perform his commission with approximate fidelity. But the game may be played a good many times ill the course of a year with sucli a man as Pere Lemoine, whose alcoholised brain has long lost the capacity for remembering the details of a year's existence. ' Vogue la galere ' is the drunkard's motto. The Lemoines, husband and wife, had lived in that ground-floor den in the rue Sombreuil for nearly forty years. The house had been built not long after the Terror, while the fall of the old fortress prison-house yonder was yet green in the memory of those who watclied the barrack- like pile rising from the dreariness of a level waste. Pere Lemoine could just remember the wreck of the Bastille. The roar of cannon, and the cries of a maddened crowd were the earliest sounds he could recall as he looked backward along the cloudy avenue of the past. The picture of those days when he was a barefooted little galopin at his father's knees seemed far more vivid than that of ten years ago. He was a married 'THE END OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVINESS.' 119 man and a father long before the Eevolution of July, 1830, which drove Charles X. into exile and gave France her Citizen King. He and his wife were among the crowd at the review on the boulevard du Temple, when Fieschi's infernal machine exploded, and Marshal Mortier fell dead by the side of his king. There was nothing that Pere Lemoine re- membered in his life better than the building of the rue Sombreuil. He had played as a barefooted gamin among the builder's rubbish, the stone-dust and shavings, had watched the carpenters at work, and the gdclieur mixing his mortar, had seen the tall white houses rise stone by stone out of the ground. His father was an ebeniste like himself, working independently at his own goodwill, just as Pere Lemoine worked now; and as soon as the boy was old enough to hold hammer or chisel he began to learn his father's trade. There was an elder brother, a soldier, following the fortunes of the First Consul, and there was a sister who worked at a great military outfitter's in the fau- bourg du Temple, and who came home at night with arras and fingers aching, after ten hours' stitchingr at ser^e coats and trousers. It was a great epoch for the Lemoine family when they moved into the ground-floor rooms on the 120 ISHMAEL. south side of the big white house. It was all so clean, so white, so dazzling, such a contrast to the narrow alley from which they emerged — a darksome passage where all the houses looked as if they were on the point of falling into each other's arms, a passage steeped in the foulness of centuries, reeking with indescribable odours. In this new wdiite barrack all the sanitary conditions were as vile as they could be, no one knowing or caring about sanitation in those days. But the house was new, and foul odours had not had time to crrow. The Lemoines were prosperous in those early days of Consulate and Empire, prosperous because industrious and temperate. Pierre's father was a first-rate workman, and although it pleased him to be independent, and to supply the dealers at his own pleasure, he was regular in his habits, and turned out plenty of work in the year. At twenty young Lemoine married a neighbour's daughter, and took his wife home to the family nest. There was a slip of a room off the living room, which did well enough for the young couple. The elder brother was otherwise accommodated, far off in a foreign grave. He had fallen at Auorstadt, and his sword and a smoky wreath of immortelles hanging above the chimneypiece, amidst Mere Lemoiiie's hatterie de cuisine, were the only tokens left of his existence. 'THE END OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVIXESS.' 121 The mother owed her dead boy's sword to the thoughtful kindness of a young officer, who had since that time trodden the same dark road, and found a grave on the great highway to Eussia. When the Citizen King came to rale over his loving subjects, Pere et Mere Lemoine the elder were both dead, and Pierre and his wife lived in the rue Sombreuil with their only child, a pale graceful girl of nineteen, with large violet eyes, and chestnut hair which was the admiration of all the gossips in the neighbourhood. Pierre and his wife were known as jpere et mere, and the last generation was for- gotten. Mere Lemoine and her daughter did not get on very happily together. The mother was a person of fretful disposition, given to tears, and not innocent of a liking for wine and spirits. She was not a confirmed drunkard in those days, but she was just beginning a system of secret tippling which must inevitably lead to a bad end. Jeanneton, the daughter, was fond of pleasure, and somewhat vain of her pale, fair prettiness, which had won her too many outspoken compliments from students and clerks as she went to her work across the river yonder, in the Quartier Latin, a dangerous neighbourhood for youth and beauty in those days. P^re Lemoine had apprenticed his daughter to a 122 ISHMAEL. clear-starcher in a good way of business in a dull, shabby street near the rue de Fleurus ; but dull and shabby as the street was, it boasted one of the most popular restaurants in the students' quarter, a house called The 'Pantagruel/ in which all the quick- witted dare-devils of the Sorbonne and the Maison Dieu loved to assemble, and where they made and unmade dynasties and governments, or fancied they did, which was almost the same thing. At first Jeanneton rebelled sorely against her apprenticeship to the art of clear-starching ; it was killing, cruel, abominable, she told her parents. There was no other trade in all Paris that would have been so hateful. It was spirit-breaking drudgery to stand stooping over an ironing-board all day ironing shirt-fronts and goffering frills. In 1832 the frilled shirt-front was not yet altogether exploded. There were elderly gentlemen who still wore those decorations. The whole business was distasteful to Jeanneton. She complained of the heat of the stoves, the weight of the irons, the smell of the starch ; and she came home of an evening white as the shirts she had ironed, and dissolved into tears at the least word of reproach. Her appetite was wretched. Moved by these complaints, Mere Lemoine her- self began to make a trouble of her daughter's 'THE EXIJ OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVINESS.' 123 avocation, and had more than one violent quai-rel with her husband on the subject. Pere Lemoine was well started upon the downward course by this time, and spent half his earnings upon cheap brandy. The girl was dying by incheS; Mere Lemoine told her husband ; it was a blackamoor's slavery to which he had sold her yonder, and they were not a penny the richer for her sufferings. ' Perhaps you would rather she were in the streets,' growled Lemoine, who " thought clear- starching a genteel trade, and that he had done very well for his daughter when he got her accepted as pupil of Madame Eebeqiie, at the sign of the ' Garden of Eden,' without a sous of premium. When she had worked for Madame a year gratis, she was to receive twelve francs a week, which was to be increased six months afterwards to eighteen. At the outfitters in the faubourg du Temple his sister had never earned more than two francs a day, toiling early and late; and the stooping over her work all day had given her a chest complaint, which carried her to Pere Lachaise before she was thirty. Lemoine would hear of no complainings. He was not a duke or a millionaire, he protested savagely, but an honest mechanic, and his daughter must work as he worked ; which comparison, seeing that 124 ISHMAEL. Pere Lemoine seldom laboured more than three days out of the seven, hardly bore upon the case of a girl who had to go to her work every morning, except Sunday, at six o'clock, and was seldom free to come home till seven. The tears and sullen looks went on for about six months. Then came a change. Smiles, alacrity, u more careful toilet, the poor little cotton gown and grisette's muslin cap adjusted as jauntily as if they had been the satin and leghorn of a countess. The mother and father heard the girl singing as she went to her work in the cold early morning, long before they thought of leaving their dingy pallets. ' She has got the better of all that nonsense, and is growing fond of her trade,' said Pere Lemoine. ' See how wdse we were not to listen to her risj- maroles ! That is the only way to manage a girl of her age. They are as fall of fancies as the great ham fair is full of mountebanks and pickpockets.' After this period of joyousness and alacrity there came another change. Jeaniieton was gay and sad by turns : to-day in tears, to-morrow full of wild spirits, laughing, chattering at the humble supper table, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing. At such times she looked her handsomest, and Mere Lemoine sighed to think so much beauty was being wasted in a clear staicher's workshop. ' THE END OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVINESS.' 125 Neitlier father nor mother were thoughtful enough or careful enough to read all these signs and tokens, which would have had a very clear significance for wise and loving parents. Neither of them ever thought of following Jeanneton to her work, or asking any questions of Madame Eebeque. There had been no complaints; therefore it might be supposed the girl did her duty. She left home at the same hour every morning ; and if she had taken to being much later at night, it was because there was overtime work to be done, for which she was paid liberally, in proof of which there were the four or five francs she handed her mother at the end of the week. One bright spring morning Jeanneton left the rue Sombreuil at the usual hour, carrying all her wardrobe neatly packed in a large red cotton hand- kerchief. Neither father nor mother were astir, to see her depart, and it was late in the forenoon that Mere Lemoine, by no means a notable housewife, went into the darksome closet where the girl slept, to give a stroke of the broom, and discovered a little bit of a note pinned on to the patch- work counterpane : — ' I am going away with the man of my choice for good fortune or evil. Don't fret about me, poor old mother. I should have died at that odious 1 26 ISHMAEL. laundry business if it had not been for my Rene. I shall come back some day, perhaps, a lady, in a bonnet and an Indian shawl, and then you and the father will be pleased with me. If ever my Eene is rich I will send you money. God bless and keep you, poor little mother ! Eene is a follower of a person called Voltaire, and says there is no God, and that we are all fools to believe in justice and mercy up in the skies, where there are only the stars and millions of miles of empty space. But I like to think there is Someone up there above all those dear little stars. Adieu, and forgive your poor Jeannetoc' The damsel's parents were as furious as if they had guarded and treasured this one daughter as the apple of their eye. Xot Shylock himself stormed and chafed worse at the elopement of Jessica, albeit she carried off good store of ducats to her lover, than Pere Lemoine at Jeanneton's evanishment. He rushed off to Madame Eebeque, half stupefied and wholly savage with strong drink, to demand of her what she had done with his daughter. The laundress treated his angry interrogations with the high hand. 'My faith, what do I know of your daughter? She is no affair of mine. It was for you and her mother to see that she conducted herself wisely. ' THE EXD OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAYIXKSS. 127 Name of a name ! she has been troublesome enough for the last three months ; coming to her work late — always wanting to leave early, for some excuse or other.' * Leave early ! ' echoed Pere Lemoine. * Why she has been working till ten o'clock at night, she told us. She brought us the money she was paid for overtime.' * I pay for overtime ! What a farce ! ' cried the laundress. ' If she has brought you money, it was for no overtime with me,' There was no more to be got out of Madame Eebeque, who did not want to say all she knew, lest the matter should be made troublesome to herself in any way. One more apprentice gone to the bad made no difference to her. It was the way that half of them went. What would you have ? Father Lemoine went out of the clear-starcher's shop, sobered, quieted, crestfallen. La Eeb^ue's black eyes and fiery-apple cheeks, grenadier bust and shoulders, bare arms set fiercely akimbo, had been too much for him. He went slowly along the shabby little street, and, halfway down, en- countered a band of noisy students, long-haired, sallow, lank, with Byronic collars and short pipes, issuing out of the Pantagruel, where they had been eating their midday breakfast merrily. 128 ISHMAEL. Lenioine turned and followed them as they strolled off towards the Luxembourg. These were the wolves his poor lamb had met every day, and among such as these her seducer was doubtless to be met. * Eenc ' — he was not likely to forget that name. He did not know that it was a name just then made popular by a famous poet, and therefore likely to be chosen as an alias by aspiring youth. The students had to pass Madame Eebeque's window, with its smart muslin curtains, and hyacinths in dark-blue glasses. A couple of them stopped in front of the window, and peered inside. ' Take care that the Eebeque does not see you looking after her chickens,' said a third. 'She is tlie kind of woman to throw a bowl of dirty water over you, if she caught you peeping. You would not be the first to be so baptised.' 'I was looking for that pretty pdlotte, that little gentille Jeanneton! said the other. 'Lost time, my friend. The mlotte has no eyes for any of us,' said the other. ' She is devoted to that unknown with the black mous- tachios, who breakfasts twice a week at the Pan- tagruel.' ' Tlie Prince Eene. Ah, I know the gentleman. A regular lion of the boulevard du Temple.' *THE END OF THAT MIKTH IS HEAVINESS.* 129 They passed on, merrily, with much fooling as they went. Pere Lemoine turned upon his heel. It seemed to him that these students had told him all they had to tell. They admired his daughter, as one of the belles of Madame Eebeque's establishment ; but Jeanneton's lover was not one of them. He felt in his t^rousers-pocket, and found a franc and a few sous, quite enough to warrant his entrance into a cafe restaurant such as the Pantagruel. He went in and took his seat in a dark little corner, where a blouse of dubious cleanliness would not offend the eye of customers of a superior class, notwithstanding which laudable delicacy the waiter looked askance at Monsieur Lemoine's unshaven chin and greasy blue raiment. He ordered a bouillon and a fine champagne, otherwise best coonac. The tables were all deserted after the breakfast hour; and he had the place to himself, which was exactly what he wanted. The waiter brought him his soup and the brandy bottle. He helped himself in a leisurely way, and then filled a second sjlass. 'Let us chat a little/ he said, pointing to the glass, which the waiter accepted with a gracious bow. The lady of the counter had gone to some obscure den in the background to eat her own VOL. I. K 130 ISHMAEL. breakfast, and there was no one to object to the waiter's hobnobbing with this very dubious-looking customer. The big sandy cat, a well-known character, was prowling in a forest of table legs, picking up a savoury morsel here and there, and rubbing herself against one of the legs, as if in a vague expression of gratitude to the universe in general. ' There is a gentleman who breakfasts here sometimes, the Prince Eene — a gentleman with a dark moustache ? ' *Connu,' answered the man, sipping the bright yellow spirit. ' I have the honour to wait upon him.' ' Do you know who and what he is ? ' * There are wiser than I who would be glad to know that,' answered the waiter, shrugging his shoulders. *He is not a student, and he is not a mechanic. He is pretty free with his money, whatever he is. Some take him for an author or a poet — one of the new romantic school, which was joliment hissed the other day at the Theatre rran9ais ; others say he is a nobleman in disguise. There was one who hinted that he is a thief, like Mandrin or Cartouche.' * That man spoke the truth whoever he was ! ' cried Pere Lemoine savagely. 'He is a thief, this ' THE END OF THAT MIRTH IS HEAVINESS.' 131 villain, for he has stolen my only daughter — as good a girl as ever lived — the staff and comfort of my life ; ' and here the eheniste broke into a passion of sobs, burying his head in his folded arms upon the table of the Pantagruel. He went back to his hole in the rue Sombreuil at nightfall, steeped in fiery liquor, having idled away the afternoon among the lowest brasseries in the Quartier Latin. But he made no further effort to discover the true character of the person known as Prince Eene, or the fate of his only daughter. CHAPTEE VII. 'THE GROWN OF OLD IVIEN.' Three years and more had gone by since Jean- neton's elopement, and it was August — season at which Paris is at its worst, and in which sultry period the rue Sombreuil was a place to be avoided as carefully as the Jews' quarter in Piome or Frank- fort. A heavy stagnant atmosphere of heat brooded over the Place de la Bastille and the faubourg St. Antoine, and hung like a ragged veil upon the cemetery yonder, and the wild crags and precipices of the stone quarries by the Z)?^f/es Gliaumont. The crowded population of the big house which the Lemoines inhabited existed as best they might upon the scanty allowance of fresh air which found its way into their rooms from the deep well on which their windows looked, or came down into the yard below for coolness. The very flowers which here and there decorated a window-sill languished in their earthern pots. The very scarlet-runners drooped upon their strings. Only the foul smells 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 133 flourished and fattened in this sickly suffocating August heat. An odour of stale cabbage and sour dish-water was in the very air men breathed. People talked of last year's awful visitation of cholera, and predicted a return of the scourge, gloating ghoul-like over the picture of greater horrors to come, a more terrible cup of affliction to be drunk than the death-chalice of the year gone by. There had been a long drought, w4iich promised well for the cornfields and the vineyards, but which was felt as an actual scourge in the crowded neighbourhoods of Paris — no welcome rain to wash the gutters, to flush the primitive sew^ers of that period, to cool the hot pavements, and splash with refreshing sound upon the stony roads. All w^as fiery and dry, as if Paris had been one huge furnace. Father Lemoine carried his cabinet work into the yard, and worked just outside his den, using the window-sill as a shelf for his tools. The children came and stood about him as he w^orked, and made their remarks upon the mysteries of his craft — his glue-pot, his chizels, his gouges, and fine little nails. But the work stood still a ;good many hours of every day, sometimes for days together, with a piece of old sacking over it, while Pere Lemoine amused liimself at ' The Faithful Pig,' reading the -news. 134 ISHMAEL. playing dominoes, talking politics, grumbling against the new king and his ministers. Paris had naturally expected the millennium after the glorious days of July ; and the reign of the elected monarch had as yet fallen some way short of the Parisian idea of a millennium. The old faubourg of St.-Antoine, populous as an ant-hill, was the seething hot-bed of revolutionary feeling; and men who drank in those historic wine-shops were more drunken with strong words than with strong wine. Lemoine, the trolleur, was an ardent politician in these days, a member of the society of the Eights of Man, and full of undisciplined eloquence about his own right to work as little and to drink as much as he liked. Mere Lemoine was not always at home in this sultry weather. Her husband's earnings had been a diminishing quantity during the last year or so, not because he worked worse or was worse paid for his work, but because he worked less than of yore. Drunken habits were beginning to exercise their usual effect. He was idle and irregular in his life, worked with fury for a couple of days, and then left off for three, or worked like a demon for a morning, and spent the whole afternoon out of doors. Mere Lemoine found that she must do something for her own part to swell the family budget, or else go very often without fricot or a morsel of meat *THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.* 135 in the pot-au-feii. Slie had been educated in all the arts of fine laundry work, and to that kind of work she naturally returned. She went to Madame Eeb^que, and engaged herself to that person as ironer for four days a week : the other two days would be quite sufficient to devote to the menage in the rue Sombreuil, which already left much to be desired in the way of purity, and fell far short of a Dutch interior in neatness and polish. At Madame Eebeque's the bereft mother heard various details of her daughter's lapse from good ways. How la pdlotte, as she was called in the laundry, had first been seen walking with a tall man in a frock-coat in the gardens of the Luxem- bourg ; how she had been observed to wear a blue bead necklace and a pair of real gold earrings ; and how she had been seen at a later period driving with the same man — a handsome man, with a thick black moustache — in a forty sous (hired carriage) ; how she was known to have gone to dances at the Pr^ Catalan ; how she had told Herminie, that stout girl in the blue cotton frock, that her lover was a nobleman's son, and that she had no cause to be ashamed of him. His family lived at a chateau near Nimes, and he was to take her to live there with them. She was to live like a lady, learn to play the piano, and she was 136 ISHMAEL. to wear silk gowns with gigot sleeves. All tliis Mere Lemoiiie heard from the workwomen. ]\Iadame Kebeque still pretended to have had no hint of her apprentice's danger. * Who knows if the poor child was not telling the truth all the time? She may be living as a lady in a grand chateau, and her husband may have made her promise to hold no communication with her parents/ said Mere Lemoine, who would fain have induced the laundry to look at the sunny side of the picture. The laundresses laughed aloud over their iron- ing-board. * They all tell the same story, these fine gentle- men/ said one — 'a stern father, a grand chateau, the family name, impossible to make a marriage of inclination until the father dies, and then she will be mistress of the chateau and tout le trem- hlement. And most likely your fine gentleman is only a clerk at ninety francs a month, or a student in law or medicine, with a father keeping a shop somewhere in the provinces. It is only fools who believe such stories ; but the pcUotte was a born innocent — always moping by herself, or crying in corners, never taking kindly to her work or to our company. Such a girl is an easy prey for a scoundrel.' 