re from the life--his own life, maybe--for it was
dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been
growing worse and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned
her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented
herself at the carriage door.

"It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition."

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,
Monseigneur looked out.

"How, then! What is it? Always petitions!"

"Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester."

"What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He
cannot pay something?"

"He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead."

"Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?"

"Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor
grass."

"Well?"

"Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass!"

"Again, well?"

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate
grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together with
wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage door--tenderly,
caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to
feel the appealing touch.

"Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of
want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want."

"Again, well? Can I feed them?"

"Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don't ask it. My petition is,
that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be placed
over him to show where he lies. Otherwise the place will be quickly
forgotten; it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady; I
shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are
so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!
Monseigneur!"

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into a
brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace; she was left far
behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly
diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and
his chateau.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as
the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group
at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid
of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his
man like a sp