position, I need not say where, or any
more about it, for it would be a long tale to tell. Well, he sends me to
Marseilles to embark and go to a capital appointment in Algeria. I left
Paris as happy as a child; but, all of a sudden, a change comes over
me."

"That was singular!"

"Why, you must know that once separated from M. Rodolph I was uneasy,
disturbed, as fidgety as a dog who has lost his master. It was very
stupid; but so are dogs, sometimes, but that does not prevent them from
being at least attached, and as well mindful of the nice bits given them
as of the thumps and kicks they have had, and M. Rodolph had given me
many nice bits, and, in truth, M. Rodolph is everything to me. From
being a riotous, dare-devil, good-for-nothing blackguard, he made an
honest man of me by only saying two words, just for all the world like
magic."

"What were the words he said?"

"He said I had still heart and honour, although I have been at the
galleys, not for having stolen, it is true,--ah, never that,--but what
perhaps is worse, for having killed,--yes," said the Chourineur, in a
gloomy tone, "killed in a moment of passion, because formerly growing up
like a brute beast, or, rather, as a vagabond, without father or mother,
and left abandoned in the streets of Paris, I knew neither God nor
devil--neither good nor evil. Sometimes the blood mounted to my eyes,
and I saw red, and if I had a knife in my hands I slashed and hacked,--I
was a real savage--a beast, and only lived amongst thieves and
scoundrels. I was in the mud, and in the mud I lived as well as I could.
But when M. Rodolph said to me that since, in spite of the contempt of
all the world and my misery, instead of plundering like others I had
preferred working as long as I could, and for what I could, that showed
I had still heart and honour--thunder!--you see these two words had the
same effect on me as if I had been seized by the hair of my head and
lifted a thousand feet into the air above the vermin with whom I dwelt,
and showed me the filth in which my life was spent. So I said, 'Thank
ye, I've had enough of this!' Then my heart beat with something else
besides anger, and I took an oath to myself always to preserve that
honour which M. Rodolph spoke of. You see, M. Germain, that when M.
Rodolph told me so kindly that I was not so bad as I believed myself to
be, that encouraged me, and, thanks to him, I became better than I had
been."

When he heard this lan