outlines? Was it trouble,
or vice, or greed? Had she loved too well? Had she been a second-hand
clothes dealer, a frequenter of the backstairs of great houses, or had
she been merely a courtesan? Was she expiating the flaunting triumphs
of a youth overcrowded with pleasures by an old age in which she was
shunned by every passer-by? Her vacant gaze sent a chill through you;
her shriveled face seemed like a menace. Her voice was like the shrill,
thin note of the grasshopper sounding from the thicket when winter is at
hand. She said that she had nursed an old gentleman, ill of catarrh of
the bladder, and left to die by his children, who thought that he had
nothing left. His bequest to her, a life annuity of a thousand francs,
was periodically disputed by his heirs, who mingled slander with their
persecutions. In spite of the ravages of conflicting passions, her face
retained some traces of its former fairness and fineness of tissue, some
vestiges of the physical charms of her youth still survived.

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing like
a gray shadow along the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his head a
shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory handle in the tips of his
thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed
to conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken
limbs; the thin, blue-stockinged legs trembled like those of a drunken
man; there was a notable breach of continuity between the dingy white
waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a
throat like a turkey gobbler's; altogether, his appearance set people
wondering whether this outlandish ghost belonged to the audacious race
of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard Italien. What
devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring
passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed
outrageous as a caricature? What had he been? Well, perhaps he had been
part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to which the
executioner sends in his accounts,--so much for providing black veils
for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for
the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public
slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man
appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social
mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom their Bertrand