m
respectfully the miserable bit of stuff that had been styled an
academician's robe:

"Well, what are you waiting for?" asked she sharply.

"Nothing...."

"What are you going to do with that?"

Cranajour seemed to reflect:

"Haven't I told you," grumbled Mother Toulouche, "to go and stick it up
outside?... Don't say you've gone and forgotten already!"

"No, no!" protested Cranajour, hastening to obey orders.

"What a specimen!" thought Mother Toulouche, whilst counting over the
seventeen francs.

Cranajour was a remarkably queer fish, beyond question. How had he got
into connection with Mother Toulouche and her intimates? That remained a
mystery. One fine day this seedy specimen of humanity was found among
the "comrades" exchanging vague remarks with one and another. He stuck
to them in all their shifting from this place to that: no one had been
able to get out of him what his name was, nor where he came from, for he
was afflicted with a memory like a sieve--he could not remember things
for two hours together. A feeble-minded, poor sort of fellow, with not a
halfpenny's worth of wickedness in him, always ready to do a hand's turn
for anyone: to judge by his looks he might have been any age between
forty and seventy, for there is nothing like privations and misery to
alter the looks of a man! Faced by this queer fish, with a brain like a
sieve, they had christened him "Crane a jour"--and the nickname had
stuck to this anonymous individual. Besides, was not Cranajour the most
complaisant of fellows, the least exacting of collaborators--always
content with what was given him, always willing to do his best!

As to Mother Toulouche; she kept a little shop on the quay of the Clock.
The sign over her little store read:

"_For the Curiosity Lover._"

This alluring title was not justified by anything to be found inside
this store, which was nothing but a common pick-up-anything shop: it was
a receptacle for a hideous collection of lumber, for old broken
furniture, for garments past decent wear, for indescribable odds and
ends, where the wreckage of human misery lay huddled cheek by jowl with
the beggarly offscourings of Parisian destitution.

Behind the store, whose little front faced the edge of the quay and
looked over the Seine, was a sordid back-shop: here the pallet of Mother
Toulouche, a kitchen stove out of order, and the overflow of the goods
which were crowded out of the store were jumbled up in ill