'THE CKOWN OF OLD MEN.' 137 No one was able to tell Mere Lemoine auythiug more about the Prince Eene than that he was tall and good-looking, with a black moustache and a military walk. He had not been seen in the quarter since Jeanneton's elopement. And now it was more than three years since the girl's flight, and not a line had come from her to tell whether she was still among the living. ' She is dead, I hope,' said Jacques Lemoine, brutally ; but the mother still kept a tender corner in her heart for the girl, to whom she had not been over-kind when they two were together. It was the end of August, and the evening air was heavy with an impending thunderstorm. There had been many thunderstorms during that month of sultry weather, and the leaden-hued skies seemed charged with electricity. To-night, as Mere Lemoine walked home from her laundry, there was that terrible stillness which comes before the warring of the heavens. Lights were burning dimly in some of the windows of the Sombreuil barrack; but the general impression of the courtyard, as Mere Lemoine went in through the archway, was one of cavernous darkness. Her own room was darker still, and she had to grope upon the chimneypiece for matches and 138 ISHMAEL. a tinder-box. While she was fumbling about among dirty brass candlesticks and saucepan lids, something stirred upon the hearth and startled her violently — something which she touched with her foot presently, while her trembling hands struck a light. What was it — a dog, or some- thing human ? It was very human. A white face looked up at her, passive, ghastly in the blue light of the sulphur match. * Mother ! ' came like a cry of pain from pale quivering lips. ' Mon Dieu ! * cried the mother, falling on her knees beside that crouching figure, while the match fell and expired upon the cold hearth by which the wanderer squatted. 'My child Jeanneton, and alive ! * * Not very long to live, mother, or I should not be here to-night,' the hollow voice answered. It was not Jeanneton's old voice. Something told Mere Lemoine that it was the voice of one whose life was fading, just as the match had flickered out upon the hearth a moment before. "No, nOy fillette ; don't say that. Suppose there has been trouble — let that pass. Our hearts are not stone : we know how to forgive. Wait while I 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 139 strike another match. You are tired and faint. There is a drop of wine in the cupboard, I dare say, and that will revive you.' The tinder-box flashed again ; another match was struck, and the candle lighted. The mother set it on the table, and then turned to look at her daughter, who still crouched on the hearth, with her head and shoulders resting against the side of the chimney-piece.' Alas ! what a change was there I La pdlottey as they had called her at the laundry, had been once of a lily-like fairness. She had now a yellow^ tint, as of a face moulded out of wax. Her cheeks were hollow, her lips had a purple tinge ; her eyes had that awful lustre which tells of lung disease ; her shrunken hands were almost transparent, and the shoulders — the poor bent shoulders — and hollow chest indicated the extremity of weakness. * Pauvrette' sobbed the mother, lifting this vanishing creature in her arms, on her lap, as when she was a child of ten or eleven. Alas ! as light a burden now as in those earlier days. * My pet, what has befallen you ? * * Only misery, mother ; the fate that befalls every woman who puts her trust in an idler. No, I will not speak evil of him. It was Destiny more than he that was unkind. If the .140 ISHMAEL. world were more just, men more merciful to each other, my life would have been different.' ' Tell me everything, cherie ; fear not your poor old mother. The father will be home presently, and we will tell him any story you will ; but have no secrets from me.' * I will not, mother,' she answered faintly. ' Oh, how good you are ! I thought you would thrust me out of doors — spurn me with your foot when you found me on your hearth. I will tell you by-and-by — everything — but not yet.' The dry lips faltered, as if the speaker was going to faint ; then Mere Lemoine placed the girl in an old arm-chair — a Voltaire — which the eheniste occupied in his hours of leisure. She rushed to the cupboard and brought out a bottle with a remnant of wine left from last night's supper — another bottle in a secret corner on the shelf above held a few spoonfuls of. brandy. She mixed the two in a tumbler, and gave it to her daughter, who drank greedily. ' My mouth was parched,' she murmured, putting down the glass with her tremulous hand, while her mother brought out some fragments of char- cuterie — the remains of an assiette assortie pur- chased for the morning's breakfast — odd pieces of pork and sausage. Mere Lemoine put these on 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 141 the table, with knife and fork and plate, and a loaf of bread. * I have walked a long way since daybreak,' faltered Jeanneton. ' The roads were hot and dusty — my feet burnt like fire. It was like walk- ing on red-hot iron.' * Where have you come from?' 'Toulon,' answered the girl. ' Toulon ! What took you to Toulon ? ' ' Fate ! Don't ask me anything to-night mother. Let me have one night's rest under a roof — in a bed. I have not slept in one for nearly a month.' ' My poor child ! And the chateau near Nimes, and the rich father ? ' ' What ! you heard of that ? ' ' Yes, I am at work with La Eebeque. Your father does not earn so much as of old; one must help a little.' * Poor mother ! Yes, the chateau, the noble father, the silk gowns, and carriages, and piano : the life that I was to lead far away. All lies, mother ; lies which only a baby or an idiot would believe. But that is past and gone. Mother, I have come to bring you trouble.' ' Never mind the trouble. Eat something, my pet ; try to eat.' 142 ISHMAEL. Jeanneton made an attempt, but those savoury morsels of pork had no flavour for her dry lips. The wine had comforted her — she drained the glass — but she had no appetite — her throat seemed thick and swollen — she could with difficulty swal- low two or three mouthfuls of bread. * I am not hungry, mother ; I think I have got out of the way of eating. Come, let me show you something.' She rose with an agitated air, took up the candle, and led the way to that narrow closet of a chamber, in which she had slept as a girl — the room where she left the letter pinned on her coverlet on the morning of her flight. Jeanneton leant over the bed and held the candle, shading the light with her too transparent hand. A child of two years' old, with a shock of curly flaxen hair, was sleeping placidly on the tattered patchwork counterpane, wrapped in a ragged shawl. * Yours ? ' said the mother, and not another word. * Mine,' answered the daughter. ' Will you take care of her, and bring her up as your own when I am gone ? ' * Oh, but you are not going to die,' remonstrated Mere Lemoine, kneeling down to caress the child. * With a bed to sleep in and good food, you will soon get strong again and recover your pretty looks* 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 143 And — who knows ? — you may find a kind husband yet who will provide a good home for you and this gamine here.' 'Don't talk nonsense, mother. You know, and I know, that I am dying. I have known as much for the last three months. It has been a slow death; but the end is coming. Promise me not to send this little one to the Enfants Trouves. I could not rest in my grave if I thought she was to be sent there.' * Never, my Jeanneton : I swear it.' ' God bless you, mother, for that promise.' ' Perhaps her father may come to claim her some day,' 'suggested Mere Lemoine, dying with curiosity about her daughter's past, now that she was recover- ing from the shock of the meeting. ' Never. He has other business in life than to claim his child. She must be your own, mother — yours only. And you will take care of her — watch her better than you watched me — you will be wise by experience,' said Jeanneton with a hysterical sob. She seemed half-sinking with fatigue ; she had walked fifteen miles under the burning August sky, on the sun-baked roads, carrying her child the greater part of the way, obliged to stop to rest every half-hour or so by the roadside, in shade or sunlight. Her mother undressed her, taking off the dusty 14-1: ISHMAEL. raiment, wliich was tidier than might have been expected under the circumstances, and supplying a ragged old petticoat and camisole of her own for night-gear. And then Jeanneton sank wearily down upon the bed beside her baby girl, the bed upon which she had slept lightly enough in days gone by. Oh, how sweet it is to be in a bed ! ' she murmured ; ' and yet all my bones ache.' She was asleep in a few minutes, the child's head nestling against her bony shoulder, her wasted arm : but her breathing was laboured, and she started every now and then in her sleep with a murmur of pain. Happily this was one of Pere Lemoine's late nights. It was twelve o'clock when he came in from ' The Faithful Pig,' and he was too far gone to be told of Jeanueton's return. That must wait till next morning. When morning came poor Jeanneton was in no condition to plead her own cause with an offended father upon earth. Only the heavenly Pather of us all could understand the language which those dry lips babbled to-day in the delirium of high fever. The glassy eyes gazed upon Mere Lemoine and knew her not : they seemed to see things and people far away.. The trolleur, in a sombre mood after last night's 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 145 revelry, inclined to see life under the blackest hue, was grimly pitiful of his daughter's dying state, and did not urge that she should be flung out of doors. But he spoke of her, even in her sickness, with undisguised bitterness. This is what such creatures bring upon themselves when they forsake a good home and a loving father and mother to follow a villain. He was furious at the idea that his wife had sworn to rear the child — not to send her to the Enfants Trouves, the only natural houie for such canaille. ' To the hospital she shall go,' he said, * before we are many hours older. Cre nom ! is it not enough Lo have reared one viper? Would you let another of the same brood warm itself in our bosoms to sting us by-and-by, when we are old and feeble ? — and this one has a villain's blood in her veins. From Toulon she came, you say, that trash yonder ? Xo doubt she has left her Rene there in the prison. That would be his natural end. To the hospital with that base-born brat! I shall take her there myself after dark.' His wife began to cry. What was she that such shame and misery should befall her? she demanded. An honest working woman, able to earn her pdUe as well as ever her husband earned his. She worked four days in the week, while he ^"^OL. I. L 146 ISHMAEL. worked scarcely three, and half his earnings were spent at ' The Faithful Pig.' Suppose she chose to bring up her dying daughter's child ? She had a right to spend the few pence the child's mainten- ance would cost out of her wages at the laundry. And by-and-by, when she was old, the grand-daughter would be a help to her. She defied her husband, and bade him take the little one to the Foundling Hospital at his peril. If he did she would make the faubourg ring with the story of his cruelty. She stormed with such vehemence that Jacques Lemoine was fain to sneak out of the house, and repair to a little restaurant in the rue de la Eoquette, famous for its pieds de motiton roulette at seven sous, and its Bordeaux at twelve sous the litre. When he was gone Mere Lemoine borrowed a pinch of tilleul from a neighbour and brewed a tisane for her sick daughter, which powerful remedy had, strange to say, no effect on the galloping pulse or dry hard skin. The grand- mother washed and dressed the child, and let her toddle about the living-room, and even into the yard. She was a pretty little thing, as like what the mother was in her girlhood as the bud is like the flower, yet with a more exquisite delicacy of feature, pale, and with large blue eyes. She had a sorrowful look, as if the dreamy, half-unconscious 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 147 first years of life had brought her few childish joys ; yet betimes the little face broke into smiles, and the wide blue eyes laughed merrily, as children's eyes do laugh, at the wonderland of childish fancies and dreams. She could talk a little, after her baby fashion, and toddle about the yard, pointing to rays of sunlight flickering on the wall, and cry- ing, * Pretty, pretty,' enraptured with a kitten which graciously suffered the caress of her soft little arms. In the afternoon, the tisane having proved ineffectual, Mere Lemoine called one of her gossips in to look at her daughter. The gossip opined that the poor young woman was in a desperate way, and recommended Madame Lemoine to fetch an apothecary whom she knew of in a street hard by. The apothecary was out when Mere Lemoine went in search of him, and it was not until nightfall that he came to look at Jean- neton. He knelt down beside the pallet, felt the sufferer's pulse, looked at the large dim eyes, so bright yesterday, so dull to-day. ' I can do nothing,' he said. ' She is sinking fast. You had better go for a priest at once. You should have called me sooner.' Mere Lemoine, in self-justification, told the circumstances of her daughter's home-coming. 148 ISHMAEL. ' Poor thing ! To walk Hfteeii miles in her state was simple suicide. It could only be wonderful energy of mind which enabled her to accomplish it. Her case must have been hopeless a month ago — galloping consumption. Pere Lemoine had been so disturbed by his wife's vehemence that work was naturally impos- sible, and it was the usual midnight hour when he came home, not drunk, but alliivie, as he and his friends called it. He roared out an angry greeting as he crossed the threshold and saw his wife sitting up for him, with the baby-girl asleep on her knees ; but Mere Lemoine pointed to the door of the little bed- chamber where her daughter lay. ' Did you not see the taper burning in the window as you came across the yard ? ' she said. • Could you not guess ? ' * Dead ? ' he faltered hoarsely. ' Dead ! She was sensible just at the last, after the priest had been praying over her, and she asked for you. ' Kiss him for me,' she said with her last gasping breath, * and tell him to forgive.' The father opened the door softly, and looked in at that poor clay ; marble white in the faint light of the consecrated taper. There was some holy water in a saucer on the rush chair beside the bed, and a 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 149 little spray of box. Lemoine knelt beside the corpse, dipped the spray in the holy water, and made the sifjn of the cross on that ice-cold brow. It was years since he had made that holy sign — not since his mother's death. A husky sob broke from his labouring chest, his heart beating heavily with the sense of a new pain ; remorse ; the sense of eternal bereavement. * He went back to the living-room, and sat down opposite his wife without a word. She leant across and took his hand with a tenderness which was a thing of the past between them, and laid that horny hand upon the child's satin-soft brow. ' Swear that you will not send this nameless orphan to the hospital!' she said. 'Swear!' ' I swear it,' he answered, bending down to kiss the baby-face. He had not had courage to kiss that marble brow yonder, though he had longed to do it. And so a young life began to grow and bud and bloom in that dingy dwelling-place, amid foul odours which grew fouler with the passing years; within the sound of loud tongues which changed one slang for another, and one form of blasphemy for another, as time went by, but which never ceased to offend earth and heaven. The child's life was 150 ISHMAEL. not one of sunshine in that shady place. For the first years — while the memory of the mother's early death was still fresh, a softening influence upon the minds of Pere and ^Icre Lemoine, while the fairy- like loveliness and beguiling ways of childhood made the granddaughter a kind of plaything — the little one was treated with indulgence, was kissed and fondled, fed on the best morsel out of the dish, allowed to occupy the warmest corner of the hearth, and had the softest pillow for her golden head. The child was completely happy in those days, knew not that there was any fairer place on earth than the rue Sombreuil, loved the murky old house — passing old after forty years' occupation, the cosy hearth, the narrow little room in which her mother had died, the neighbour's children, her playmates. She was a bright, joyous little creature in her childhood, but always slim and delicate in form, and of a snow- drop fairness. She had been baptised Jeannette, but her grandfather called her Paquerette, his Easter daisy, on account of her pale cheeks, blanched in that stony well where her life was spent. She came very soon to be called Paquerette by every one. As she grew to girlhood it was the only name she knew. When she was seven years old she was sensible enough to be trusted upon an errand, handy enough *THE CROWN OF OLD MEN.' 151 to dust the room and sweep the hearth. By the time she was nine she had learned to be very useful ; and then a change came o'er the spirit of her dream, and the pains and penalties of life among the poor began in real earnest for this little pale child called Paquerette. Once accustomed to make her useful, the grandparents very soon began to treat her as a drudge, and to lose their temper with her at the slightest provocation. Any little mistake in an errand, any neglect of an order from her elders, brought upon her the harshest treatment ; nay, errors that were none of hers brought punishment upon her guiltless head. If the grocer gave her a quarter of a pound of bad coffee, or the woman at the cremerie supplied a pat of rank butter, it was Paquerette who suffered. She should not be such an imbecile as to take whatever those thieves chose to foist upon lier. She had a nose, had she not, to smell butter so rancid that one could have detected it a street off? Was she to be a fool all her life?— for example. Sorrows there were many in that orphan girl- hood ; joys there were none. Aged by anxieties, Paquerette at eleven cared no longer for the play of the common troop of children who made one band in the big house. It was no longer a delight to her to play hide-and-seek on the winding-stone 152 ISHMAEL. stair and the long narrow passages, with noisy boys and girls — to race about the yard dragging an old stew-pan or a wooden shoe for a cart, or to play at being the postilloji de Longjumeau, with four small boys for her team. She had taken upon herself all the cares ^f life at twelve years of age, and had bidden farewell to childhood and its fancies, its sweet imaginary joys, its cheap blisses, in which a dirty common stair can do duty for a mountain-pass, the embrasure of a door for a feudal castle, a saucepan-lid for the shield of Bayard or Achilles, an old broken chair for a royal carriage, and a broomstick for a prancing thorough- bred. ISTothing moved Paquerette now except music, and for that she had ever a greedy ear. Let a brown-faced Savoyard stray into the yard and grind a waltz upon liis Barbary organ, and Paque- rette would throw aside her broom, or leave her tub of dish-water, and go waltzing round the dirty courtyard on the points of her slim young feet — light as any fawn in the glades of St. Geriuain or Fontainebleau. But even such a joy as this was of the rarest : Paris was not rich in barrel- organs in those days, and the grinders knew that the rue Sombreuil was not likely to give them a plenteous harvest. 'THE CROWN OF OLD MEX.' 153 It never occurred to Pere or Mere Lemoine that the sordid monotonous existence which was good enough for them was hardly suitable for the dawn of life ; that this pale flower which they had sworn to rear was languishing and fading in their charge. In sober truth, Paquerette would have been far better off at the hospital for name- less children than she was in that ground-floor den in the rue Sombreuil. State charity would have lodged her better, clad her better, taught her better, provided her with more recreation, and in every way been a better parent to her than these of her own flesh and blood, who let her wallow in ignorance, shutting her off alike from all knowledge of the glorious beauty of earth and from all hope in the infinite joys of heaven. And thus, a drudge and a scapegoat for two elderly people with wdiom the world did not go over well, and who grew a little less amiable with the passing of the years, Paquerette endured the monotony of a joyless existence till she was seventeen. Very child in ignorance of all good, very woman in knowledge of evil. CHAPTER VIII. ' SHE STRETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' It was Sunday, and all the world of the faubourg St.