to taste the
soldier's soup; the guard-house is notified and the soup seasoned for
the royal palate. Have you seen those pictures in religious books,
where a little communicant, with his bow on his arm and his taper in
his hand, all combed and curled, goes to assist a poor old man lying on
his wretched pallet with the whites of his eyes turned up to the sky?
These charitable visits had the same conventional stage-setting and
accent. The machine-like gestures of the little preachers with arms too
short for the work, were answered by words learned by rote, so false as
to set one's teeth on edge. The comical words of encouragement, the
"consolation lavishly poured forth" in prize-book phrases by voices
suggestive of young roosters with the influenza, called forth emotional
blessings, the whining, sickening mummery of a church porch after
vespers. And as soon as the young visitors' backs were turned, what an
explosion of laughter and shouting in the garret, what a dancing around
the offerings brought, what an overturning of armchairs in which they
have been feigning illness, what a pouring of boluses into the fire, a
fire of ashes, very artistically arranged! When the little Jansoulets
went to visit their parents, they were placed in charge of the man with
the red fez, Bompain the indispensable. It was Bompain who took them to
the Champs-Elysees, arrayed in English jackets, silk hats of the latest
style--at seven years!--and with little canes dangling from the ends of
their dogskin gloves. It was Bompain who superintended the victualling
of the break on which he went with the children to the races,
race-cards stuck in their hats around which green veils were twisted,
wonderfully like the characters in lilliputian pantomimes whose
comicality consists solely in the size of their heads compared with
their short legs and dwarfish movements. They smoked and drank
outrageously. Sometimes the man in the fez, himself hardly able to
stand, brought them home horribly ill. And yet Jansoulet loved his
little ones, especially the youngest, who, with his long hair and his
doll-like aspect, reminded him of little Afchin in her carriage. But
they were still at the age when children belong to the mother, when
neither a stylish tailor nor accomplished masters nor a fashionable
boarding-school nor the ponies saddled for the little men in the
stable, when nothing in short takes the place of the watchful and
attentive hand, the warmth and gayet