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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
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