-Antoine was drifting towards that wider world outside the walls of Paris, where there were fields and gardens, parks and woods, and where the river seemed to take a new colour as it flowed between verdant banks, under the shadow of spreading willows. Everybody was holiday-making, except that one little family in the muiky ground -floor, looking into the pent-up yard — everybody else in the world was happy and idle and gay, as it seemed to Paquerette ; but for her Sunday made no dif- ference. Neither the trolleur nor his wife ever went to church, or put on Sunday clothes, or went holiday-making in the afternoon, like their neigh- bours. They had no Sunday clothes ; nor had Paquerette. The trolleur s only notion of a holiday was to go earlier than usual to ' The Faithful Pig,' and to stay later, and drink more. His wife sat at home, and hugged her misery, and drank secretly. ' SHE STRETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 155 So that when Pere Lemoine came home from his noisy revelries, steeped in vitriol, but as firm on his legs as a granite pillar, he found the wife in a silent and stony condition, which might mean a dignified sullenness, and which the trolleur never troubled himself to interrogate. It was enough for him that there were no wearisome remonstrances — that no vessels of hot or cold water were ever flung at his head, as was the fashion in some domiciles he knew of under that very roof; that he was allowed to roll into his wretched straw bed, and court slumber in peace. If any one had questioned him about his wife, he would have replied that she was one of the soberest of women — only a little given to sulks when he stayed out after midnight. Paquerette knew better, or knew worse about her grandmother. She had been sent too often to replenish Mere Lemoine's brandy-bottle, at a little wine-shop in the close and foetid alley round the corner — the wretched lane where the waste from the dyer's workshop made pools of crimson water that lay like blood-stains in the muddy hollows, beside a grutter half-choked with refuse cabbao^e- leaves, egg-shells, and an occasional dead cat. In this unholy place, at a dark little den, down a couple of steps, Paquerette was a familiar visitor. The patron filled her bottle without waiting for lier 156 ISIIMAEL. to ask for what she wanted. Sometimes she had the money ready to hand him, sometimes she had to ask for indulgence till the next time, and the pati'on was fierce and expressed himself harshly. Once she had trembled at that wolfish ferocity of his — the deep harsh voice and strong language ; but custom hardened her, and she came to understand that those terrible oaths, that bass thunder, only meant that she must not cro there too often without o the money in her hand. It was Sunday, a brilliant morning in the middle of May, and Paquerette sat on a broken-down wooden stool in the yard, just beside the door of that room which was workshop, kitchen, and living- room all in one, for the trolleur's family. It was between ten and eleven o'clock. The bells of Xotre Dame were ringing, and Pere Lemoine and his wife were still asleep in the den at the back of the sitting- room. They always slept later on Sunday mornings. That was the one difference by which they honoured the Sabbath. Paquerette had been to fetch a loaf from the shop on the other side of the street, and had brought from the cupboard the remains of an arlequin bought overnight in the market-place, a curious assortment of broken victuals, the refuse of the fashionable restaurants, piled together artistic- ally, a lottery of comestibles in which a lucky ' SHE STKETCHETH OUT HEll HAND TO THE POOR.' 157 venturer might gain half a truffled pheasant, or the tail of a fine lobster — a hodge-podge of good things, where tish and flesh, confectionery and vegetables jostled each other. Paquerette looked longingly at the wall of a vol-au-vent half full of chocolate cream, as she set out the table for her elders, but she did not presume to begin her breakfast without them. She had made the coffee, which was sim- mering in a chauffrette, and now she was sitting listlessly in the yard, looking up at the blue bright sky, as out of a w^ell, hardly hoping to see more of its beauty than she could see thus, sitting at her door, pent in by walls which were as the walls of a prison. Had not her whole life been spent in a prison, hemmed round and shut in by poverty, ignorance, neglect, cruelty, helplessness ? The girls in prisons and reformatories are better cared for than ever Paquerette had been. She sat gazing up at the sky. Sometimes her eyes fell lower, and she looked at the many windows staring down at her from the four sides of that stone well, like so many eyes. Each window was alive, as it were, and had its peculiar significance. The tall dilapidated old house teemed with human life. At some windows clothes were hanging out to dry ; at some — these only the few among the many — there were flow^ers. Here and there hung a bird-cage. 158 ISHMAEL. Those windows were the cleanest which had birds or flowers, and Paquerette fancied life must be sweeter and more peaceful in the room that was shaded with yonder box of wallflowers, dark-green leaves, and blossoms of gold and crimson. Some windows were screened by a bright-coloured curtain, across another hung a limp and dirty rag, which hinted at a filthy interior. Children were hanging out of some window^s, women were looking out of others. Before one a man was shaving himself in an airy costume of shirt and braces. At another a girl was peeling potatoes. Fragments of song, fragments of speech, fell into the silence of the yard below ; and from an open window high up came a gusli of melody, the serenade from * Don Pasquale ' whistled divinely by a young house-painter who lived under the tiles. Paquerette knew hardly any one to speak to in the thickly peopled barrack. There were some who were old inhabitants like the Lemoines, w^ho had squatted dow^n in their one or two rooms, among their poor scraps of secondhand furniture, or their heirlooms brought from some far-away country village a quarter of a century ago, and had been content to grow old wdth the house, which was rotting visibly, no one spending any money upon its repair. Others came and went, and were like the shifting figures in a kaleidoscope, alike, and * SHE STRETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 159 yet not the same. Paquerette was too shy to make friends. There were merry girls in some of the rooms — girls who worked hard all day, yet were full of talk and laughter when they came home in the evening. Two, three, sometimes four, lived to- gether in a small apartment — sisters, cousins, friends. There were a pair of sisters who lived behind that window with the wallflowers, and who shared their room with a cousin older than themselves. This little menage Paquerette had observed with peculiar interest. The three girls seemed so happy. They had such an air of perfect contentment in their work and their lives, their simple pleasures and humble home. She saw them go out in the morning when she was doing her housework, before grandmother or grandfather had emerged from the inner den vender. She saw them go to mass in the early morning, she saw them run in again for a hurried breakfast, and then off to work. The two sisters worked for a third-rate dressmaker in the Marais ; the cousin worked in a bedding warehouse in the rue Ste. Honore, and spent all her days in stabbing mattresses with a big needle. They were always neatly clad. On Sundays they looked like young ladies, and, if the weather were fine, they always went out in the afternoon with their friends, coming home after dark under masculine escort, but 160 ISHMAEL. in a sober respectable fashion that gave no ground for scandal. On some rare occasions, gratefully remembered by Paquerette, these girls had stopped to speak to her as they passed by. Pauline, the youngest and merriest, had asked her why the old people nev€T took her out, at Christmas time . and the new year, for instance, when the boulevards were well worth going to see. One need not have any money to spend. Only to look at "the stalls of toys and jewellery, and the lights and the people, was an evening's pleasure. Paquerette shook her head sadly. The grandfather and grandmother would not walk so far. They had seen all that, and it was worth nothing ; the same thing year after year, they said. ' Ah, but you have never seen,' cried Pauline. * Can old people forget that they have ever been young ? Besides, it is not the same every year. There are always new toys, new trinkets, new bonbons, new words, new jokes. No new year is quite the same as last year. And if it were, there is time to forget between whiles. Lights and music and happy faces are always fresh. You shall go with us next Christmas.' Paquerette gave a sigh of rapture. * Oh, I should so like !' she said ; ' but you would be ashamed of me in my old clothes.* ' SHE STRETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 161 ' But your clothes cannot always be old,* answered Pauline, with her bright laugh. 'You can save your next new gown for Christmas.' Paquerette crimsoned, and hung her head, but said never a word. The truth was that she had never had a new gown in her life. Mere Lemoine had amicable relations with a snuffy old woman in the Temple, who dealt in second-hand clothes, and it was from the very refuse, the offal of this old hag's stock-in-trade, that Paquerette's wardrobe was occasionally replenished. The two old women drank their litre of little-blue or their measure of three-six together, and over their cups debated the price of those few rags which Madame Druge, the dealer, flung together in a dirty heap upon the floor. Paquerette wore anything — a wine-stained velvet jacket, the nap crushed and the edges frayed, a garment that had grown old before its time, like its first owner, now riding in a carriage, anon rolling in the gutter, the cast-off livery of vice — or a cotton skirt that had grown thin in the wear-and-tear of honest labour. Paque- rette had neither voice nor choice in the matter. ' AVhy do you never mend your clothes, child ? ' asked the eldest of the three girls one day, a tall, stout young woman, who was called big Lisbeth — a broad-shouldered, strong-minded, outspoken damsel VOL. I. M 162 ISHMAEL. of eight-and-tweiity, the soul of lionestv and good- nature. She gave Paquerette a little friendly tap upon the cheek. * My child, why are you always in rags ? ' she asked reproachfully ; and then Paquerette owned with tears that she had no needles and thread, and that she had never been tauoht to sew. This state of thins^s was too horrible. Bi^ Lisbeth took the oirl straight to lier apartment, the room with the wallflowers in the window, a room with two beds in alcoves, shaded by white muslin curtains, everything neat and clean as the palm of your hand. Paquerette looked about her, dazzled by the prettiness of the room. It was the first decent or orderly room she had ever entered. She could not imagine that a duchess would have anything better. The mahogany chest of drawers, shining with polish, the white jug and basin, the bunch of flowers in a glass vase on the mantlepiece, the portraits of Louis-Philippe and Marie Amelie neatly nailed against the white- washed wall, and between them a coloured print of the Holy Family, with a white and gilt china henitier just below it. On a shelf by the fireplace there were white cups and saucers — ah, how clean ! — and an old copper coffee-pot which shone like a jewel. As compared with that wretched kennel on the ground-floor, this room was as the Heavenly • SHE STKETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 163 Jerusalem with its jasper walls and gates of pearl compared with the foulest city on earth. Lisbeth took out her needle-case and gave Paquerette her first lesson in sewing. The girl was very awkward. Her fingers were unacquainted with the use of a needle, and the cotton skirt was like tinder — the stuff broke away from the needle. But Lisbeth was very patient, and the long slit which had attracted her attention in the yard below got cobbled together somehow, while Paquerette acquired some rudimentary ideas as to the use of a needle and thread. Lisbeth made her a present of half a dozen needles, an old brass thimble, and a reel of cotton— the first gift of any kind which the girl had ever received from any one outside her own family. She promised that she would use the needles, and mend her clothes always in future. The thimble was a difficulty. She doubted if she should ever accustom herself to the use of that curious instrument; but she promised to try. ' Why do you wear a velvet jacket and a cotton skirt?" asked Lisbeth, bluntly. 'That does not go well together. Besides, velvet for working- people ! It is scarcely respectable ? ' Paquerette hung her head. It was a small pretty-shaped head, like a rosebud on its stalk, 164 ISHMAEL. and had a trick of drooping when Paquerette was troubled or confused. * Grandmother buys thera,' she faltered. ' Grandmother is an old fool/ exclaimed Lisbeth, angrily. She was indignant with that old trolleur and his wife for bringing up their grandchild so vilely. They taught her nothing. She sat in the sun half the day, rolling her thumbs and looking up at the sky. She had grown up as a pagan in a Christian city, with the bells of Xotre Dame rinorins: within earshot. She could do nothing useful for herself, or for other people, except cook and clean up a little, in her poor untaught way, for that wretched old man and his wife. She was a regular Cinderella ; and there are no good fairies nowadays to come to Cinderella's relief. Paquerette had never heard the story of Cin- derella, or she might have thought of her to-day as she sat gazing idly up at the sky, while all the world was going forth to its pleasure. She had no hope of going any further than the yard, or of seeing any more of the sky than she saw now. Her hands hung listlessly at her sides; her head leant wearily against the dirty stone wall behind her. She was slipshod, slovenly, with her hair rolled up in a loose knot that seemed too big for her head. ' SHE STRETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.* 165 She was sitting thus, hopeless, idle, unfriended, when the three young women — the demoiselles Benoit — came back from mass. This picture of forlorn girlliood struck them all three at once. ' That poor child ! Just look at her ! I should like to massacre those wicked old people/ muttered Lisbeth, who always used strong language. ' She looks the picture of misery,' said Toinette, with a compassionate sigh. ' If we could only do anything to cheer her a little,' murmured Pauline. After all, the race of good fairies is not quite extinct. They are human, the good fairies of the present, and their power is limited. They cannot turn a melon into a Lord Mayor's coach, or a lizard into a prize footman ; but there is much that can be done, if people will only do it, with the wand called charity. The good Samaritan, who went out of his way and took some trouble to help his fellow-creature, is a grander ideal than Cinderella's fairy, who had the command of all Wonderland, and never took any trouble at all. 'What a fine day, Paquerette ! Are not your old people going to take you out this afternoon ? ' The girl shook her head. 'They never go into the country, and grand- 166 TSHMAEL. mother never goes out till after dark,' she said piteously. 'What foolish people! We are all going to Vincennes for a picnic. Have you ever been there V * I have never been anywhere,' said Paquerette, with a reproachful air. There was a kind of cruelty in askiug her such a question. Surely they must know that she was never taken out for her pleasure. 'And you have never been to a picnic?' asked Pauline. Paquerette answered dumbly, only by a shake of her head. The tears came into her eyes. Why did they tease her by such silly questions? Why could they not take their pleasure and let her alone ? The three girls lingered in the yard a iew paces from Priquerette, putting their heads together and whispering. *We could lend her a gown and a cap,' said Pauline. 'It would not cost much to take her. Ten sous for the omnibus there and back. There is enough in the basket for all.' ' If Madame Morice would not mind,' speculated Toinette. ' SHE STKETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 1G7 'Why should Maman Morice mind? The girl is well-behaved : she will interfere with nobody.' A little more whispering; and then Pauline, the youngest of these three lowly graces — she who had been the first to speak to Pclquerette — went over to the lonely child, and said : ' Would you like to go to Yincennes v with us this afternoon ? We'll take you, if your people will let you go. I can lend you a gown. We are pretty much of a size, I think.' Paquerette started up from her rickety little stool, crimson with wonder. * You don't mean it ! ' she cried, clasping her hands. ' Oh, you couldn't be so kind ! ' ' Nonsense, child, it is no great matter,' answered Lisbeth, in her frank loud voice. ' We shall be very glad to have you with us, poor little thing. Ptun aad speak to your old people; there is no time to be lost; and then come up to our room. You know the way.' 'Oh yes, mademoiselle. I have not forgotten your goodness in teaching me to sew.' The three girls went indoors, while Paquerette ran into the den where her grandfather was taking his coffee at the table near the fireplace, in his morning dress of shirt, trousers, and slippers. He looked as if he had not washed or combed his 168 ISHMAEL. hair for a week ; but lie was only saving himself up for a swimming-bath by the Pont Neuf, an indulgence which he generally gave himself on a Sunday afternoon. He w^as not quite so bad as he seemed. He lolled at ease in the dilapidated old Voltaire, his naked feet half out of his tattered old slippers, and reposing on a chair opposite. He sipped his coffee, and gazed dreamily at his work — a honlieur- du-joiLT in amboyna wood, richly inlaid — a work of art. The charahia was to come for it to-morrow morning, and take it about to the dealers till he got Pere Lemoine his price, out of w^hich JMonsieur Charabia naturally took a handsome commission. There were about half a dozen hours' work still wanted for those finishing touches which would make the little bureau perfect, and that labour would most likely be put off till the very last. Pere Lemoine would dawdle away his Sabbath in luxurious idleness, and stroll homeward after mid- night, tres bon-zig, to snatch two or three hours' feverish sleep, and then up and to work at earliest dawn, by the light of a tallow candle, so as to be ready for the Auvergnat. The coffee was good, the arlequin suggested a dejeuner at the Eocher de Cancale, and the grand- father was amiably disposed to poor little Cinderella. * SHE STRETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 169 ' Come and have your breakfast, child,' he said. 