s as
fierce as tigers; sanguinary encounters at night, in the most dangerous
quarters, with ruffians and nose-eaters, were the most insignificant
episodes of his nightly career. Nor do I dare relate other adventures of
a more intimate character, from which, as the writers of an earlier day
would say in noble style, a pen the least timorous would recoil with
horror.

However painful it may be to confess an unworthy sentiment, I am obliged
to say that my admiration for Meurtrier was not unmixed with regret and
bitterness. Perhaps there was mingled with it something of envy. But the
recitation of his most marvellous exploits had never awakened in me the
least feeling of incredulity, and Achille Meurtrier easily took his
place in my mind among heroes and demigods, between Roland and
Pirithous.

II.

At this time I was a great wanderer in the suburbs, and I occupied the
leisure of my summer evenings by solitary walks in those distant
regions, as unknown to the Parisians of the boulevards as the country of
the Caribbees, and of whose sombre charm I endeavored later to tell in
verse.

One evening in July, hot and dusty, at the hour when the first
gas-lights were beginning to twinkle in the misty twilight, I was
walking slowly from Vaugirard through one of those long and depressing
suburban streets lined on each side by houses of unequal height, whose
porters and porteresses, in shirt sleeves and in calico, sat on the
steps and imagined that they were taking the fresh air. Hardly any one
passing in the whole street; perhaps, from end to end, a mason, white
with plaster, a sergeant-de-ville, a child carrying home a four-pound
loaf larger than himself, or a young girl hurrying on in hat and cloak,
with a leather bag on her arm; and every quarter-hour the half-empty
omnibus coming back to its place of departure with the heavy trot of its
tired horses.

Stumbling now and then on the pavement--for asphalt is an unknown luxury
in these places--I went down the street, tasting all the delights of a
stroller. Sometimes I stopped before a vacant lot to watch, through the
broken boards of the fence, the fading glories of the setting sun and
the black silhouettes of the chimneys thrown against a greenish sky.
Sometimes, through an open window on the ground-floor, I caught sight of
an interior, picturesque and familiar: here a jolly-looking laundress
holding her flat-iron to her cheek; there workmen sitting at tables and
smoking i