fruit.

The _citoyen_ Blaise, who was a capital rider, took the road on
horseback, going on in front to escape the dust from the _berline_.

As the wheels rattled merrily over the suburban roads the travellers
began to forget their cares, and at sight of the green fields and trees
and sky, their minds turned to gay and pleasant thoughts. Elodie dreamed
she was surely born to rear poultry with Evariste, a country justice, to
help her, in some village on a river bank beside a wood. The roadside
elms whirled by as they sped along. Outside the villages the peasants'
mastiffs dashed out to intercept the carriage and barked at the horses,
while a fat spaniel, lying in the roadway, struggled reluctantly to its
feet; the fowls scattered and fled; the geese in a close-packed band
waddled slowly out of the way. The children, with their fresh morning
faces, watched the company go by. It was a hot day and a cloudless sky.
The parched earth was thirsting for rain. They alighted just outside
Villejuif. On their way through the little town, Desmahis went into a
fruiterer's to buy cherries for the overheated _citoyennes_. The
shop-keeper was a pretty woman, and Desmahis showed no signs of
reappearing. Philippe Dubois shouted to him, using the nickname his
friends constantly gave him:

"Ho there! Barbaroux!... Barbaroux!"

At this hated name the passers-by pricked up their ears and faces
appeared at every window. Then, when they saw a young and handsome man
emerge from the shop, his jacket thrown open, his neckerchief flying
loose over a muscular chest, and carrying over his shoulder a basket of
cherries and his coat at the end of a stick, taking him for the
proscribed girondist, a posse of _sansculottes_ laid violent hands on
him. Regardless of his indignant protests, they would have haled him to
the town-hall, had not old Brotteaux, Gamelin, and the three young women
borne testimony that the _citoyen_ was named Philippe Desmahis, a
copper-plate engraver and a good Jacobin. Even then the suspect had to
show his _carte de civisme_, which he had in his pocket by great good
luck, for he was very heedless in such matters. At this price he escaped
from the hands of these patriotic villagers without worse loss than one
of his lace ruffles, which had been torn off; but this was a trifle
after all. He even received the apologies of the National Guards who had
hustled him the most savagely and who now spoke of carrying him in
triumph to the