of young
urchins with colds, were the affecting benedictions, the whining and
piteous mummeries of a church-porch after vespers. And the moment the
young visitors departed, what an explosion of laughter and shouting in
the garret, what a dance in a circle round the present brought, what an
upsetting of the arm-chair in which one had pretended to be lying ill,
of the medicine spilt in the fire, a fire of cinders very artistically
prepared!

When the little Jansoulets went out to visit their parents at home,
they were intrusted to the care of the man with the red fez, the
indispensable Bompain. It was Bompain who conducted them to the
Champs-Elysees, clad in English jackets, bowler hats of the latest
fashion--at seven years old!--and carrying little canes in their
dog-skin-gloved hands. It was Bompain who stuffed the race-wagonette
with provisions. Here he mounted with the children, who, with their
entrance-cards stuck in their hats round which green veils were twisted,
looked very like those personages in Liliputian pantomimes whose entire
funniness lies in the enormous size of their heads compared with their
small legs and dwarf-like gestures. They smoked and drank; it was a
painful sight. Sometimes the man in the fez, hardly able to hold himself
upright, would bring them home frightfully sick. And yet Jansoulet was
fond of them, the youngest especially, who, with his long hair, his
doll-like manner, recalled to him the little Afchin passing in her
carriage. But they were still of the age when children belong to the
mother, when neither the fashionable tailor, nor the most accomplished
masters, nor the smart boarding-school, nor the ponies girthed specially
for the little men in the stable, nor anything else can replace
the attentive and caressing hand, the warmth and the gaiety of the
home-nest. The father could not give them that; and then, too, he was so
busy!

A thousand irons in the fire: the Territorial Bank, the installation
of the picture gallery, drives to Tattersall's with Bois l'Hery,
some _bibelot_ to inspect, here or there, at the houses of collectors
indicated by Schwalbach, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers
in curiosities, the encumbered and multiple existence of a _bourgeois
gentilhomme_ in modern Paris. This rubbing of shoulders with all sorts
and conditions of people brought him improvement, in that each day he
was becoming a little more Parisianized; he was received at Monpavon's
club, i