'I began to think you had taken the key of the fields.' ' I shouldn't know where to look for the fields if I had the key,' she answered ; and then she came round to the back of the old man's chair, and leant over him. ' Grandfather, the demoiselles Benoit have asked me to go to Vincennes with them —this afternoon — directly. May I go ? ' The old man shrugged his shoulders, and gave a long whistle, expressive of surprise. He knew of the three girls on the fourth floor, and that they were very respectable young persons. He wondered that they should take any notice of such a ragamuffin as his granddaughter. ' Will it cost any money ?' he asked, cautiously ; ' for if it will you can't go. The bag is em-ptj — not a sous till the charabia gets me a price for my bureau yonder.' ' They did not say anything about money. They offered to take me to a picnic, that was all ; and Mademoiselle Pauline will lend me one of her gowns.' ' One of her gowns I What a duchess ! If I had two coats one of them would be always au dote [with the pawnbroker]. Well, you can go, child. If those girls are simple enough to pay 170 ISHMAEL. for you, I see no objection to your having, a day's pleasure. Your pocket will be empty, so there is no chance of your lieing swindled by any of your co-operative dodges ; or else the word picnic has a sound I don't like. It means handing round a plate after dinner, and for every man to pay his scot.' * Bo7i jour, pire,' cried Paquerette. She did not give the trolleur time to change his mind. She ran across the yard to the steep black staircase upon which the Benoit apartment opened ; a terrible staircase in truth, an air-shaft for all insalubrious odours, a dark well whose greasy walls were thick with the grime of half a century, an atmosphere of infection, rank, sour, musty, tainted with every variety of foulness, animal, vegetable, mineral. Paquerette was inured to such odours. She took hold of the greasy rope which hung against the slimy wall, and served as banister-rail, and ran lightly up the corkscrew stair, hustled by, or hustling, three or four blouses and one frock coat who were hurrying down, eager to ba off and away for their day's amusement. The door on the fourth landing was open, and the demoiselles Benoit were waiting for her. ' Come, Paquerette, we want to catch the one 'she stretcheth our her hand to the poor.' 171. o'clock omnibus/ cried big Lisbeth ; and then tlie door was shut, and the three girls began their protegee's toilet. They meant to do the thing thoroughly, having once taken it in hand. Lisbeth was one of the most thorough-going young women in Paris, a svorkwomen such as there are few, and everything she did was done well and earnestly. She had trained the two young cousins in the same spirit. In the midst of poverty, surrounded by dirt, sloven- liness, drunkenness, and all evil habits, they had kept their lives pure and clean; and the place they inhabited was an oasis of purity in the murky old house. All three girls stood for a minute or two looking at Paquerette, as if she had been a work of art. Was she pretty? They hardly knew; but they knew that she might be made to look gentille. There was an air of elegance in the slim fragile figure, the swan-like throat, the slight droop of the head, which the Benoit damsels, substantially built, felt rather than understood. But of that order of beauty which was appreciated in the faubourg St. Antoine Paquerette had not a trace. The sparkling eyes, the heauU die diahle, fresh com- plexion, girlish plumpness, were not here. There was rather a look of sickliness, a waxen pallor, 172 ISHMAEL. and an attenuation which, from a conventional point of view, was fatal to beauty. Instructed by her friends, Paquerette plunged her head and shoulders into a shallow wooden tub, and made such use of soap and water as she had never done before, emerging flushed and breathless from this novel ordeal, to scrub herself vigorously with a large huckaback towel, a very coarse, common towel, but, oh ! how delightfully clean. The flavour of cleanliness, the fresh odours of abundant soap and water, were new things in Paquerette's experi- ence. *Sit down, child, and let me do your hair,' said Lisbeth, with bluff authority. ' Oh ! mademoiselle,' murmured the girl, over- come with shame at the thought of her unkempt locks. Happily she had a habit of dipping her head in the wretched cracked little basin every morning when she washed her face, for coolness sake, so the rough head was fairly clean. What a mass of soft brown hair fell about the child's shoulders when Lisbeth had drawn out two rusty spikes of hair-pins — a soft palish brown, not auburn or golden or chestnut — a shadowy veil of fine soft hair which fell round the thin wan face like an evening cloud. * SHE STKETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 173 While Lisbeth brushed and combed the long thick mass of hair, Pauline and Toinette con- sulted in a corner as to the gown they would lend the orphan, and finally decided on a white cotton with little pink spots, clean and fresh from the ironing board. Girls who are good starchers and ironers, and are not afraid of the public laundry, can afford to wear clean clothes. The hairdressing was finished by this time, the soft brown tresses were brushed back from the forehead, and rolled into a large knot at the back of the small head; and now Paquerette, casting the slough of her poverty, put on a petticoat of Toinette's and over it Pauline's pink-spotted cotton. Pauline had prided herself on her small waist until to-day, but her gown was ever so much too big for Paquerette. It had to be taken off, and the bodice taken in nearly three inches with a few vigorous stiches on each side of the waist : and then the gown was put on again and finished off with a neat linen collar. A dainty little muslin cap was pinned on the smooth brown hair, and Paquerette, who had submitted very patiently to be turned and twisted about like a doll in the process of dressing, was to be rewarded by the sight of her transformed image in the 1 74 ISHMAEL. little looking-glass. Not until tLe final touch was given to the picture would the three girls allow so much as a peep at the glass. But now, when the last pin had been adjusted, Pauline brought the glass and held it before Paquerette's astonished eyes. Wiat did she see there ? What kind of image greeted her curious gaze ? A grisette ? A grisette only as for cotton frock and white cap. That shy, slender, fragile, ethereal creature had nothing else of the grisette. The type was patrician. That kind of face marked the vanishing point of an aristocratic line — a race dying out, attenuated, but lovely in its decay. This was beauty assuredly, but the beauty of a white woodland flower, frail, faint ; the brief bloom and glory of a day. The soft grey eyes — dark, pensive — the small Greek nose, and deli- cate chin, with that receding slope which means weakness of character, the pallid complexion, just relieved by the blush-rose tint of the lips and the pencilling of the eyebrows, — all these made up a kind of beauty, but not a type to strike the vulgar eye. Paquerette was just good-looking enough to pass in a crowd, as the vulgar say, and just the kind of girl to be passed unmarked and unadmired by the crowd. Yet the demoiselles 'SHE STKETCHETH OUT HER HAND TO THE POOR.' 175 Benoit felt that there was a charm in that pale face and slender form— a charm which was better than vulgar beauty. ' What do you think of yourself now, Paque- rette ? ' asked Pauline. But the girl would not express any opinion on this point. She had only words of gratitude for the three good fairies. CHAPTEE IX. 'AS SNOW IN SUMMER.' The Benoit girls and their prot^g^e set out for the omnibus office, talking, laughing, intensely happy. Paquerette had never ridden in an omnibus till to-day. Cinderella could not have been more delighted with her enchanted coach than this waif of St. Antoine with the heavy red omnibus which jolted and rattled over the stones of the shabby boulevard. There is not much beauty in the road from the Place de la Bastille to Vincennes ; but to Paquerette it was rapture to feel the movement of the carriage, and to see the happy-looking people in their Sunday clothes — the children, the mothers, the working men; the noise and bustle and ferment of a fine warm Sunday, the first Sunday of summer^ when all the world was at its best, and when all the ants in the ant-hill of St. Antoine had come out of dark holes and corners to bask in the sun. As they were jolted along, Pauline told 'AS SNOW IN summer/ 177 Paquerette what they were going to do. They were to meet their friends at the Fort — Monsieur and Madame Morice — old friends who had known the departed Monsieur Benoit, and Gustave his brother, Lisbeth's father, in years gone by, when they all lived in a little bourg in IS'ormandy, about twenty miles from the fine old city of Eouen. Madame Morice had succeeded to a small inherit- ance left her by a bachelor uncle, a well-to-do blacksmith ; and with this modest fortune she and her husband had come to Paris and had set up a small grocery shop at Menilmontant. The rents were so high in all the good quarters of Paris that they had been constrained to establish themselves in a district which left much to be desired. But these Morices were exceptional people. The}^ brought the temperate and industrious habits of the province to Paris, and did not allow themselves to be corrupted by the great city. Their little shop at Menilmontant flourished exceedingly. The two rooms behind the shop were the pink of neat- ness, and their one child, a boy of seven, was a model of obedience and good manners. Surrounded by so much that was foul and evil, they had con- trived to keep themselves untainted by the infection of vice. They were the only intimale friends the Benoit girls could reckon upon in Paris ; but for VOL. I. N 178 ISHMAEL. acquaintance — the come-and-go society of Sundays and holidays — the Benoits had all Madame Morice's circle, which consisted of the most respectable citizens of her quarter. The Morices were sauntering up and down with half a dozen friends in front of the Fort when the four girls arrived. There was Mademoiselle Gilberte, the dressmaker, a stylish young person of five-and thirty ; and there was Madame Beck the clear-starcher, a matron whose purity of attire spoke well for her laundry- work ; also Madame Beck's son, a flaxen youth of nineteen, with not a word to say for himself, and with an embarrassing habit of blushing violently and goggling his eyes if he were looked at. There were Monsieur and Madame Callonge, from the smart little houcherie opposite Madame Morice's shop ; and lastly, there was a tall, broad-shouldered, and very handsome Monsieur whom the Benoit girls had never seen till to-day. He wore a blue blouse and a workman's cap ; but one could see at a glance that his outer gar- ments were spotless, and that his linen, as indicated by the white collar and wristbands, was that of a gentleman. Morice and Beck were both in broad- cloth and stove-pipe hats, and Morice had gone so far as to encase his lingers in a pair of stiff yellow leather gloves ; and yet this man in the 'AS SNOW IX SUMMEK.' 179 blue blouse looked more like a gentleman than either of them. His movements had an ease, his head was carried with a lofty grace, which those others had not. He was strolling by Madame Morice's side, silent and thoughtful, as the four girls approached. There was much cordiality in the greeting given to the Benoit girls by all the company, except the man in blue, who was evidently a stranger. Lisbeth presented Paquerette to Madame Morice as a little neighbour she had brought with her, and that was all the introduction needed. The grocer's wife smiled at her with a comfortable protecting air, and murmured to Lisbeth that the child was tres gentille, and then the gentlemen of the company took the baskets, and they all strolled off to find the prettiest part of the wood. It was a gay and busy world through which they went, a world of humble pleasure-seekers, somewhat loud in their mirth, but passing merry. There were wedding- parties among the crowd, couples who had been wedded on Saturday in order to secure Sunday for a second day of revelry. There were circles seated on the grass at their picnic breakfast ; youths and lasses playing hide and seek or blind-man's buff among the stunted bushes, in an atmosphere of dust and sunshine. Blue blouses, crimson trousers, white 1 80 ISHMAEL. bridal gowns made a vivid variety of colour against the turf, wliicli looked green in the distance, although it was rusty and trodden almost to ex- tinction by the multitude of feet. Yonder glanced blue water, under the bright spring sky. Paquerette thought the whole scene bewilderingly beautiful. While they were walking in quest of a retired glade Madame Morice, who was a great gossip, told bisj Lisbeth about the strangjer in the blue blouse. He was from Brittany, a stone-mason, en- gaged on the fortifications yonder, and he had lately moved into an apartment on the top front floor above her shop. He was a very superior person — sober, saving, and almost a gentleman in his ways. He sat up late at night studying some- times. She had seen his lamp from the road when she and her husband came home from a theatre ; but let him study never so late, he was always off to his work in the early morning. She had heard that he was a staunch Eepublican, and had srand ideas about the equal riorhts of man. She had made his acquaintance through her little boy Adolphe, who had been nearly run over, when this good fellow, Ishmael, picked him up from under the very feet of a pair of waggon-horses. * Can you wonder that I have liked him ever 'AS SNOW IN SUMMER.' 181 since ? ' she said. * Morice cultivates his society for the sake of his conversation — they are of the same way of thinking, and neither of them trusts too securely in the Prince l^resident, or this new law which the Chamber passed the other day.' Lisbeth was no Eepublican. She had liked and admired the Citizen King and his family — that pious charitable queen, those princesses, fond of sculpture and poetry, needle-work, and all pure feminine arts. The revolution of '48 had seemed to Lisbeth an unmitigated calamity, and the people M'ho made it were devils in her eyes. She admired Prince Louis Napoleon for the sake of those glorious traditions which are as fairy tales to the children of France. She knew her Beranger, and in the songs of the national poet had learned the history of the Empire that was gone. If those people who prophesied the coming of a new Empire were right, so much the better. Anything was better than a Kepublic, which seemed a colourless, hopeless kind of Government ; a Chamber always at logger-heads ; a flock without a shepherd. Madame Morice and her party found a little glade, a somewhat secluded spot, in which to picnic, and as everybody seemed pretty sharp set by five o'clock, they all sat down at that hour tot open the baskets and arrange the meal. The gentlemen oJ 182 ISHMAEL. the party provided the wine, and some limonade gazeuse had been brought by the thoughtful Morice for those ladies who might not care for such strong drinks as macon or ordinaire. It was a very sober party, but very cheerful notwithstanding, with much talk and laughter ; and the paucity of accommoda- tion in the way of knives and foiks, plates and glasses, gave occasion to many small jokes of an ancient and innocent character, Thus big Lisbeth and the stone-mason, on sharing their meal off a common plate, were called the menage Tshmael, and various insinuations of a matrimonial kind were levelled at them, all which Lisbeth bore with strong-minded placidity. But when Paquerette presently sipped a little wine out of the stone- mason's glass, the first jesting remark made the pale face flush crimson. * She is so shy, la pauvrette' said Pauline to Madame Morice. ' A word frisjhtens her.' * She is rather pretty,' said Madame; 'and she has the air of a demoiselle.' 'You would not have said that if you had seen her this morning before we took her in hand,' replied Pauline, with a natural pride in her work. Before they had finished dinner a gray-haired old organ-player came and perched himself near them, and began to drone out his old airs — 'The *AS SNOW IN summee/ 183 Carnival of Venice,' 'La ci darem/ ' Non piu mestay and a waltz or two. The waltz tunes inspired the little party. Why should not one have a dance ?— just for digestion. A word and the thing was "done. The plates were thrust into the empty baskets ; every one was on foot ; partners were chosen : Paquerette found herself, she hardly knew how, gliding round in a circle, sup- ported by the strong arm of Monsieur Ishmael. The shy youth with eyes a fleur de tete sum- moned courage to invite Pauline. The copper- faced, weather-beaten old organ- player ground on, a villainous music, but with a swing and a rhythm which guided the feet of the dancers, and seemed to them in the inspiration of the moment — summer air, blue sky, youth, hope, and freshness— as the music of the spheres. It was in their own pulses, in their own young hearts, the melody was sounding; the rhythmical drone of the organ was only the outer husk of that inner and spiritual melody, the mere me- chanical beat which kept time with the music of newly awakening hopes and loves. Paquerette had never learned to dance ; but in these light, slim slips of girlhood dwells the very spirit of motion. Like an ^Eolian harp which has hung in the stillness of a closed 18-i ISHMAEL. chamber, silent for years, but, let a summer wind breathe on the strings, and the music comes ; so with Paquerette ! At the sound of the Savoyard's organ, with the sense of a strong arm encircling her waist, her feet slid lightly over the dry close turf, and every movement of that slender figure and those little feet was supple, graceful, harmo- nious, as in a dancer of highest artistic training. There are some arts that come by instinct to certain people, and Paquerette was a born dancer. 'Hurrah!' cried the middle-aged lookers-on, applauding the three couples, but with their eyes on Ishmael and his partner; and 'Hurrah!' echoed Ishmael, drawing his partner a little closer to his breast, light-hearted, elated, he scarce knew why. The other two couples stopped breathless and panting, and stood aloof out of the little circle of sunburnt greensward; but Ishmael and his partner waltzed on, unconscious that they were alone, unconscious of spectators, feeling like two birds with outspread wings hovering in a world of light and air, steeped in blue sky and sun- shine, far above this common earth. When they at last came to a stop the girl's head dropped upon her partner's shoulder in a sudden giddiness. It seemed to her a- if they had swooped down from that blue, bright world, 'AS SNOW IX summer/ 185 and that it was the shock of touching the earth again which made her senses reel and her sight grow dim. She recovered herself almost immediately, and released herself from Ishmael's supporting arm. ' Thank you/ she said naively. ' How delicious dancing is !' ' And how exquisitely you dance !' answered Ishmael, looking at her with eyes which seemed to her to orlow and dazzle like the sun-rays that meet on a burning glass. 'Please do not laugh at me, monsieur; T never danced with any one in my life until to-day. I have danced by myself in the yard sometimes when there was an organ, but of course that is different.' * I am very glad of that,' said Ishmael. ' Glad of what ? ' ' That I am the first partner you ever danced with. That makes a beginning in life, does it not ?— a kind of landmark. And now shall we oro for a little walk ? You are breathless still. We must not dance any more just yet/ He offered his arm, through which she slipped her little ungloved hand, after an instant or so of hesitation. She had never taken any man's arm before. Miranda in her desert island could hardly have been more innocent of the manners and ways 186 ISHMAEL. of the outer world. Ishmael looked down at her wonderingly, admiringly. He had seen many more beautiful women since he had lived in Paris : the women at the theatres, for instance — dazzling, gorgeous creatures, 'with eyes that flashed liquid light, complexions of ivory or alabaster. He had seen aristocratic loveliness go by him in carriages — patrician beauty innocent of the actress's art ; for in those days ladies of rank had not taken to rouge and enamel. This slender thing, stealing a little upward glance at him now and then, tremu- lously, was splendid neither in form nor colour. Yet there was an aristocratic refinement in the almost too delicate features — the little nose, so finely chiselled, yet undecided between the Greek and the retrousse, the small round chin sloping somewhat weakly at the base, and the pure half tints of the pale complexion, the violet blue of the large dreamy eyes, with their long auburn lashes and pencilled brows. No Joan of Arc or Agnes Sorel type of woman this : but rather of the Louise de la Valliere mould — a woman to sin, her heart being tempter, and to be sorry for her sin for ever after. ' Paquerette,' murmured Ishmael thoughtfully, perceiving the relation between the white spring flower and this pale fragile prettiness ; ' were you christened Puquerette ! ' 'AS SNOW IN SUMMER.* 187 * I don't know,' she answered childishly ; ' I don't remember.' * Of course not,' he said, smiling at her sim- plicity : ' one does not usually remember one's baptism. But have you no other name ? ' *N"ot that I know of. My grandfather once said that he called me Paquerette because I was such a poor white little thing when he first took care of me.' . * And you have neither father nor mother living ? ' ' Neither,' sighed Paquerette. ' Can you remember your parents, or did they both die while you were a baby ? ' He was not questioning her out of idle curiosity, or with the idea of making conversation, while they strolled by the shabby, dusty trees, in the people's much-trampled wood. He wanted to get nearer to this pale flowerlike creature ; to know how this delicate spray could have shot forth from the rugged tree of hard-working humanity. * I never saw either father or mother,' the girl answ^ered sadly. ' I used to think till a year ago that my grandfather and his wife were my father and mother, only a good deal older than other srirls' fathers and mothers. And then some one in the house — the old tinman on the fifth floor. 188 ISHMAEL. who lived there before I was born— told me that my mother died while she was young. She was very pretty, he said. He remembered her when she was smaller and younger than 1 am now. I asked him why she died so young, but he did not know. She went away, and then she came back with me, and then she died, and was buried among the poor people at Pere Lachaise. There is no cross to tell where she lies. I have gone there sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, and walked about over the long grass under which she is lying with so many others, all nameless. And after a few years the great common grave will be opened again, and more coffins will be put in till it is full — the dead lying above and below each other in crowds, just as the living are crowded story above story, in the big houses like ours.' ' It is hard,' said Ishmael, setting his teeth, for to this staunch Eepublican all inequalities of rank and wealth seemed hard, 'but it will not always be so. The living and the dead will have their rights by-and-by. The hewers of wood and drawers of water will not always be flung into a common grave. I remember hearinof something of a new law made last winter, which was to secure decent burial for the poor. And so you live with your grandfather and grandmother, Mademoiselle 'AS SXOW m SUMMER.' 189 Paquerette,' he went ou. ' I suppose they are very fond of you ? ' He fancied that the love of an old couple for an orphan grandchild must be something over and above the common love of parents, tenderer, more blindly indulgent. ' They are not always unkind,' Paquerette answered innocently. 'Not always. Are they ever unkind to you?' • Sometimes. They are very poor. Grand- father works very hard — now and then. He makes beautiful things — bureaux or escritoires for the furniture-dealers. But he cannot always sell what he has made for a good price; and then he gets unhappy, and very angry with grandmother and me. And they both have to take a good deal of wine and brandy for their rheumatism : and when one is old that gets into one's head, and one does not know what one says or does.' *I hope you never take wine or brandy, Made- moiselle Paquerette,' Ishmael said earnestly. ' They never give me any — they have none to spare,' the girl answered with childlike simplicity ; * and I hate the smell of the stuff. I have to fetch it for grandmother from the wine-shop.' * I hope you will always hate it,' said Ishmael. ' Strong drink is the curse of great cities. In 190 ISHMAEL. Brittany nobody gets drunk ; we drink only cider. But there we are always in the fresh air — our brains are not dulled by the stilling atmosphere of small crowded rooms,' he continued, recalling that crowded wine-shop near his lodging where the men heated themselves and maddened them- selves, as they sat in the oven-like room, under the low blackened ceiling, drinking their coarse spirit and smoking their rank tobacco, and holding forth to one another with an eloquence that was ranker and coarser than potato brandy or cabbage- leaf tobacco, could Ishmael but have understood it aright. He had to explain to Paquerette where Brittany was, and what kind of a place. Her ignorance upon all possible subjects was of the densest. The whole world outside the faubourg St.