o stoutly that he took her by the throat and squeezed with all his
might until she could not breathe, and was nearly dead.

In rescuing Josephine from him, they had thrown him on the ground, but
he jumped up again immediately, foaming at the mouth and slobbering, and
exclaimed:

"I am not a girl any longer, I am a young man, I am a young man, I tell
you."

And he proudly essayed to convince them that it was so, but the evidence
that he could adduce was very slight.

THE MOUNTEBANKS

Compardin, the clever manage of the _Eden Reunis Theatre_, as the
theater critics invariably called him, was reckoning on a great success,
and he had invested his last franc in the affair, without thinking of
the morrow, or of the bad luck which had been pursuing him so inexorably
for months past. For a whole week, the walls, the kiosks, shopfronts,
and even the trees, had been placarded with flaming posters, and from
one end of Paris to the other carriages were to be seen which were
covered with fancy sketches of Cheret, that represented two strong,
well-built men who looked like ancient athletes. The younger of them,
who was standing with his arms folded, had the vacant smile of an
itinerant mountebank on his face, and the other, who was dressed in what
was supposed to be the costume of a Mexican trapper, held a revolver in
his hand. There were large type advertisements in all the papers, that
the Montefiores would appear without fail at the _Eden Reunis_, the next
Monday.

Nothing else was talked about, for the puff and humbug attracted people.
The Montefiores, like fashionable knicknacks, succeeded that whimsical
jade, Rose Peche, who had gone off the preceding autumn, between the
third and fourth acts of the burlesque, _Ousca Iscar_, in order to make
a study of love in company of a young fellow of seventeen, who had just
entered the university. The novelty and difficulty of their performance,
revived and agitated the curiosity of the public, for there seemed to
be an implied threat of death, or, at any rate, of wounds and of blood
in it, and it seemed as if they defied danger with absolute
indifference. And that always pleased women; it holds them and masters
them, and they grow pale with emotion and cruel enjoyment. Consequently,
all the seats in the large theater were let almost immediately, and were
soon taken for several days in advance. And stout Compardin losing his
glass of absinthe over a game of dominoes, was in