eacefully
till daybreak.

On the morrow, after a last day's work, the itinerant Academy took the
road back to Paris. When Jean Blaise paid mine host in assignats, the
_citoyen_ Poitrine complained bitterly that he never saw what he called
"square money" nowadays, and promised a fine candle to the beggar who'd
bring back the "yellow boys" again.

He offered the _citoyennes_ their pick of flowers. At his orders, the
girl Tronche mounted on a ladder in her sabots and kilted skirts, giving
a full view of her noble, much-bespattered calves, and was indefatigable
in cutting blossoms from the climbing roses that covered the wall. From
her huge hands the flowers fell in showers, in torrents, in avalanches,
into the laps of Elodie, Julienne, and Rose Thevenin, who held out their
skirts to catch them. The carriage was full of them. The whole party,
when they got back at nightfall, carried armfuls home, and their
sleeping and waking were perfumed with their fragrance.

FOOTNOTES:

[2]

"I am Denis, and sainthood is my trade,
I love the land of Gaul,... etc."

[3]

"Well, well, sir Saint, 'twas hardly worth your pains
Thus to forsake the heavenly domains...."

[4]

"Some ribalds took the pig,
Of the good St. Anthony,
And clapping a cowl on's head,
They made the brute a monk.
'Twas all a matter of dress...."

XI

In the forenoon of the 7th September the _citoyenne_ Rochemaure, on her
way to visit Gamelin, the new juror, whose interest she wished to
solicit on behalf of an acquaintance, who had been denounced as a
suspect, encountered on the landing the _ci-devant_ Brotteaux des
Ilettes, who had been her lover in the old happy days. Brotteaux was
just starting to deliver a gross of dancing-dolls of his manufacture to
the toy-merchant in the Rue de la Loi; for their more convenient
carriage he had hit on the idea of tying them at the end of a pole, as
the street hawkers do with their commodities. His manners were always
chivalrous towards women, even to those whose fascination for him had
been blunted by long familiarity, as could hardly fail to be the case
with Madame de Rochemaure,--unless indeed he found her appetizing with
the added seasoning of betrayal, absence, unfaithfulness and fat. Be
this as it may, he now greeted her on the sordid stairs with their
cracked tiles as courteously as he had ever done on the steps before the
entrance-door of Les Ilet