have undertaken to relate,
of whom we have scarcely spoken. We would refer to the good bourgeois,
whom we have seen quitting the group in the Rue de Valois, and making
for the Barriere des Sergents at the moment when the street-singer began
his collection, and who, it will be remembered, we have since seen at so
inopportune a moment in the Rue des Bons-Enfants.

Heaven preserve us from questioning the intelligence of our readers, so
as to doubt for a moment that they had recognized in the poor devil to
whom the Chevalier d'Harmental had rendered such timely assistance the
good man of the terrace in the Rue du Temps-Perdu. But they cannot know,
unless we tell them in detail, what he was physically, morally, and
socially. If the reader has not forgotten the little we have already
told him, it will be remembered that he was from forty to forty-five
years of age. Now as every one knows, after forty years of age the
bourgeois of Paris entirely forgets the care of his person, with which
he is not generally much occupied, a negligence from which his corporeal
graces suffer considerably, particularly when, as in the present
instance, his appearance is not to be admired.

Our bourgeois was a little man of five feet four, short and fat,
disposed to become obese as he advanced in age; and with one of those
placid faces where all--hair, eyebrows, eyes, and skin--seem of the same
color; in fact, one of those faces of which, at ten paces, one does not
distinguish a feature. The most enthusiastic physiognomist, if he had
sought to read on this countenance some high and curious destiny, would
have been stopped in his examination as he mounted from his great blue
eyes to his depressed forehead, or descended from his half-open mouth
to the fold of his double chin. There he would have understood that he
had under his eyes one of those heads to which all fermentation is
unknown, whose freshness is respected by the passions, good or bad, and
who turn nothing in the empty corners of their brain but the burden of
some old nursery song. Let us add that Providence, who does nothing by
halves, had signed the original, of which we have just offered a copy to
our readers, by the characteristic name of Jean Buvat.

It is true that the persons who ought to have appreciated the profound
nullity of spirit, and excellent qualities of heart of this good man,
suppressed his patronymic, and ordinarily called him Le Bonhomme Buvat.

From his earliest yo