the Oratoire
and near the office of the Messageries, at the sign of the _Amour
peintre_. The shop was on the ground floor of a house sixty years old,
and opened on the street by a vaulted arch the keystone of which bore a
grotesque head with horns. The semicircle beneath the arch was occupied
by an oil-painting representing "the Sicilian or Cupid the Painter,"
after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise's father had put up in
1770 and which sun and rain had been doing their best to obliterate ever
since. On either side of the door a similar arched opening, with a
nymph's head on the keystone arch glazed with the largest panes to be
got, exhibited for the benefit of the public the prints in vogue at the
time and the latest novelties in coloured engravings. To-day's display
included a series of scenes of gallantry by Boilly, treated in his
graceful, rather stiff way, _Lecons d'amour conjugal_, _Douces
resistances_ and the like, which scandalized the Jacobins and which the
rigid moralists denounced to the Society of Arts, Debucourt's _Promenade
publique_, with a dandy in canary-coloured breeches lounging on three
chairs, a group of horses by the young Carle Vernet, pictures of air
balloons, the _Bain de Virginie_ and figures after the antique.

Amid the stream of citizens that flowed past the shop it was the
raggedest figures that loitered longest before the two fascinating
windows. Easily amused, delighting in pictures and bent on getting their
share, if only through the eyes, of the good things of this world, they
stood in open-mouthed admiration, whereas the aristocrats merely glanced
in, frowned and passed on.

The instant he came within sight of the house, Evariste fixed his eyes
on one of the row of windows above the shop, the one on the left hand,
where there was a red carnation in a flower-pot behind a balcony of
twisted ironwork. It was the window of Elodie's chamber, Jean Blaise's
daughter. The print-dealer lived with his only child on the first floor
of the house.

Evariste, after halting a moment as if to get his breath in front of the
_Amour peintre_, turned the hasp of the shop-door. He found the
_citoyenne_ Elodie within; she had just sold a couple of engravings by
Fragonard _fils_ and Naigeon, carefully selected from a number of
others, and before locking up the _assignats_ received in payment in the
strong-box, was holding them one after the other between her fine eyes
and the light, to scrutiniz