-Antoine and Pere Lachaise was a blank to her. The faubourg was her only idea of town, the cemetery her sole notion of country. She listened to Ishmael's description of his native province with eyes that grew wider and wider with wonderment. The sea, what was it like ? And rocks, what were those ? Hills, valleys, orchards, windmills, river, willow-shaded, flocks of turkeys, processions of geese, broad sketches of yellow sand : everything had to be explained to her. Ishmael grew eloquent * AS SNOW IN SrMMEE.' 191 as he went ou, full of enthusiasm for that dear land which he had left; not for lack of love on his part, but because parental love was lacking there for him. He told Paquerette all about the villaG;e of Pen' Hoel and its surroundings, and his own wild, free life there : but he never mentioned the name of the place, or the chateau, or uttered a word which could indicate that he had been anything higher than a peasant in his native place. His past life was a profound secret, which he had no intention of revealing to any one. His yoiith and its belongings were dead and buried, and he stood alone — a young Csesar who had just passed life's Kubicon, and had taken up arms against fate. By-and-by came more dancing, while the sun went down in a sky of crimson and gold behind a meagre avenue of shabby limes, their spring foliage already tarnished with the dust of the city, and while umber shadows stole across the scattered patches of scrubby wood and copse. The old Savo- yard had sent his dog round among the company with a hat in his mouth, and had been so satisfied with the result that he was smiling over his barrel- organ, and grinding away with renewed energy, while his faithful mongrel sat beside him, wagging a poor stump of a tail, the more ornamental half 192 ISHMAEL. of which had been demolished piece by piece iu various fights with other mongrels. Again Paquerette and Ishmael waltzed together, to the old-fashioned 'Due de Eeichstadt' waltz, which enjoyed a revival of popularity just now on the organs of Paris, as a delicate compliment to him who called the dead boy cousin. Again the fair small head reclined against the stone-mason's stalwart shoulder, and the strong arm sustained the girl's slim figure, so that her little feet seemed to skim rather than to tread the dusty turf. They were dancing still when Paquerette's friends began to urge the prudence of turning their faces home- wards. Spring days may be ever so delicious, but spring evenings are always chilly. A cold wind was creeping up from tlie unseen river, the last gleam of gold and red had faded in the west. The world was a misty gray world, under silvery stars, that were just beginning to glitter in a cold gray sky. The baskets had been packed with empty plates and glasses ; the empty bottles — alias negroes — given as a perquisite to the old Savoyard. The day of rest and pleasure was over. Throughout the wood little parties of holiday folk were tramping homeward — fathers carrying sleepy childien on their shoulders, mothers dragging babies in little chaise carts ; lovers with arms 'AS SNOW IX SUMMER.' 19'^» wreathed round maidenly waists ; here and there the red legs of a soldier striding towards the barrack ; everywhere departure ; save where silent and stealthy in the darkness of copse or grassy hollow some homeless wretch watched the departing multi- tude, hopeful of being able to pass a quiet night under the stars, unassailed by the authorities of the city. Ishmael stopped reluctantly when the organ- grinder ground his last bar. He had danced many a waltz in the least disreputable dancing places of the workmen's quarter : but never had he felt the very inspiration of the dance as he had felt it to-day, on the disadvantageous turf, under the open sky. The hastringues yonder, even the best of them, reeked with odours of cheap wine and brandy, and a vile decoction of wine and spices known as sang de hoeuf. Their very atmosphere was poisoned by bad company and evil language. Ishmael had always left such places disgusted with himself for having been induced to enter them. But to-day he had felt himself in respectable com- pany ; he had heard not one foul word. He felt that he would like to see more of his little partner of to-day, of those three candid-looking, decent girls, her companions. * Your little friend dances exquisitely,' he said VOL. I, 194 ISHMAEL. to big Lisbeth. ' I think you must have taught her; * Not I, indeed,' answered Lisbeth, laughing at his impKed compliment, so evidently meant to conciliate. ' She has taught herself, poor little thing, skimming about the yard, like a bird or a butterfly. The only joy she has had in life, I believe, has been to dance to the sound of an organ, when one has chanced to come our way, which has not been often.' ' She seems to have had a very unhappy child- hood, poor little thing ! ' said Ishmael, walking beside Lisbeth, as they made their way towards the point at which the party was to disperse. He had no intention of leaving the four girls at that, point, but meant to offer them his escort to their home. * The old trolleiir and his wife are an ogre and ogress,' answered Lisbeth, indignantly. ' Figure to yourself, then, monsieur, this is the first day's pleasure that poor thing has ever known ; and if it were not for my cousin lending her a gown — but I ought not to speak of such things; only when one is angry ' * You are right to feel angry. Poor child, poor child ! ' So even the neat pink cotton frock, the modest *AS SNOW IN SUMMER.' 195 muslin cap, were borrowed plumage. Poor little Cinderella ! Hitherto Ishmael had believed his own unloved childhood to be altogether exceptional — a kind of martyrdom unknown before in the story of mankind. And here was this fragile girl, ever so much unhappier, steeped to the lips in squalid poverty, the drudge of a drunken old man and woman. The very thought of Fate's injustice towards this weakling made his blood boil. He looked down at the girl pityingly, tenderly almost, as he walked by her side along the dusty road. So pale, so delicate, wan and wasted even, in the very springtime of life ! The bud had not unfolded into the blossom, and yet it was already faded. Such a faint snowdrop prettiness ! He had admired women before to-night, had dreamed more than one dream of the passing moment ; but he had never before been deeply interested in a woman's character or a woman's fate. And Paquerette interested liim both ways. He wanted to know what kind of girl she was : he wanted to know all that could be known of her sad story. *Let me see you home, mademoiselle,' he said to Lisbeth, in whom he recognised the head of the Benoit family. ' Monsieur is very good. We thought of return- ing by the omnibus.' 196 ISHMAEL. * On such a lovely spring night ? The omnibuses will be crowded to suffocation. It will be an affair of waiting till midnight for places. Don't you think it would be much pleasanter to walk home ? ' * It is a long way,* said Lisbeth, pleased at the idea of saving so many sous ; ' but if the others are not too tired ' ' JSTot at all,' protested Toinette. ' The night air is so fresh, I could walk to Asnieres or Bougival.' ' But Paquerette, she has danced so much, she must be very tired,' said Pauline. ' Tired ! Oh no, not in the least,' cried Paque- rette. * It will be delicious to walk home ; although the omnibus was heavenly,' she added, gratefully remembering her first drive. So they all set out along the dusty road, which was less arid now under the cool softness of night. Paquerette found herself hanging upon Ishmael's arm, somehow, lust as in their first dance she had seemed to glide unconsciously into his arms. He had taken the little hand in his and slipped it through his arm, with an air of mastery which implied protection, friendship, shelter, the guardian- ship of the strong over the weak. He asked Paquerette no questions about herself or her life, as they walked back to the faubourg St. Antoine. After the story he had heard briefly '^AS SNOW IN SUMMER.' 197 from Lisbeth Benoit, he felt that it would be almost cruelty to touch upon the poor child's surroundings. He wanted to know more of her story ; he was moved and interested as he had never been till now ; but he felt that he must make his discoveries for himself, not from those delicate lips, with their tint of pale rosebuds. He spoke of himself, or rather of his province, which was another part of himself, the orchards and fields and winding river, the sea and rocks of that land where the borders of Normandy and Brittany almost touch across the narrow boundary of the Couesnon. He told her of that land of legends ; of fairies, and of poulpicains, the impish husbands of fairies ; of Druid monuments and haunted fountains ; of Christian miracles and pagan shrines ; told her of that good King Gradlon, of Cornuailles, who is to the Breton as King Arthur to the Cornishman. Never had Paquerette been so interested. Her eager questions led the speaker on. Fairies ; what were they ? She had never heard of them. The sea ? Ah, yes, she had heard often of the sea, and she longed to know what it was like — how big, what colour, and did it really roar in stormy weather, as her grandfather had told her, as if with the might of ten thousand lions ; and did the waves really, really, rise 198 ISHMAEL. mountains high, glistening walls of white water ; and were there silvery shining lights upon the waves, which looked like enchantment, and only meant rotten fish ? She longed of all things to behold the sea, and the country, and the vineyards and mountains which the cJiarabia had told her about when he sat smoking his pipe with her grandfather. Ishmael inquired who this cliarahia was of whom she spoke as a familiar friend. The chcirabia was grandfather's friend, Paque- rette told him. It was he who took away a piece of furniture when grandfather had finisked it, and carried it round to the dealers. Sometimes he got a very good price, and then he stayed to supper, and there was a fricot, and grandmother made a saladier of wine a la Francaise afterwards, and then the charahia grew merry and talked of his native Auvergne. There were bad times when nobody would give a fair price for the furniture ; and then when there was hardly bread to eat the charahia came forward and bought grandfather's work himself, rather than that they should all starve. Grandfather was a trolleur — a man who worked on his own account, and sold his work to the dealers. The charahia must be a very benevolent *AS SNOW IN SUMMER.' 199 person, or a rank thief,' said Islimael. ' He is altogether a new character to me. What kind of a man is he ? ' * Stout, broad-shouldered, with a dark face, and short black hair — not a very nice-looking man,' answered Paquerette, simply ; ' but grandfather says he means well ; except when he is angry, and then he says the charabia is a blood-sucker, and is growing fat upon his flesh and hones. Grandmother says the charabia is rich, and that we ought to make much of him.' * And you, Mademoiselle Paquerette, do you like this Auvergnat ? ' asked Ishmael. Paquerette had never been called mademoiselle until to-day. It was a kind of promotion. * Like him — I ? ' she said, wonderingl5^ ' I don't think he cares very much whether I like or dislike him. He has hardly ever spoken to me ; but he sits and stares at me sometimes with great black eyes which almost frighten me. I have to fetch the wine and brandy when he comes to supper. I hate him,' she added, with a shudder ; * but I mustn't say so. You won't tell grandfather ? ' * Not for the world, mademoiselle. I am afraid from the way you speak that these grandparents of yours are not very kind to you.' 200 ISHMAEL. ' They are not so kind as you,' the girl answered softly, for there was a protecting friendliness in his tone which awakened in her a new sense of sympathy ; ' but they do not mean to be unkind. It is only because life is so hard for them.' They were near the rue Sombreuil by this time, and in a few more minutes they entered the gloomy archway of the common lodging-house — not so large as those barracks of a hundred rooms, to be built a few years later under the Haussmann rule, but large enough to hold a good deal of misery and foulness of all kinds. The yard looked very dreary in the faint light of a moon which was just rising above the towers of jS"otre Dame. A guttering candle flared with a yellowish flame upon the bare old table in the trolleufs room. The door w^as open, and M^re Lemoiiie was standing in the doorway gossiping with a neighbour. She wore a smart little coloured shawl over her shabby gown, and her Sunday cap, which was an interesting specimen of diity finery- She w^as in that condition which her friends called poivre, and had the peculiar solemnity of manner which sometimes goes with that state. ' It is that torchon J at last !' she exclaimed. ' Don't you think you have given me enough of inquietude this evening, pHite gredine, roaming 'AS SNOW IN SUMMER.' 201 the streets after dark, you that have been brought up as carefully as a mam'selle ? And now ' — with a suppressed hiccough — 'you come home with a strange monsieur in a blouse ! ' Paquerette and Ishmael had the start of the others by some five minutes. 'You knew I was with kind friends, grand- mother,' said the girl. 'This gentleman came home with me. Mam'selle Benoit and her cousins are just behind us.' On this Mere Lemoine curtseyed to the stranger with a dignified air, and regretted that her husband was not at home to invite him to supper ; but if he would break a crust with them, he would be heartily welcome. Ishmael, moved by curiosity about Paquerette, or interest in Paquerette, snapped at the invitation. ' I d!ned too well to be able to eat anything,' he said, ' but I should not be sorry to rest for a little while, without deranging Madame. It is nearly five miles from Yincennes, though the walk seemed a mere bagatelle; and I have a longish way to go to my lodgings.' Madame Lemoine threw up her hands in wonder- ment. ' They had walked all the way from Vincennes ! That paresseuse of hers, for example, who always loitered on every errand? Wonders would never cease !' 202 ISHMAEL. ' It was a lovely walk,' said Paquerette. ' Made- moiselle Benoit asked me if I would rather go in the omnibus, and it was my own choice to walk. You are not tired, are you, monsieur ? '—appeal- ing to Ishmael. * I feel as if I could walk five miles more.' * Tired ? no, mademoiselle, not absolutely tired ; but I should be glad to rest for a little quarter of an hour.' The Benoit girls were parting with the goggle- eyed youth and his sister under the archway. Paquerette flew across to them as they came into the yard, to thank them for their goodness to her. ' And the gown ? ' she said. ' Shall I come up to your room and change it for my own ? ' 'Not to-night, child,' answered Pauline kindly; 'you must be tired after that long walk. I will bring down your things at six o'clock to-morrow morning, and then you can return me mine. I suppose you are always up at six?' 'I will be up at six to-morrow morning,' answered Paquerette, ashamed to own the lateness of her normal hour. What was there to induce early rising in that ground-floor den, where the trolleur and his wife sometimes slept half through the sunny forenoon, coiled in the darkness of their hole like dogs in a kennel ? 'AS SXOW IN SUMMER.' 203 The Beuoit girls kissed Paquerette, wished Ishmael a brief good -night, and ran off to their dingy staircase. Ten o'clock was striking from the tower of Notre Dame— not a very dissipated hour, albeit Mere Lemoine pretended to be shocked at the lateness of her granddaughter's return. Ishmael was invited to walk into the livin^y- room, and to seat himself in the trolleur's greasy old Voltaire, an heirloom which had grown dirtier and more rickety year by year durino- Paquerette's progress from baby to girl, but which was still regarded as the acme of comfort. The stranger looked round the room wonderingly. There was not one feature to redeem the all- pervading dreariness ; even the fine old walnut- wood armoire, tall, capacious, a relic of old-world industry and comfort, had been degraded from its sober antique beauty by neglect and hard usage. The brass lock and hinges had fallen into dis- repair; the heavy door yawned ajar, revealing a heterogeneous collection of old clothes, crockery, boots, hardware, and empty wine bottles. Nothing in the room suggested neat or careful habits in the occupants. In one corner the cabinet-maker's bench stood above a heap of shavings which must have been accumulating for weeks ; in 20J: ISHMAEL. another a basket of tools had been flung down anyhow among dirty plates and saucepans. A greasy pack of cards on the table beside the battered brass candlestick showed how Mere Lemoine and her gossip had been amusing them- selves. Not a primrose or a spray of wall-flower from the flower-market; not one sign of womanly nice- ness, of the household fairy's care, in all the room. Ishmael sighed as he glanced at Paquerette, who stood shyly beside the smoky hearth, straight, slim, fragile-looking in her white and pink raiment. ' Poor child,' he said to himself, ' she looks sweet and innocent as a spring flower in the woods at Pen-Hoel ; but what honest man would ever dare to marry a girl from such a home as this ? ' While Ishmael sat beside the hearth, replying to the grandmother's polite interrogatories, Pere Lemoine came in, unexpectedly early, unexpectedly sober. He had not been to 'The Faithful Pig,' but to a political meeting of ebenistes in a wine- shop in the rue de la Eoquette, where they assembled secretly in a back room, and in fear of the police, all such meetings at this time being illegal. Although he had taken his glass or two he w.is in a perfectly respectable condition, full 'AS SNOW IX SUMMER.' 205 of the meeting, and of the importance of the syndicate of cabinet-makers, of which he was only an outsider. 'But they know that I can speak,' he said proudly, ' those scoundrels of the Left. I am not good enough to be one of their syndicate, a poor devil who lives from hand to mouth, works as the whim seizes him, as all true artists have always worked, from Palissy downwards. They let me speak, for they know I am not without eloquence. They have called me sometimes their old Danton — the mouth of thunder — the lion-headed one. There is again a talk of a coup d'etat He — Prince Louis Bonaparte — has sworn that there is no such thing in his thoughts ; but the Mnistes neither trust him nor the Chamber — and the Mnistes are a power in Paris. Let the Elysee and the Chamber look to it. The pulses of the national heart beat here— the life blood of France ebbs and flows here ! ' * Monsieur, here, is no friend to the President,' said Mere Lemoine, 'he is a man after your own heart.' ' Pardon, Madame,' answered Ishmael, ' I have been in Paris only half a year. I reserve my opinion. If Louis Bonaparte means well to the people, I am with him heart and hand. But I wait to know more 206 ISHMAEL. of the Prince President and his policy. He has dealt fairly with France so far, and this rumour of an impending coup d'etat may be groundless. It was talked of nearly a year ago, and has not come yet.' ' The time has not come — the necessity has not come,' said Lemoine, fresh from the secret discussion at the wine shop. ' Wait till the sands are running out in the glass ; wait till that man's day of power is waning ; and then see what he will do to keep the sceptre in his hand. Remember the Consulate and the Empire. Pieraember the 18?^^ Brumaire. We shall see the same game played over again by an inferior player. Louis Bonaparte has the army at his back. It was said to-night, by one who knows, that Courtigis, the general in command at Yincennes, has orders to fire upon the faubourg with the biggest of his cannon, in case of insurrection, while three regiments of cavalry are to clear the streets, and sabre every insurgent who ventures out of his hole. If necessary he is to burn every house in the faubourg. It will be a fierce struggle, friend, but I hope when the fight comes you will be found on our side.' ' I shall be on the side of liberty and right, be sure of that ' answered Ishmael. CHAPTER X. 'MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' IsHMAEL saw no more of Paquerette for nearly a month after that night in May, although he asked Madame Morice more than once during that time why she did not organise another picnic with those nice girls her friends of the faubourg St. Antoine. Madame Morice had other plans, or the Benoit girls were otherwise engaged. He might have found some excuse for calling in the rue Sombreuil had he so chosen; but he shrank with loathing from that dingy room, half workshop, half kitchen — the trolleur in his greasy blouse, the troUeur's wife with her crafty questions, her blood- shot eyes, looks as evil as those of the fabulous witches dear to his native province. He was sorry for Paquerette; he sympathised with the innocent, helpless creature, whose youth had been over- shadowed by this ogre and ogress. But to choose a wife from such a den — he, with manly aspirations and gentle blood in his veins — no, that was not 208 ISHMA.EL. possible. Neither was it possible for him to en- tertain one dishonourable wish about that childlike creature. And yet he ardently desired to see Paquerette again ; out of curiosity, out of a purely philanthropic yearning to be of some good to so unhappy a being. One Saturday afternoon, just before midsummer, Ishmael, coming home from work earlier than usual, heard a shrill confusion of voices in the little room behind Madame Morice's shop. The door was half open to the common passage, to admit such summer airs as might wander that way, and Madame Morice caught sight of the blouse going by. *It is Monsieur Ishmael himself,' she cried. ' Come in, if you please, monsieur. You have been asking me about picnics for the last three weeks, and now is your opportunity. The demoi- selles Benoit and 1 have' been discussino; a grand fete for to-morrow.' I am with you, ladies,' answered Ishmael. 