e did this loathsome work, he would
reply resignedly:

"Faith, 'tis for my children, whom I must support. This brings me in
more than anything else."

He had, indeed, fourteen children. If any one asked him what had become
of them, he would say with an air of indifference:

"There are only eight of them left in the house. One is out at service
and five are married."

When the questioner wanted to know whether they were well married, he
replied vivaciously:

"I did not oppose them. I opposed them in nothing. They married just
as they pleased. We shouldn't go against people's likings, it turns
out badly. I am a night scavenger because my parents went against my
likings. But for that I would have become a workman like the others."

Here is the way his parents had thwarted him in his likings:

He was at the time a soldier stationed at Havre, not more stupid than
another, or sharper either, a rather simple fellow, however. When he was
not on duty, his greatest pleasure was to walk along the quay, where the
bird dealers congregate. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a soldier from
his own part of the country, he would slowly saunter along by cages
containing parrots with green backs and yellow heads from the banks of
the Amazon, or parrots with gray backs and red heads from Senegal, or
enormous macaws, which look like birds reared in hot-houses, with their
flower-like feathers, their plumes and their tufts. Parrots of every
size, who seem painted with minute care by the miniaturist, God
Almighty, and the little birds, all the smaller birds hopped about,
yellow, blue and variegated, mingling their cries with the noise of the
quay; and adding to the din caused by unloading the vessels, as well
as by passengers and vehicles, a violent clamor, loud, shrill and
deafening, as if from some distant forest of monsters.

Boitelle would pause, with wondering eyes, wide-open mouth, laughing and
enraptured, showing his teeth to the captive cockatoos, who kept nodding
their white or yellow topknots toward the glaring red of his breeches
and the copper buckle of his belt. When he found a bird that could talk
he put questions to it, and if it happened at the time to be disposed
to reply and to hold a conversation with him he would carry away enough
amusement to last him till evening. He also found heaps of amusement in
looking at the monkeys, and could conceive no greater luxury for a rich
man than to own these animals as one owns cats