anquette, until one day realising her young strength she held him firm
in her grip and threatened to throw him into a pond if he persisted in
his attempted chastisement. Since then he had respected her person, but
to the day of his death he had cursed her for anserine stupidity. An
unlovely, loveless and unloved old man. Why should Blanquette have wept
over him? She had not the Parisian's highly strung temperament and
capacity for facile emotion. She was peasant to the core, slow to
rejoice, and slow to grieve, and she had the peasant's remorseless
logic in envisaging the elemental facts of existence. Pere Paragot was
wicked. He was dead. _Tant mieux._

* * * * *

Blanquette had not the divine sense of humour which rainbows the tears
of the world. That was my dear master's possession. But at the obvious
she could laugh like any child of unsophistication. In the long shaded
avenue of Chambery, with its crowded market-stalls on either
side--stalls where you saw displayed for sale rolls of calico and boots
and gauffrettes and rusty locks and melons and rosaries and flyblown
books--Paragot bought me my red shirt (which--_mirabile dictu!_--had
tasselled cords to tie the collar) and pomade for my hair. He also
purchased a yard of blue chiffon which he tied in an artistic bow round
Narcisse's neck, whereat Blanquette laughed heartily; and when Narcisse
bolted beneath a flower-stall and growling dispossessed himself of the
adornment, and set to with tooth and claw to rend it into fragments, she
threw herself on a bench convulsed with mirth. As Paragot had spent
fifty centimes on the chiffon I thought this hilarity exceedingly
ill-natured; but when another and a larger dog came up to see what
Narcisse was doing and in half a minute was whirling about with Narcisse
in a death grapple, and Blanquette sprang forward, separated the two
dogs at some risk and took our bleeding mongrel to her bosom, consoling
him with womanly words of pity, I saw there was something tender in
Blanquette which mitigated my resentment.

* * * * *

The Restaurant du Soleil, where the marriage feast was held, was an
earwiggy hostelry on the outskirts of the town, sheltered from the
prying roadway by a screen of green lattice and a series of _tonnelles_,
the dusty arbours, each furnished with table and chairs, beloved of
French revellers. Above the entrance gate stretched the semi-circular
si