ws out stories at haphazard, like numbers in a lottery. There
are plenty of tales just as strange and just as well hidden still left;
but some day, you may be sure, their turn will come.

One day my charwoman, a working man's wife, came to beg me to honor
her sister's wedding with my presence. If you are to realize what this
wedding was like you must know that I paid my charwoman, poor creature,
four francs a month; for which sum she came every morning to make my
bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and make ready
my breakfast, before going to her day's work of turning the handle of
a machine, at which hard drudgery she earned five-pence. Her husband, a
cabinetmaker, made four francs a day at his trade; but as they had three
children, it was all that they could do to gain an honest living. Yet I
have never met with more sterling honesty than in this man and wife. For
five years after I left the quarter, Mere Vaillant used to come on my
birthday with a bunch of flowers and some oranges for me--she that had
never a sixpence to put by! Want had drawn us together. I never could
give her more than a ten-franc piece, and often I had to borrow the
money for the occasion. This will perhaps explain my promise to go
to the wedding; I hoped to efface myself in these poor people's
merry-making.

The banquet and the ball were given on a first floor above a wineshop in
the Rue de Charenton. It was a large room, lighted by oil lamps with
tin reflectors. A row of wooden benches ran round the walls, which were
black with grime to the height of the tables. Here some eighty persons,
all in their Sunday best, tricked out with ribbons and bunches of
flowers, all of them on pleasure bent, were dancing away with heated
visages as if the world were about to come to an end. Bride and
bridegroom exchanged salutes to the general satisfaction, amid a chorus
of facetious "Oh, ohs!" and "Ah, ahs!" less really indecent than the
furtive glances of young girls that have been well brought up. There was
something indescribably infectious about the rough, homely enjoyment in
all countenances.

But neither the faces, nor the wedding, nor the wedding-guests have
anything to do with my story. Simply bear them in mind as the odd
setting to it. Try to realize the scene, the shabby red-painted
wineshop, the smell of wine, the yells of merriment; try to feel that
you are really in the faubourg, among old people, working men and poor
wome