The Doctor was at work over his manuscripts in one corner of the little
dining-room, and his wife was asleep over the fire in another, when the
messenger arrived.

'Sapristi!' said the Doctor, 'you should have sent for me before. It was
a case for hurry.' And he followed the messenger as he was, in his
slippers and skull-cap.

The inn was not thirty yards away, but the messenger did not stop there;
he went in at one door and out by another into the court, and then led
the way by a flight of steps beside the stable, to the loft where the
mountebank lay sick. If Doctor Desprez were to live a thousand years, he
would never forget his arrival in that room; for not only was the scene
picturesque, but the moment made a date in his existence. We reckon our
lives, I hardly know why, from the date of our first sorry appearance in
society, as if from a first humiliation; for no actor can come upon the
stage with a worse grace. Not to go further back, which would be judged
too curious, there are subsequently many moving and decisive accidents in
the lives of all, which would make as logical a period as this of birth.
And here, for instance, Doctor Desprez, a man past forty, who had made
what is called a failure in life, and was moreover married, found himself
at a new point of departure when he opened the door of the loft above
Tentaillon's stable.

It was a large place, lighted only by a single candle set upon the floor.
The mountebank lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man, with a
Quixotic nose inflamed with drinking. Madame Tentaillon stooped over
him, applying a hot water and mustard embrocation to his feet; and on a
chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet
dangling. These three were the only occupants, except the shadows. But
the shadows were a company in themselves; the extent of the room
exaggerated them to a gigantic size, and from the low position of the
candle the light struck upwards and produced deformed foreshortenings.
The mountebank's profile was enlarged upon the wall in caricature, and it
was strange to see his nose shorten and lengthen as the flame was blown
about by draughts. As for Madame Tentaillon, her shadow was no more than
a gross hump of shoulders, with now and again a hemisphere of head. The
chair legs were spindled out as long as stilts, and the boy set perched
atop of them, like a cloud, in the corner of the roof.

It was the boy who took the Doctor's fancy