ight nights, you would slip into the shade of
myrtle groves with actresses and dancing-girls to the far-off shrilling
of flutes and fiddles.... Alas! they were more lovely, were they not,
your goddesses of the Opera and the Comedie-Francaise, than we of
to-day, we poor little National actresses?"

"Never think it, Mademoiselle," returned Brotteaux, "but believe me, if
one like you had been known in those days, she would have moved alone,
as sovereign queen without a rival (little as she would have desired
such solitude), in the park you are obliging enough to form so
flattering a picture of...."

It was quite a rustic inn, this Hotel de la Cloche. A branch of holly
hung over the great waggon doors that opened on a courtyard where fowls
were always pecking about in the damp soil. On the far side of this
stood the house itself, consisting of a ground floor and one storey
above, crowned by a high-pitched tiled roof and with walls almost hidden
under old climbing rose-trees covered with blossom. To the right,
trimmed fruit-trees showed their tops above the low garden wall. To the
left was the stable, with an outside manger and a barn supported by
wooden pillars. A ladder leaned against the wall. Here again, under a
shed crowded with agricultural implements and stumps of trees, a white
cock was keeping an eye on his hens from the top of a broken-down
cabriolet. The courtyard was enclosed on this side by cow-sheds, in
front of which rose in mountainous grandeur a dunghill which at this
moment a girl as broad as she was long, with straw-coloured hair, was
turning over with a pitchfork. The liquid manure filled her sabots and
bathed her bare feet, and you could see the heels rise out of her shoes
every now and then as yellow as saffron. Her petticoats were kilted and
revealed the filth on her enormous calves and thick ankles. While
Philippe Desmahis was staring at her, surprised and tickled by the
whimsicalities of nature in framing this odd example of breadth without
length, the landlord shouted:

"Ho, there! Tronche, my girl! go fetch some water!"

She turned her head, showing a scarlet face and a vast mouth in which
one huge front tooth was missing. It had needed nothing less than a
bull's horn to effect a breach in that powerful jaw. She stood there
grinning, pitchfork on shoulder. Her sleeves were rolled up and her
arms, as thick as another woman's thighs, gleamed in the sun.

The table was laid in the farm kitchen, w