's face.

I saw him, _la Frieze_. His fat face, which had been badly washed, was
still blood-stained; he had a low forehead, square jaws, pointed ears,
sticking out from his head, and flat nostrils, like the muzzle of some
wild animal; but above all, I saw Babette.

She was smiling, and at that moment, her eyes had not their monkey-like
and ferocious expression, but they were pleading and tender, with all of
their sweetest childlike candor.

"You know," my host said to me in a low voice, "that the poor woman has
fallen into senile imbecility, and that is the cause of her looks, which
are so strange, considering the terrible sight she has seen.

"Do you think so?" the magistrate said. "You must remember that she is
not yet sixty, and I do not think that it is a case of senile
imbecility, but that she is quite conscious of the crime that has been
committed."

"Then why should she smile?"

"Because she is pleased at what she has done."

"Oh! no; you are really too subtle!"

The magistrate suddenly turned to Babette, and, looking at her steadily,
he said:

"I suppose you know what has happened, and why this crime was
committed?"

She left off smiling, and her pretty, childlike eyes became her
abominable monkey's eyes again, and then the answer was, suddenly to
pull up her petticoats and to show us the lower part of her person. Yes,
the magistrate had been quite right. That old woman had been a
Cleopatra, a Diana, a Ninon de L'Enclos, and the rest of her body had
remained like a child's, even more than her eyes. We were thunderstruck
at the sight.

"Pigs! Pigs!" _la Frieze_ shouted to us. "You also wanted to have
something to do with her!"

And I saw that actually the magistrate's face was pale and contracted,
and that his hands and lips trembled like those of a man caught in the
act of doing wrong.

SYMPATHY

He was going up the _Rue des Martyrs_ in a melancholy frame of mind, and
in a melancholy frame of mind she also was going up the _Rue des
Martyrs_. He was already old, nearly sixty, with a bald head under his
seedy, tall hat, a gray beard, half buried in a high shirt collar, with
dull eyes, an unpleasant mouth and yellow teeth.

She was past forty, with thin hair over her pads, and with a false
plait; her linen was doubtful in color, and she had evidently bought her
unfashionable dress at a _reach-me-down shop_. He was thin, while she
was chubby. He had been handsome, proud, ardent, full of