* * * * *

The factory hooters would sound: the boy would come to his senses,
swallow down his mouthful, take a long drink at the Wallace fountain
near by, slip back into his hunchbacked shell, and go limping and
hobbling back to his place in the printing works in front of the cases
of magic letters which would one day write the _Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin_, of the Revolution.

Daddy Feuillet had a crony, Trouillot, the stationer on the other side
of the street. He kept a stationery and haberdashery shop, in the
windows of which were displayed pink and green bonbons in green bottles,
and pasteboard dolls without arms or legs. Prom either side of the
street, one standing on his doorstep, the other in his shop, the two old
men used to exchange winks and nods and a whole elaborate code of
pantomimic gesture. At intervals, when the cobbler was tired of
hammering, and had, as he used to say, the cramp in his buttocks, they
would hail each other, La Feuillette in his shrill treble, Trouillot
with a muffled roar, like a husky calf; and they would go off together
and take a nip at a neighboring bar. They were never in any hurry to
return. They were both infernally loquacious. They had known each other
for half a century. The stationer also had played a little walking-on
part in the great melodrama of 1871. To see the fat placid creature with
his black cap on his head and his white blouse, and his gray,
heavy-dragoon mustache, and his dull light-blue bloodshot eyes with
heavy pouches under the lids, and his flabby shining cheeks, always in a
perspiration, slow-footed, gouty, out of breath, heavy of speech, no one
would ever have thought it. But he had lost none of the illusions of the
old days. He had spent some years as a refugee in Switzerland, where he