rencontrions_--_Rue Gregoire de Tours!_"

His arm with the riding switch and laced handkerchief went up as though
he had been stung. Before it could descend, I darted aside deep into the
crowd which hustled around him, understanding nothing, but none the less
sullenly hostile. "A bas les cocardes blanches!" cried one or two. "Who
was the cur?" I heard Maubreuil's question as he pressed in to the
rescue, and Alain's reply, "Peste! A young relative of mine who is in a
hurry to lose his head; whereas I prefer to choose the time for that."

I took this for a splutter of hatred, and even found it laughable as I
made my escape good. At the same time, our encounter had put me out of
humour for gaping at the review, and I turned back and recrossed the
river, to seek the Rue du Fouarre and the Widow Jupille.

Now the Rue du Fouarre, though once a very famous thoroughfare, is
to-day perhaps as squalid as any that drains its refuse by a single
gutter into the Seine, and the widow had been no beauty even in the days
when she followed the 106th of the Line as vivandiere and before she
wedded Sergeant Jupille of that regiment. But she and I had struck up a
friendship over a flesh-wound which I received in an affair of outposts
on the Algueda, and thenceforward I taught myself to soften the edge of
her white wine by the remembered virtues of her ointment, so that when
Sergeant Jupille was cut off by a grapeshot in front of Salamanca, and
his Philomene retired to take charge of his mother's wine shop in the
Rue du Fouarre, she had enrolled my name high on the list of her
prospective patrons. I felt myself, so to speak, a part of the goodwill
of her house, and "Heaven knows," thought I, as I threaded the
insalubrious street, "it is something for a soldier of the Empire to
count even on this much in Paris to-day. _Est aliquid, quocunque loco,
quocunque sacello...._"

Madame Jupille knew me at once, and we fell (figuratively speaking) upon
each other's neck. Her shop was empty, the whole quarter had trooped off
to the review. After mingling our tears (again figuratively) over the
fickleness of the capital, I inquired if she had any letters for me.

"Why, no, comrade."

"None?" I exclaimed with a very blank face.

"Not one"; Madame Jupille eyed me archly, and relented. "The reason
being that Mademoiselle is too discreet."

"Ah!" I heaved a big sigh of relief. "You provoking woman, tell me what
you mean by that?"

"Well, now, it