'I wish I had a big balloon and could carry you all off to Brittany by to-morrow evening. It is the feast of St. John, our greatest festival. When the sun goes down every rock and every hill begins to shine with its bonfire in honour of Monsieur St. Jean — a hundred fires, a thousand fires, all sparkling and gleaming in the twilight. 'MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' 209 And then comes the joyous sound of music, and a procession of girls in their holiday clothes come to dance round the fires. She who can dance round nine bonfires before the first stroke of mid- night will have a husband before the year is out. And the farmers bring their beasts to pass them through the sacred fire — sure safeguard against cattle disease for ever after. And from valley to valley sound the shepherds' horns, calling and answering each other through the night; and beside many a fire there are placed empty chairs, that the spirits of the beloved dead may come and sit there to hear the songs and watch the dances.' ' What a strange people you Bretons are ! ' exclaimed Madame Morice. * We are a people who honour our ancestors and believe in their God,' answered Ishmael gravely. * It seems to me sometimes that in Paris you have neither the memory of the past nor a creed in the present.' * We remember our revolutions,' replied Madame Morice, whose husband was a politician ; ' they are the landmarks in our history.' * You were discussing a picnic,' said Ishmael. The three Benoit girls and Madame Morice were seated round a table furnished with dainty little white cups and saucers, a plate of delicate VOL. L p 210 ISHMAEL. biscuits, and a chocolatiere which breathed odours of vanille. As a grocer's wife, Madame could afford to entertain her friends with such luxuries, once in a way. She handed Jshmael one of the little toy cups and saucers, which he took with the air of an elephant picking up a pin. * Yes, we were talking of a grand excursion,' answered practical Lisbeth Benoit ; ' but I am afraid it is too far, and will cost too much. We want to go to Marly-le-Eoi, and spend the day in the woods, and have a picnic dinner at a restaurant in the village, where there is a nice lictle garden with an arbour in which one can dine. Madame Morice knows all about it. We went there on her sister's wedding-day. The people are civil, and the dinner not too expensive. But the journey there and back — that is a serious question.' The three Benoit girls shook their heads gravely. There arose a serious discussion. There was the railway fare to a certain station on the line, which only took them about half way to Marly-le-Koi, and then there was the diligence, and then the dinner. It would cost at least twelve francs a head, all told, travelling third class on the railway and in the cheapest part of the diligence, and limiting the dinner to bouillon, bouilli, salad, and dessert. ' MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' 211 It seemed a frightful price to pay for one day's pleasure, but then what a delight it is to escape out of the dust of Paris into the real country, the grand old royal forest, the village which could not be more primitive were it a hundred miles from the metropolis ! The Benoit girls had given themselves no pleasure since that day at Vincennes. They had been saving their money for some stupendous festival ; and this idea of Marly, which they had seen and admired so intensely two years ago, had obtained possession of them. Bougival — Asnieres ? No : they wanted the forest, the old forsaken fountains, the water-pools, the memories of a stately past. So, after an infinitude of talk, calculation, argumentation, it was finally settled that they should all go to Marly. It was to be a small select party this time. Madame Morice's married sister and her husband. Monsieur and Madame Dulac, were to be invited to join, and would doubt- less be charmed to revisit scenes associated with the tender memories of a wedding-day. But no one else was to be asked. There should be no risk of grumbling and recrimination at the costli- ness of the day's pleasure. And, again, a diligence will only accommodate a certain number. A large party is always difficult to manage en voyage. 212 ISHMAEL. Ishmael began to look blank. * Your friend IMademoiselle Paquerette, you will take her, will you not ? ' he asked, appealing to Lisbeth. Mademoiselle Benoit sighed and shrugged her shoulders. * Not possible,' she said. ' Poor little Paquerette would dearly love to go, I am sure ; but that wicked old trolleur would not give her twelve francs for a day's pleasure; though I dare say he spends twice as much every week at *" The Faithful Pig." ' 'But you might pay for her, Mademoiselle Benoit,' said Ishmael eagerly. ' That is to say, you might allow me to find the money, and say nothing about it to Mademoiselle Paquerette. She is only a child; she would never ask who paid for her.' * She is little more than a child, I admit,' replied the practical, outspoken Lisbeth; 'and yet I hardly know if it is a right thing to do. You seem to admire Paquerette very much, monsieur: I hope you mean well by her.' •Monsieur Ishmael means well by all the world. I will answer for that,' interjected Madame Morice. Ishmael reddened a little at this. 'Believe me that I am incapable of one evil 'MY SOUL FAILED WHKN HE SPAKE.' 213 thought in regard to your poor little friend,' he answered gravely. ' Perhaps you go a shade too far when you say I admire her. I am very sorry for her, poor child ; such a blighted girlhood is a thing to give every honest man the heartache. But I own that, if Mademoiselle Paquerette were ever so much handsomer and ever so much more fascinating, I should hardly go to the trolleufs den in search of a wife.' ' Precisely,' said Lisbeth ; ' and, since that is so, I should think the less you and Paquerette meet the better.' ' What nonsense, Lisbeth ! ' cried Pauline. ' Why should you deny poor little Paquerette a day's pleasure, which monsieur was so generous as to offer her out of sheer compassion? Paquerette is not so silly as to misunderstand his kindness ; and think what rapture it would be to her to see the woods and the real country, and to dine under green leaves in a garden full of roses and carnations. It would be too cruel to deprive her of such a pleasure.' 'There are some sweets that leave a bitter taste afterwards,' said Lisbeth, but the rest of the party took no more notice of her than the Trojans of Cassandra. They were all on Ishmael's side What other feeling than pure pity could he enter- 214 ISHMAEL. tain for such a poor little waif as Paquerette, and why deprive her of the kindness he so generously offered ? Lisbeth was overruled. The hour for meeting at the railway station was fixed, and Ishmael bade the ladies good afternoon, and went up to his own room under the tiles. Ishmael's apartment was in every way different from the trolleur's den in the rue Sombreuil. He had furnished his lodging himself, with divers substantial pieces of furniture picked up at the secondhand dealers. A fine old cherry-wood arinoire, solid and substantial as the cabinet work of Eennes or Yitry ; a mahogany bureau, style First Empire, ponderous, ungraceful, but passing good of its kind. The little iron bedstead in a corner was screened by a chintz curtain. There were four rush-bottomed chairs, a writing-table in the window, and two deal shelves of Ishmael's own making, filled with useful books, chiefly on mechanics ; for this young man had set himself to learn the constructive arts in all their bearing on his trade of mason and builder. He had taken up mathematics also, of which he had learned only the elements from good Pere Bres- sant of Pen-Hoiil. The room was kept with the purity and neat- ness of a monastic cell. Here, at the little stove 'MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' 215 in the corner, Islimael brewed his coffee in the early morning ; here late into the night he sat at yonder writing-table, studying, reading, thinking, inventing ; for that busy brain of his was full of plans and visions — bridges yet to be built, railways in the far future, aqueducts, viaducts, new^ roads, new levels. For at least three nights out of seven he gave himself up to hard study, locking his door upon the outside world, lighting his lamp in the early dusk, and working till the small hours. Then, after perhaps but three hours' sound sleep on his hard pallet, he was up again, brewing his coffee, and off to his work in the chilly morning ; while the market carts were slowly rumbling into the city, laden with fruit and vegetables from distant gardens, and great mountains of sea-fish and river-fish were being sold by auction, and the stomach of Paris, yonder by St.-Eustache, the great central market, was only just beginning its daily functions. There were other nights which Ishmael spent out of doors ; but these nights were not wasted in the haunts of vice or folly. The young work- man had entered with heart and soul into the thronging life of Parisian politics. He went with the representatives of the Left in their champion- ship of republican ideas, their dreams of an ideal '216 ISHMAEL. republic — universal suffrage, universal enlightenment. He was a member of two republican societies ; adored Victor Hugo; spoke on occasion, and was no mean orator, and was willing to shed his blood in support of his opinions should the hour of conflict come. He knew that among the class with which his lot was cast there were many doubtful speci- mens, many vile examples of the ge7ius working- man; but it seemed to him that the great heart of the people was a noble and a true heart, and that the faults and sins of the people were the faults and sins of circumstance. In a life where there were so many elements of degradation, so few of refinement, so many temptations to baseness, so few inducements to lofty thoughts, he did not look for ideal perfection ; but he saw the rudiments of perfectability, and he told himself that with better surroundings and a better education the working- men of Paris would shrink with horror from the low wine-shop and the lower dancing-room, which now constituted the paradise of their idle hours, would turn with loathing from the abject houris of the hastringue, the sordid sirens of the Passage Menilmontant or the rue des Filles-Dieu. He had seen what their pleasures were, and had recoiled shuddering from the edge of that loath- some gulf into which so many had gone down. •my soul failed when he spake/ 217 He lived among them, won their liking, and yet was not of them. He thought of his lost home sometimes as he walked back from his work, thought of the half- brothers he had loved so well, and wondered what they were doing in the quiet eventide, and whether they still missed their playmate. He was not angry with his father for the hard words that had hastened his exodus from the old home. He knew that the stepmother's venomous hate had been the true cause of all unkindness on his father's part, helped not a little by those bitter memories of the past which had set a brand upon the eldest son from the very beginning. He was not angry with Fate for having banished him from his birthplace — for having landed him on a lower level in life. He had an indomitable belief in his own power to climb. Already — though he had not been a year in Paris — he had achieved a reputation for superior skill and superior in- dustry. He could command good wages. He saw before him a future in which he would be able to save money — to buy a plot or two of land, perhaps — in those desert wastes and outskirts between the exterior boulevards and the forti- fications, where land was so cheap, and where it might some day be of much greater value. The /218 ISHMAEL. coming time was to be an age of improvements. Railways were altering the face of the earth. The builder would play an important part in all the undertakings of the future. Already Ishmael imagined a time in which he was to be an employer of labour. His workmen should not be crowded in filthy holes, or given over to Satan and all his works. He would found a brotherhood of industry and temperance. He would build a lay monastery — a mighty barrack for workmen and their families, full of light and air and cleanliness. Men so lodged would be healthier and stronger, better physically and morally ; better workmen, giving better value for their wages. Ishmael did not foresee that perfect machinery of trade-unionism which forbids the individual man to work better than his brothers, and insists upon the minimum of labour all round. Father Bressant's money had long been returned to him out of Ishmael's savings, and the apart- ment at Menilmontant had been furnished from the same source. An occasional letter from the good priest told Ishmael how the little world of Pen-Hoel was going on. Monsieur de Caradec was fairly well — he had hunted, and shot a little in the season ; but he had an air of not being altogether happy. Madame was an invalid always, ' MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' 219 as of old; but the doctor laughed, and said her complaint was only a chronic peevishness, which was likely to increase with years. The two boys throve splendidly, and their growth was visible to the eye. iN'ext winter Father Bressant was to begin their education, and prepare them for the Polytechnic at Rennes. Midsummer and the woods of Marly. What could be a more delicious combination? Paque- rette, joyous, though a little ashamed of herself in another borrowed gown, thought that heaven itself could hardly be so lovely as this forest glade in which she was wandering with big Lisbeth and Ishmael — a glade where the sunshine glinted athwart tremulous semi-transparent leaves, and sprinkled the mossy ground with Hecks of emerald light that looked like jewels. All the way they came from the city to the village seemed to have been between groves of flowering acacias : the atmosphere was full of their subtle perfume. Paquerette's nostrils had never inhaled such sweet odours. And the sky and the water : never had she imagined such a lovely azure. Surely the sky above the rue Sombreuil was of a different colour. A faint rose-flush lighted her pale cheeks as 220 ISHMAEL. she walked in that leafy glade, and listened re- spectfully, yet understanding very little, while Ishmael expounded the political situation — the chances for and against a coup cT^tat— or a tranquil termination of the Prince President's term of power to Lisbeth, who had a masculine intellect, read newspapers, and was deeply interested in public affairs. * A new era has come,' she said. ' We loved the Citizen King and his good queen for their own sakes — kind harmless people wishing good to all classes — but under a Eepublic one feels that the people count for much more — have a right to know how they are being governed — and to ques- tion and to understand every act of the Chamber.' * It is a pleasure to meet a lady who is inte- rested in public matters ' answered Ishmael, under- standing that this little speech of Lisbeth's was in some wise an apology. Paquerette strayed away from them every now and then to gather flowers, or to examine mosses or butterflies, like a happy child. The wood was all-sufficient for her happiness. The sunshine, the sweet air, the sense of mystery in those aisles of glancing sunlight and flickering shades, the idea of a glad green world stretching away and away into immeasurable distance, the first vagjue dawnincr 'MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' 221 sense of the infinite stealing over a mind that had never before understood anything beyond the squalidest, saddest realities — all this was a kind of intoxication, and Paquerette flew from flower to flower, screaming with rapture at the vision of a butterfly, lifted out of herself and off the common earth by this new delight. The prudent Lisbeth had made up her mind that Ishmael and Paquerette were not to be left too much alone. That long walk from Vincennes, in which they had gone so far ahead of the rest, seeming so engrossed in each other, had aroused the wise damsel's suspicions. It was all very well for Ishmael to protest that he only pitied the poor child. All the world knows that pity is akin to love ; and, since he had said that he would not take a wife from that hole in the rue Sombreuil, there was an end of the matter. Poor little Paquerette 's heart must not be broken. So in all their ramblings — and they went half the way to St. -Germain — Lisbeth took care to be near her protegee. That did not prevent Ishmael talking to Paquerette, or Paquerette hanging upon his words with obvious delight. She did not listen while he talked politics : those were dark to her. But, seeing her rapture in flowers and trees and all 222 ISHMAEL. living things, he began to talk of these, telling her the names of flowers, the habits of insects and birds, squirrels, rabbits, weasels, moles, field-micej water-rats — all the free creatures that haunt woods and water-pools. They had been the companions of his boyhood, his books, his study. ' How can you bear to live in a great town, where there are no such things ? ' Paquerette asked wonderingly. ' I endure my life in the town because I look forward to the day when I shall be able to have my nest in the country,' he answered. ' Not to live there always. Life among woods and fields is a long pastoral dream, an everlasting idyl. A man must have work, movement, progress ; and those he can only have at their best in a great centre like Paris. But it is worth while to toil for a week in stony places for one such day as this at the end of the six.' * I can understand that,' said Paquerette. ' And now tell me about your own country, as you told me that night — the fairies, the saints, the sacred fires, the sea and the fishing-boats, the wild-boar hunt in which you were nearly killed.' Ishmael laughed and reddened. *I am afraid I talked of nothing but myself that night,' he said. • MY SOUL FAILED WHEN HE SPAKE.' 223 ' I like to hear you talk of yourself,' she answered simply. By the time they went back to the village street of Marly, Paquerette had a lapful of wild flowers, mosses, twigs, tufts of grass, toadstools, and coloured pebbles which she had collected in her woodland walk. She carried her treasures frankly in the skirt of her cotton frock, not ashamed of showing the clean white petticoat and stockings, albeit her shoes were of the shabbiest. The feet in the well- worn shoes were small and slender, like the bare hands which held up the bundle of flowers and mosses. * I must get a basket for you to carry home your botanical collection,' said Ishmael, laughing at her enthusiasm ; and while the rest of the party were settling down at the humble eating-house, and exploring the little garden in which they were to dine, Ishmael went all over the village to find a shop where he could buy a basket for Paquerette. He was not a man to fail in any quest, great or small, and he appeared in the garden with a capacious willow basket hanging over his arm, just as the others were going to sit down to their soup without him. There was a little coloured straw twisted in among the willow, and the basket was altogether the smartest and best he had been able 224 ISHMAEL. to buy. Paquerette gave a little cry of joy wlieu she was told that this beautiful thing was for her. Not since the brass thimble given her by Lisbeth had she received anything that could be called a gift. She trembled and turned pale with delight, as she flung herself down on the grass, with the basket in her lap, and began to arrange her treasures — her oak-apples, and golden-bright toadstools, and foxgloves red and white, and clusters of dog-roses, and long trails of woodbine, and feathery fern-fronds in all the freshness of their midsummer green. She forgot all about dinner, though the soup tureen was steaming on the table in the arbour. ' What a child she is ! ' exclaimed Madame Morice, looking at the slender figure sitting in the sunshine, the small oval face bent over spray and blossom, pale and delicate as the eglantine bloom in the tremulous hand. ' Come to dinner, Mademoiselle Paquerette, or your soup will be cold,' cried Morice, a middle- aged and somewhat obese personage, whose love of a good table had stamped itself upon his honest " face in the form of pimples. When any friend of the grocer's ventured to allude to those pimples, he always declared that they were of a kind that came from poorness of blood, and that it was a duty which he owed himself not to lower his diet. 'MY SOUL FAILED WHEX HE SPAKE.' 225 It was Mousieur Alorice who had ordered the dinner at the village aitherge before they started for their woodland ramble; and he had not re- stricted himself to the Spartan simplicity whicli his wife and the Benoit girls had proposed yes- terday. He had made a bargain with the innkeeper for a dinner at three francs a head— such a dinner as in Paris would have cost at least six, he told the others triumphantly after the compact had been made. There was a hoitillon a la bonne femme, a consomm^ with poached eggs floating in it, over which Morice smacked his lips. Then came a piece of beef, boiled to rags, but made savoury with gherkins and mustard and vinegar. After that followed a chapon en hlanquette, creamy, velvety, which was discussed in solemn silence, as too beautiful for words. Then came a disli of petits pois a la beurre, and anon a salad, made by the worthy Morice himself, with intense gravity; and to crown the whole a large dish of ceicfs a la neige, which appeared simultaneously with a dessert of strong Gruyere, Savoy biscuits, and wood strawberries. Paquerette had never even dreamed of such a dinner : yet she was too excited to eat much. Ishmael stole a look across the table every now and then to see how VOL. I. Q 226 ISHMAEL. she was fretting un. She had a delicate way of ealin; FUIJ. OF VIOLENCE.' 