keep
from always laughing in his company.

All doors were opened to him after a time.

He is to-day the mayor of his township.

THE BEGGAR

He had seen better days, despite his present misery and infirmities.

At the age of fifteen both his legs had been crushed by a carriage on the
Varville highway. From that time forth he begged, dragging himself along
the roads and through the farmyards, supported by crutches which forced
his shoulders up to his ears. His head looked as if it were squeezed in
between two mountains.

A foundling, picked up out of a ditch by the priest of Les Billettes on
the eve of All Saints' Day and baptized, for that reason, Nicholas
Toussaint, reared by charity, utterly without education, crippled in
consequence of having drunk several glasses of brandy given him by the
baker (such a funny story!) and a vagabond all his life
afterward--the only thing he knew how to do was to hold out his hand
for alms.

At one time the Baroness d'Avary allowed him to sleep in a kind of recess
spread with straw, close to the poultry yard in the farm adjoining the
chateau, and if he was in great need he was sure of getting a glass of
cider and a crust of bread in the kitchen. Moreover, the old lady often
threw him a few pennies from her window. But she was dead now.

In the villages people gave him scarcely anything--he was too well
known. Everybody had grown tired of seeing him, day after day for forty
years, dragging his deformed and tattered person from door to door on his
wooden crutches. But he could not make up his mind to go elsewhere,
because he knew no place on earth but this particular corner of the
country, these three or four villages where he had spent the whole of his
miserable existence. He had limited his begging operations and would not
for worlds have passed his accustomed bounds.

He did not even know whether the world extended for any distance beyond
the trees which had always bounded his vision. He did not ask himself the
question. And when the peasants, tired of constantly meeting him in their
fields or along their lanes, exclaimed: "Why don't you go to other
villages instead of always limping about here?" he did not answer, but
slunk away, possessed with a vague dread of the unknown--the dread
of a poor wretch who fears confusedly a thousand things--new faces,
taunts, insults, the suspicious glances of people who do not know him and
the policemen walking in couples on the roa