245 An armed resistance was the sole idea of the assembly. ' Listen,' cried Victor Hugo. ' Bear in mind what you are doing. On one side, a hundred thousand men, batteries, arsenals, cannon, muni- tions of war sufficient for another Eussian campaign. On the other side, a hundred and twenty repre- sentatives of the people, a thousand or so of patriots, six hundred muskets. Not a drum to beat the rappel. Not a bell to sound the tocsin. Not a press to print a proclamation. Only here and there a lithographic workshop, a cellar, where a placard may be produced hastily with a brush. Death to any man who takes up a paving stone in the street ; death to all who meet as aGfitators : death to any man who placards an appeal to arms. If you are arrested during the fight — death ; if after the fight — transportation. On one side, the army and a crime ; on the other side, a handful of men and the right. These are the odds against us. Do you accept the challenge ? ' A unanimous cry responded to the appeal. Yes, against any odds — yes, in the teeth of the tyrant — face to face with death, the men of the Left were ready. If was midnight when the assembly decided that the Eeds should meet to-morrow morninsr in 24-6 ISHMAEL. the Cafe Roy sin, in front of the Marche Lenoir — the representatives of the people in the bosom of the people ; in the arms of the artisan class — relying on the courage and the energy of that people to bring to bear an overwhelming force of opposition against the armed might of the usurper. The rue Sainte-Marguerite is unique after its kind, and claims distinction as one of the most horrible streets in Paris. It is the chosen abode of the rag-pickers, mendicants, organ-grinders, monkey-men, epileptics, blind, lepers, deaf and dumb, the dealers in tortoiseshell combs and brass watchguards. The Bohemia of a new Court of Miracles has its rendezvous here. Hence they sally forth, these jovial beggars of modern Paris, the blind and the lame, the maimed and the dumb, joyous, fresh, hearty, in the early morning, each going to his post, his particular corner on bridge or at church door. Their faces are not yet composed into the professional aspect, the lugubrious droop of the lips is not yet assumed ; for here they are still en familley still behind the scenes. The play begins a little later. In the early morning, while the beggars and 'THE CITY IS FULL OF VIOLENCE.' 247 salti?)ibanques issue forth to their daily round, the rue Saiate-Marguerite is alive with the return of the rag-pickers. From all sides — by the rue de Charonne, by the faubourg, by the rue de Vaucanson, the rue Crozatier — they come, droop- ing under their burdens, preceded by loath- some odours, stumbling and slouching along the muddy pathways, tremulous, staggering, backs aching, eyes dim with the long labours of a night spent in going up and down the streets, stooping a thousand times under the heavy load, to explore a heap of foulest refuse. The lanterns swing feebly upon the ends of the long sticks, expiring in a stench of rancid oil. Silently, wearily, the rag-pickers crawl to their dens, v^hile the cheery mountebanks jog gaily on to begin a new day. Heavens, what a street! black, dismal, mal- odorous ; windows whose rotten woodwork has long forgotten tlie sensation of glass ; windows choked with straw, rags, paper, — what you will. Mud always, even when the rest of Paris is clean. Mist and dampness always, even when the better parts of Paris are bright and clear. Disease always, in more or less revolting form. Hunger always : never enough to eat, yet always, strange paradox, too much to drink. When it is a 248 TSHMAEL. question of bread or irois-six, the chiffonnier pre- fers his tvois-six. Can you blame him ? Every bone in his body is familiar to him as a sensation of pain. The bread could do him so little good. But the vile spirit burns, and that is something. The angle formed by the junction of the rue Sainte-Marguerite and the rue de la Cotte, was the scene of the one heroic act in the history of the cou2:> cVEtat. Here was erected the first barricade. Here Baudin fell. There was an air of fatality in all the circum- stances of that first barricade. There had been the meeting at the Cafe Roysin. A minority of Victor Hugo's party arrived at the rendezvous at eight o'clock. The majority understood the hour to be from nine to ten. The cafe was a large building, with high windows and looking-glasses against the wall, the usual marble tables, plenty of seats, several billiard-tables in the middle of the apartment. The representatives were received with a friendly air. They were soon joined by a number of strangers, all as earnest as themselves. There were workmen among them, but no blouses. The artisans had been requested to wear coats, lest the shopkeepers should take fright at the aspect ' TIIK CITY IS FULL OF VIOLENCE.' 249 of the blouse, as a badge of revolution. The horrors of '48 were still fresh iu the minds of the middle classes ; and the workman's blouse was the livery of the Red Spectre, the genius of anarchy and destruction, about which such terrible things had been said and written of late. Among these men of the Faubourg Saint- Antoine was Ishmael, who had cast in his lot with the Reds. He had come to Paris when the memory of '48 was still fresh in the minds of men ; and his young and ardent temper saw the struggle for liberty in its noblest aspect. He read the writings of Hugo and Schcelcher, whose articles in the Eepublican papers had done much to kindle the fire of enthusiasm in the minds of the people. And now, in the cold, rainy December morning, through the muddy streets, he came to cast in his lot with those gallant spirits who, against overwhelming odds, were to try the question of Liberty versus Despotism. Granted that the despot's rule may have been in the main better for France ; that, from the chaos of divided opinions, it was well that one man should stand forth — daring, enlightened, judicious — and take his place boldly at the helm of the national barque ; still, looking back at those three dark December days, who can doubt that the truer heroism, the purer 250 ISHMAEL. love of country, was to be found among that handful of men who flung themselves into the arms of the people, and challenged that people to defend their violated rights ? Unhappily for these heroes of the Left, the artisan class was cold to the voice of patriotism. The representatives of the Eight had been disliked and feared, suspected as Royalists, Reactionists, and no one was offended at the idea of their having all been whisked off to prison, plucked out of their beds in the dead of night, turned out of their seats in the Chamber, carted about from pillar to post by their captors, like sheep carried to the market. It is difficult to conceive what would be the effect upon English society if the household troops were to swoop down upon the House of Commons and carry a troublesome majority off to the Tower. Yet this sweeping out of the French Chamber by a military force hardly seems to have created surprise or indignation among the populace of Paris. They thought the clearing out of the Senators a good riddance ; and as they were given to understand that it meant the establishment of universal suffrage, the general feeling was at the outset in favour of the Dictator. While the little knot of Reds were waiting for the rest of their party in front of the Cafe Roysin, ' TITK CITY IS FULL OF VIOLENCE.' 25 1 an omaibiis came along at a sharp trot, escorted by a squadron of lancers, and filled with those members of the Chamber who had spent the night miserably, under watch and ward, at the d'Orsay Barracks, and w^ho were now being carried off to Vincennes. In an instant there arose a cry from the men of the Left : ' Tliey are the representatives of the people ! Save them ! ' There "svas a dash at the horses' heads, and vigorous hands caught the bridles. The first omnibus was stopped, the door was opened ; but the prisoners, instead of alighting, entreated their would-be liberators to let them alone. They would rather go to prison than be so rescued. A scornful lauo^h broke from the workmen who had stood by looking on at the attempted rescue ; and this exhibition of poltroonery on the part of tlieir senators may have helped to damp their ardour in the brief struggle which followed. Baudin was a medical man, better known to the workmen of the faubourg Poissoniere than to those of Saint- Antoine. An eloquent speaker, an honest man, the chief voice now in the little knot of Eeds w^aiting the advent of their colleagues. Ishmael had heard him speak on many occasions, and honoured him. He drew near his elbow now, w^aiting to see what was going to happen, his pulses beating high, ready 252 TSHMAEL. to help with heart and hand in the work that was to be done. Baudin knew him by sight, and knew him to be a stannch Eepublican. He gave him a friendly nod as he stood talking to one of his colleagues. There was an impatience to do something — not to wait for the others. Baudin would fain have waited till their numbers were stron^'er ; but he yielded to the eagerness of Schoelcher and the rest, all on fire for the fray. Among a hundred and fifty men they were able, by disarming the sentinels at the two nearest guard- houses, to distribute thirty muskets, the soldiers giving their arms with a friendly air to the cry of 'Vive la Eepublique !' A cart carrying manure approached the rue Sainte - Marguerite at the angle where it joins the rue Cotte. The cart was thrown over, the barricade was begun. A baker's cart followed ; then a milkwoman's cart, strong, heavy ; finally an omnibus. The four vehicles, placed in line were hardly broad enough to bar the main street of the faubourg. Empty baskets were heaped on the top. The handful of representatives, in their tricoloured scarfs, the handful of their friends, Ishmael among them, took their stand on the barricade just as a boy rushed along the street shouting ' The troops ! ' and the steady tramp of ^THE^CITY IS FULL OF VIOLENCE.' 253 men, the jingle of arms, was heard drawing nearer and nearer. Two companies were coming from the Bastille, marshalled at equal distances, and barring the entire street. Doors and windows were shut precipitately. The critical moment had come. * Citizens,' said Schcelcher, ' let no shot be fired. When the army and the city fight, it is the blood of the people that is shed on both sides. Let us first address the soldiers.' ' Down with the twenty-five francs ! ' cried a group of blouses at the corner of the rue Sainte- Marguerite, alluding scornfully to the salaiy of the representatives. Baudin looked at the men steadily from his post on the barricade. 'You shall see how a man can die for twenty- five francs/ he said. The two columns of soldiers were now in sight of the insurgents, and behind them in the distance gleamed the bayonets of another troop. Steadily, slowly, the two companies advanced upon the barricade; and then the frightened inhabitants, peering from their closed windows, the lukewarm loungers on the pavement, beheld a noble spectacle. Seven representatives of the people, with no 254 ISHMAKI.. other defence than their official scarves, came in front of the barricade and approached the soldiers, who waited for them with their muskets pointed, while the rest of the party manned the barricade — Baudin standing upon the overturned omnibus, the upper half of his figure exposed to the attack. Then followed a dialogue between Schoelcher and an officer in command — resolute, intrepid, on both sides. The republican deputy urged the majesty of the violated law — called upon the soldier to respect the constitution. The soldier recognised no law beyond the orders of his superior. 'Gentlemen of the Chamber,' said the Captain finally, * retire, or I shall give the command to fire.' * Fire ! ' cried one of the seven. Then, as at Fontenoy, the representatives of the people took off their hats and faced the levelled muskets. ' Charge bayonets ! ' cried the Captain ; and there was a movement forward ; but the soldiers shrank from wounding these unarmed men, as from a double treason ; because they were the representatives of the people, and because they were defenceless. Not a blow was struck, not a shot was tired, till, by an unhappy accident, tlie ' THE CITY IS FULL OF VIOLENCE.' 255 point of a bayonet hit Schcelcher and tore his scarf. The act was seen from the barricade, and one of the Reds, believing his colleague in danger, fired, and hit the soldier, who fell, shot through the heart. He was a conscript, a lad of eighteen. This fatal shot was the signal for a volley from the soldiers. They stormed the feeble rampart; Baudin was killed, and the barricade taken. Let it be noted that the soldiers — they who were to-morrow to riot in a carnival of murder — had, up to this point, acted with singular for- bearance. They took no prisoners ; the defenders of the barricade were allowed to disperse quietly in the surrounding streets, and to find a friendly refuge in neighbouring houses. So far the army was blameless. But on this morning of the third the men were still sober. The money distributed with such lavish hand among the soldiery had not yet begun to be spent on that liquid fire, which, later, transformed veterans and lads alike into madmen, murderers, demons almost as deadly as the copper-faced assassins of Delhi and Cawnpore. CHAPTER Xll. 'DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' ISHMAEL was among the last to leave the scene of that short, sharp struggle. He helped to carry the expiring Baudin to the hospital of Sainte- Marcfuerite. He was one of those who lifted the l)ody of the young conscript from the muddy, trampled ground in front of the barricade — a slender, boyish figure, buttoned to the chin in the gray military overcoat, one red stain upon the breast showing where the bullet had gone home. This dismal work over, Ishmael loitered about the faubourg, disheartened, stupified almost by the sight of those two dead faces, one of which, aflame with the fire of patriotism, ennobled by the power of intellect, had been so familiar to him in life. The confiict had but just begun — feebly, hopelessly begun — and already one of the best and bravest of Liberty's champions had fallen ! Not since his mother's death until to-day had Ishmael looked upon the face of the dead. He 'DFATH IS COME UP KYfO OUR WINDOWS.' 2oT turned from the hospital door with a strange dream-like feeling — a sense of hardly belonging to the actual world around him. Those . two yonder, calm on their hospital beds, had passed to the other side of the river, — the shadowy, mystic, unexplored country on the further bank. And if the conflict between the despot and the people were to continue, who could say how many more must fall as Baudin had fallen, counting the cost of a life as a feather when weighed against the freedom of a nation ? 'What would it matter to any one if I were lying beside Dr. Baudin ? ' Ishmael asked himself, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. * My father would perhaps never know my fate, or if he heard of it would hardly be sorry. My stepmother would be glad; and my brothers — well, poor little lads, they are young enough to have forgotten me before now. A year is a long time in their little lives. It would be too much to expect to be remembered after such an interval.' He took a draught of wine at a shop in the rue de la Eoquette, and as he was going out of the door brushed against an old man whose face ^as familiar to him, although he did not remember where or when they had met. VOL. I, S 258 ISHMAEL. The other was keener, and remembered Ishmael perfectly. ' Good day, citizen ; grand doings yonder by the gentlemen in . scarves,' he said ; ' but we want no more barricades ; the faubourg has had enough fighting : we want a quiet life, and to be paid fairly for our work, and to take our drop of little blue in peace.' Ishmael remembered him now. It was the old trolleur, Paquerette's grandfather. He had been drinking already, though it was not yet noon, and was in that cheery state which might be described as bien, poivre, allume, hon zig. Ish- mael would fain have passed him with briefest greeting, but the old man laid a grimy claw upon his sleeve. 'If you were going to take un canon de la boicteille, or to rinse your beak with fine champagne, for example, I'm with you,' he said. * Let us enjoy ourselves as good comrades.' Ishmael was obviously leaving the shop, but he was not of a temper to refuse a drink, even to this old vagabond. * I shall drink no more this morning,' he said, *but I'll pay for whatever you please to order.' Influenced more by a desire to hear of Paquerette than from a wish to be civil to the eheniste Ishmael turned back into the little wine- 'DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.* 259 shop, and seated himself at a table opposite Pere Lemoine. The bottle of fine champagne was brought, a bright oily yellow liquid which sparkled like a gleam of sunshine against the dull gray winter light. The waiter put a couple of glasses beside the bottle, and Pere Lemoine filled both. * Mine and yours/ he said. * Don't be frightened. You shall drink in the spirit, and I in the body. A brace of such thimblefuls can harm nobody. So you have had your little barri- cade yonder, my friend ; you have had your finger in the revolutionary pie ; and for the only result one of the best of your Eeds has been shot; he has drunk a fine soup, poor fellow, and what are any of you the better ? Victor Hugo and the rest of them want to rouse the faubourc. They want Saint-Antoine to come to handigrips with that fine gentleman yonder in the Elysee, with his curly moustache and red stripes down his trousers, and his recollections of my uncle. But the faubourg has had enough of barricades. She has shed her blood by hogsheads, poured out her heart's blood as freely as they are pouring that little blue wine yonder. And what is she the better for the sacrifice of her children? She is master for a day, to be trampled under foot 260 ISHMAEL. to-morrow. Reaction, reaction — turn out an Orleans, and bring back a Bourbon of the elder branch. Anything rather than that the people should keep the privileges for which they have bled. I shall fight on no more barricades, my friend. I have seen too many of them, and I know how little comes of the fuss and bother. Saint-Antoine is wise by experience. Victor Hugo and his friends may sermonise till they are hoarse, but they won't rouse the faubourg. To your health, monsieur Ishmael, out of glass number one ; and now to my health from monsieur Ishmael, glass number two;' and the old toper swallowed the contents of both glasses without winking. 'There may be other faubourgs more patriotic,' answered Ishmael ; ' there may be those who will avenge the blood of Baudin. But don't let us talk politics. The subject is not the safest ; and you must remember that I am a new comer, and have hardly had time to form my opinions.' ' Ah ! but you have formed them : I can see it in the resolute cut of your chin — your iron mouth. You are a Baudiniste, a Schcelcheriste, a socialist of the strongest pattern, and you are thirsting for another barricade. Before night you may have your choice of fifty, perhaps. But not ' DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 261 in our faubourg : we had enough in '48. Try the centre of Paris, the old streets in the market quarter, the neighbourhood of Saint-Eustache : that is the citadel of the people ; a town within a town : there they are impregnable — every alley a trap for their enemies ; every house a fortress. That is the true strength of old Paris ; that is the cradle of all the great revolutions : the League, the Fronde, the Terror : go there, my fiiend, if you want barricades.* ' Have no fear. I will go wherever a strong arm is wanted,' answered Ishmael. 'And now tell me about your granddaughter, mademoiselle Paquerette. She is well, I hope ? ' ' She is well. She had need be well. She is on the high road to good fortune. An honest man — a bourgeois, with a shop in this very street, and a snug little nest behind his shop, and a back-yard to store his goods, such a man as one does not meet every day in the Eue Sombreuil — has asked her to be his wife.' Ishmael started, with a sudden touch of pain. He had never been in love with Paquerette. He had existed for nearly six months without seeing the pale, snowdrop face ; and yet his heart sank within him at the thought that another man was to pluck this pearl out of 262 ISHMAEL. the gutter, this gem which he had not stooped to gather out of the mire, too careful lest his hands should be soiled in the process. Truly it were hardly a pleasant thing to have this Pere Lemoine here, whose unsteady hand was now in the act of pouring out a fourth glass of fine champagne, for one's grandfather-in-law. ' I am glad that mademoiselle Paquerette is to have such a good husband,' said Ishmael. ' Pray who is the gentleman ? ' *A friend of mine who has done business with me for twenty years ; an Auvergnat — a hard-working, frugal creature, who, beginning in the humblest way, has saved enough money to set up as a dealer in furniture and curiosi- ties — a fine trade always — and whose first thought, worthy soul ! on beginning life in his own house, was to ask Paquerette to be his wife.' ' An Auvergnat : your Charabia, I suppose ? ' exclaimed Ishmael, disgusted. 'Why, that is the man whom Paquerette abhors ; at least, she told me so six months ago.' * She is a child, and does not know her own mind. She likes him well enough now, I can tell you.' ' But you say he has been doing business for twenty years. He must be forty years of age ? ' DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 263 ' Suppose he is forty ! What harm is there in forty years, do you think V cried the troUeur,, smacking his lips over the fine champagne, and sending little gusts of fiery breath across the table towards Ishmael. 'A man at forty is in his prime. I am forty, and twenty-seven years on the top of forty, and I am in my prime. Cre nom ! a man of forty is in the very blossom of youth. Bring me no schoolboy bridegrooms for my granddaughter. I want a sensible man, a man who knov/s how to rule a wife. I married when I was five-and-twenty, and I have been sorry for it ever since. A man should be master from the first.' ' I hope you are not going to sell your granddaughter to this Charabia, as you have sold your furniture,' said Ishmael gravely. 'My faith! he shall pay me a fair price for her,' said the trolleur, whose illumination was becoming a little more vivid with every fresh glass. 'What is the use of a torclion like that if one cannot turn an honest penny by her ? She has eaten and drunk at my cost long enough, little faijieante. It is time she got someone else to pay for lier ixltee, and to make a handsome present to her grandfather into the bargain.' 264 ISHMAEL. ' I am afraid you are forcing this marriage upon mademoiselle,' said Ishmael, chinking a glass against the bottle as a summons to the waiter, and as a gentle hint that he did not mean to pay for any more brandy. The waiter came, scrutinised the bottle, which was marked in measured degrees like a thermo- meter, a downward scale which might be taken as emblematic of the descent of Avernus, and took payment for Pere Lemoine's four glasses. * I force a marriage upon her ! Why the child is as proud as a queen at getting such a husband — a shop in the rue de la Eoquette — two rooms, furnished : why the Tuileries are not better furnished than Jean Baugiste's little salon, all in mahogany, of the Empire style, substantial, splendid ; a gilded clock and candelabra on the mantelpiece, a secretaire that belonged to Talley- rand, a room fit for a duchess. Force ! do you say ? Why her grandmother and I have spoiled the girl ever since she was a baby. Come and see for yourself if you think we are ill-using her.' Ishmael hesitated for a moment or so, while he mechanically counted the change out of his five-franc piece. After all, Paquerette's marriage was no business of his. He had made up his mind last Midsummer that she was no fitting 'DEATH IS COME UP IXTO OUR WINDOWS.' 265 wife for him. But he remembered how Puquerette had spoken of the Charabia on that May night, when they two had walked from Vincennes ; he recalled her shudder as she confessed her hatred of the man, a hatred she feared to avow in her own wretched home. This recollection decided him. He. did not want to put himself forward as a suitor for Paquerette ; but if he could save her from an odious marriage, defend her from the tyranny of this drunken scoundrel of a grandfather, he would do it, even at some cost to himself. 'I should like to see mademoiselle, and con- gratulate her on her marriage,' he said quietly^ ' if my visit will not trouble you.' ' Come along then : we are sure to find the little hussy at home. She does nothing all day but roll one thumb round the other, and listen to any organ-grinder who comes our way.' The trolleur sauntered along the street by Ishmael's side, with the easy rolling walk of a man who has spent half his life in sauntering idleness, always more or less allume. He seemed to know almost every one he passed, and saluted his acquaintances with a friendly nod. Most of the shops were closed, and there were a good many people in the streets ; but the faubourg had a quiet air, almost a Sabbath-day tranquillity. 266 • ISHMAEL. * Saint-Antoine sleeps,' said Pere Lemoine. Presently at a street corner he stopped to look at the freshest placard on the dead wall of an old uninhabited house. It was the latest manifesto from the Elysee, the printer's ink still wet. 'Inhabitants of Paris, — 'The enemies of order have engraoed in o o a struggle. It is not against the Government or the elect of the people that they fight ; their pur- pose is pillage and destruction. Let all good citizens unite for the preservation of order and of their menaced homes. Be calm, inhabitants of Paris ; let no curious idlers block the streets ; they in- terfere with the movements of those brave soldiers who desire to protect you with their bayonets. * For me, you will find me unshaken in my determination to defend and maintain order.' * So much for the Prince/ said the trolleur ; * but here's a postscript from the General.' 'The Minister of War, in accordance with the law during a state of siege, decrees : — ' That every person taken in the act of con- structing or defending a barricade, or carrying arms, shall be shot. 'De Saint-Arnaud, Minister of War. 'DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 267 * It is not child's play you see, my friend, this barricade-making for which you are so eager,' said the trolleur, grinning, as with tremulous hand he plucked the wet placard off the wall and flung it into the gutter. Below the President's manifesto there was a placard isued by the Beds, a shabby lithographed placard — since there was not a printing press in Paris at the disposal of the people in these first days of December — a pocr little placard stuck on the wall with four red wafers. ' To THE People. ' Art 3. The constitution is confided to the guardianship of every patriotic Frenchman. ' Louis ISTapoleon is an outlaw. * The state of siege is abolished. * Universal suffrage is re-established. * Vive la Eepublique ! ' * To Arms ! ' For the united Mountain, 'Signed, Victor Hugo.' 'Spuffle!' exclaimed the trolleur: 'Louis Bona- parte has the Army. Unless the national guard unite with the people he will have things his 268 iShMaeL. own way. It is not worth while arguing nice points of the constitution with a disputant who has a hundred thousand soldiers at his back.' He plucked off the patriots' appeal as scorn- fully as he had torn away the President's manifesto, and flung the crumpled paper after the other. Then in sheer wantonness, while he contemptuously discussed the President and his surroundings, the trolleur peeled at least half-a-dozen weather- beaten and mud-stained placards from the wall — playbills, shopkeepers' advertisements — till he came to an old and scarcely legible placard. ' See,' he cried, pointing to the wall. ' Behold a spectre from the past ! It is the speech Louis Bonaparte made when he was elected President.' The only words remaining in a readable condition were the following, which the trolleur read aloud in his husky brandy-drinker's voice : * The suffrages of the nation and the oath which I have just taken command my future conduct. My duty is marked out for me. I shall fulfil that duty as a man of honour. * I shall recognise the enemies of my country in all those who may endeavour by unlawful means to change the Constitution, which has been established by the whole of France.' ' When Ciesar made that speech he was on the 'DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 269 Other side of the Rubicon,' said Ishmael ; and just at this moment a man in plain clothes, who looked like a member of the police, shouldered the trolleur aside, and tore down the placard, and all other old placards on the wall. Ishmael and his companion walked on to the rue Sombreuil. The gloomy old courtyard looked more like a stone well than ever on this dark and cheerless winter afternoon. The rain and the tramp- ling- to and fro of many feet had made the stony pavement muddy and sloppy. Rank odours of sewage, soup, and fricot pervaded house and yard. The trolleur marched straight into his den, followed by Ishmael. Paquerette was sitting on a three-legged wooden stool by the fire, plucking a cabbage for the family pot-au-feu. She was much smarter than of old. She wore a bright blue stuff gown, and a coral necklace and earrings ; but the small delicate face had less colour than ever, and when she started up from her low seat at the entrance of Ishmael the poor little face looked ghastly white above the red necklace and blue gown. * Here's a surprise for you, my cabbage,' cried the trolleur. ' Mademoiselle Benoit's friend has come to see you ! ' Ishmael went across the room, and offered 270 ISHMAEL. Piiquerette his hand. Her slender fingers were cold as ice, and trembled in his clasp. * Your grandfather tells me that you are soon to be married, mademoiselle,' he said. ' I hope it is going to be a happy marriage.' The girl looked first at him, and then at her crrandfather, with an indescribable expression, which might mean fear, grief, shyness, anything. ' Grandfather says so,' she faltered, after a long pause, looking at the ground. ' And I hope your husband that is to be is a cood man.' ' Grandfather says he is,' she murmured, her eyes still on the ground. * And grandfather knows the world, my little cat,' said the trolleur, with an exaggerated air of cheery benevolence. 'Grandfather will not marry thee to a rogue, be sure of that. An Auvergnat, a true son of the mountain, simple, hardy, honest, a man who has prospered by patient industry, by temperance — oh, it is a beautiful thing, temperance — self-denial, perseverance, and who deserves to enjoy his prosperity with a pretty young wife to keep him company. How can a girl hope for a better husband than that ? If he had been made expressly for her he could not be more suitable. And how he adores her I why, the very ground she * DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 271 walks upon is sacred in his eyes. And how generous too. Look at her new gown — his gift ; her earrings, her necklace — his gifts. Xot an evening passes that he does not bring us something nice for supper. Such rigolades as we have every night ! ' The girl said not a word, made no protest against her grandfather's fine talk. She was content to wear the Charabia's gifts ; and doubtless she was prepared to accept him as a husband. The grandmother came in from market, bringing a piece of beef for the pot-au-feu, while Ishmael lingered. She too was in excellent spirits. She had loitered in the streets to hear what was said about this 2^etit bout de revolte. She had gone as far as the Morgue with the crowd, who accompanied the slain conscript in his journey from the hospital to the dead-house. ' Pauvre Piou-pioii,' she said, wiping away a tear. Monsieur Baudin was to remain at the hospital till his friends came to fetch him. She had been told that he made a beautiful corpse, calm as one who slept. Ishmael turned from her with a feeling of disgust. Was this the mighty heart of Saint- Antoine? Was this all that was left of the burning patriotism of '48 ? — this spirit of idle curiosity, of gossip, of indifference to all the loftier aspects of a great national struggle, the ever- lasting conflict of might against right. 272 ISHMAEL. He was still more disheartened and disgusted by his brief interview with Paquerette. The girl looked weak and foolish, a creature born to be a slave, fit for nothing better than to be sold to the highest bidder. That coral necklace reminded him of a halter. He had seen a young heifer in the market-place at Dol with just that meek, foolish air, waiting for the butcher who was to buy her. Ishmael went from the faubourg Saint- Antoine to the neighbourhood of the markets, under the shadow of that mighty sixteenth-century church, which stands where once rose the Temple of Cybele. Here he found more excitement, more emotion than in the region of the Bastille. Barricades, or sketches of barricades, were being raised in several streets ; but there was a want of animation and a want of unanimity. The artist classes, the thinkers, the dreamers, were roused and ready for action ; but the masses had not caught fire. There were leading spirits among the workmen's clubs who were as enthusiastic and as eager for the struggle as the senators of the Left, with Victor Hugo at their head ; but the ruck, he thousands whose strong arms might have temmed the bloody tide of the couiy cVUtat, hung back. The mighty voice of the multitude was silent. The working-men of Paris, grown prudent 'DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 273 with prosperity, shrank from the risk of the conflict, and left their interests, rights, liberties, independence, to be fought for and bled for by a handful of patriots. Late into the nig^ht of December the third those patriots were assembled in a house in the rue Richelieu. Ishmael and two or three other work- men guarded the door of their council room, ready to die in defence of those faithful tribunes of the people. On the boulevards, at the Bourse, amoncT the louncrers and saunterers in broadcloth and fine linen, the coup d'Etat was taken lightly enough on this third day of December. The Assembly had been somewhat roughly dissolved ; but who cared for the fate of an Assembly which was eminently unpopular ? There is a large class in Paris which regards politics as a kind of joke — a subject for calembours and epigrams : a very large class who would as soon serve Peter as Paul, provided trade be brisk, and the favourite theatre subsidized, the chosen haunts of the gandin and the lorette maintained in all their agree- ableness at the public cost. The desire of the Parisian multitude is for panem ef circenses : and why fight and die on barricades in defence of an abstraction which dreamers and Socialists rave about by the name of Liberty, and which never VOL. I, T 274 ISIIMAEL. yet put a gocd coat on a man's back, or a piece of beef in his pot-au-feu. In such a temper as this rose the majority of the Parisians on the morning of the fourth ; after a loner winter night which had been not without its anxieties at the Elysee, where the lights in the President's study, the shadows of intent and eager figures flitting across the blind, told of discussions, disputes, imcertainties ; and where it has been said that travelliug carriages and horses waited in the stable-yard, ready at a minute's notice to whisk the Prince and his friends out of Paris, on the first stage of the long, flat road to the Belgian frontier. The fourth of December began, quietly enough everywhere, with a disheartening quietude for the chiefs of the Mountain, weary with futile waviugs of the torch of Liberty, beginning to despair of their fellow-man as a feeble hound which, perhaps after all, has an instinctive preference for the leash — a liking for being fed, and legislated for, and watched and tended by a paternal government, as supinely submissive to authority as a child in a mother's lap. Before noon there were a good many barricades in that network of streets around Saint- Eustache. In the rue Montorgueil, the rue du Petit-Car reau, the rue duCadran, and in other streets of the same * DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 2V5 quarter, the paving-stones had been plucked up and built into barricades, mixed with empty barrels, beams taken from houses in the progress of demo- lition; great alterations were going on in this quarter, which was a place of change and confusion just now. The roadway yawned with pitfalls — hollows from which the stones had been dug out. There had been a good deal of rain, and in many places the streets were knee-deep in mud and slush. There had been fighting on the barricades, but not much before afternoon ; there had been some deaths, but not many. The soldiers were picketted under the shadow of Saint-Eustache. On the boulevards all was calm. The idle classes had come out to see the fun; husbands and wives, fathers and sons ; family groups looking on at what seemed to be a little puff of revolu- tionary fire, a faint stirring of deep waters ; nothing to cause terror. Towards three o'clock a change came over the scene. From end to end the boulevards were choked with soldiers ; line regiments, gendarmerie, brigades, cavalry; a battery of four guns pointing shot and shell against the barricade in the rue Saint-Denis, which had been valiantly defended all day. The long, broad avenue — the lounging place, the forum of Paris — was crowded with armed 276 ISHMAEL. men, — armed men evidently considerably the worse for strong drink, — a fact which furnished no little amusement to the Parisians who were walking up and down the muddy pavements, enjoying the bustle and movement of the scene, or looking down from the balconies at the crowd below. Suddenly (the soldiers all in marching order facing the gate of Saint-Denis) a single shot was fired: *from the roof of a house in the rue du Sentier,' said some ; ' from a soldier in the middle of one of the battalions, who fired in the air,' said others : and in an instant, as at an expected signal, the troops changed front, and then burst from the head of the column a running fire which extended through the ranks and flashed along the boulevard like an arrow of Hame. Men, women, and children fled, or flung themselves flat upon the ground before that hailstorm of bullets. Windows, shutters, were closed in the wildest haste. But the harvest of dead and dying was not the less rich. A child playing by a fountain — an old man of eighty — a woman with an infant in her arms, clasped close against her breast even in death ; the old, the middle-aged, the young ; the harmless, inoffensive population : here a bookseller on the threshold of his shop, there the marchand de coco, wdth his shining tin 'DEATH IS COME UP INTO OUR WINDOWS.' 277 fountain. Gray hairs, cliildliood, womanhood — none were exempt from the slaughter. Those who escaped the bullet were sabred as they fell helpless at the feet of their murderers. Nothing less than the madness of strong drink could account for the ferocity of the soldiers during that hideous quarter of an hour when, in the open street, under the light of day, the horrors of St. Bartholomew's Eve were repeated before the eyes of an astonished populace, every member of which might be one moment a spectator and in the next a victim of the attack. Dismal spectacle when there came a lull in the fusillade, and the inhabitants of the boulevards and the adjoining streets crept out of their doors to gather up the wounded and the dying, whom none had hitherto dared to succour. The marclumd cle coco was lying in a corner by the wall, his white apron over his face, his glittering fountain on the ground beside him. He had come out hoping to do a brisk trade among the idlers on the boulevard, and the harvest he had gathered was death. JSTot far off lay an old man grasping an umbrella, his only defensive weapon ; and a little way farther a young flaneur, with his scarcely-extinguished cigar between his lips, seemed still to smile with the half-amused 278 ISHMAEL. expression of the fashionable pessimist, for whom all the gravest questions in life have their farcical aspect. Not far from the spot where lay youth, hope, birth, education, dressed in broadcloth, and come suddenly to a dead stop, like a watch whose wheels have run down, there lay — rolled in the gutter, blood-stained, mud-stained, with glassy eyes gazing up at the darkening winter sky, in the fixed stare of death — age, poverty, disrepute, intemperance, idleness, vagabondage, all personi- fied in Pere Lemoine, the trolleur, who had wandered far afield this December afternoon in quest of excitement, curious to see what was going on upon the boulevards, and full of unholy gaiety, pleased to mix in a row, fearing no evil to himself from civilian or soldier, safe in his insignificance, looking on with his half-drunken cynical air, caring neither for Peter nor Paul. And in this idle humour, without a moment's warning, with the first flash of arrowy flame from the muskets of the front rank, death had surprised him. Struck down by that leaden rain, like an ear of corn laid in a hailstorm, he fell and rolled over and over into the gutter. There was no one to see him fall. He was carried off to the Morgue with a large batch of other corpses some •death is come up into our windows.' 279 hours later, there to await the attention of his friends. Those on the barricades yonder, under the shadow of Saint-Eustache, were not slow to hear of the carnage. They had heard the fusillade, and took it at first for a triumphant salvo at the capitulation of the great barricade by Saint-Denis ; but there was a perpetual going and coming of patriots, aud the particulars of the massacre were soon known in the neighbourhood of the markets. The barricades were numerous enough to make this central point a kind of citadel. Barricades in the rue du Cadran, a barricade at each end of the rue du Petit-Carreau, live in the rue Montorgueil. Here and there an ambulance in an uninhabited house, or an empty cellar, — an ambulance consisting of two or three straw mattresses, an old woman as nurse and surgeon, and a child to make charpie. The loftiest and strongest of these barricades of the rue Montorgueil was well manned by about forty Eeds, mostly of the professional classes, some who dug up the paving stones and helped in the construction of the barricade with gloved hands. There were only a few workmen among them, and those were the elite of the working class. It was here that Ishmael had cast in his lot, 280 ISHMAEL. after fighting gallantly in the faubourg Saint- Martin all the morning. It was he whose quick eye had seen the advantages of this position, guarded as it was Ly two other barricades, which made it a kind of citadel. His powerful arms had done good service within the last hour, digging up paving stones, carrying huge beams from a house in process of demolition hard by, rolling empty hogs- heads from a cooper's yard near, to be filled with stones for the base of the fortification. The barri- cade had a formidable look as it loomed, huge in the dusk of evening, across the narrow street. They were joined presently by some fugitives from the boulevard, maddened by the massacre, wild for revenge. These told the story of the slaughter. One of them, who lived hard by, ran back to his house, and returned with a tin barrel full of cartridges. Darkness closed round them while they were still at work. They had told off twenty of their force, now swollen to a round fifty, for outpost duty. The soldiers were close at hand. A gleaming red light, shining now and again above the crowded roofs towards the markets, showed where the troops were holding their bivouac, drunk with blood and brandy. Sometimes the hoarse shout of a drinkin^j sonj^ — the wild lau