others
followed.

"Be quick, be quick, you silly boys, be quick," shouted the mothers,
hustling everything before them--boys, marionettes and all--as an autumn
hurricane sweeps away the fallen leaves.

"What is that man doing?" I inquired.

"Which man?"

"The one standing in the corner there--he seems to have a camera."

"Yes, that's right. He has been sent by the Cinematograph Company to
reproduce the scene for their show."

"Oh! I see. That's a capital idea; the people will like that."

"Yes, won't they?"

And two men were dragging a heavy bundle along on the ground between
them, and I asked:

"What's in the bundle?"

"Clothes," he replied.

And there was a woman carrying a hen in a basket, and the hen escaped
from the basket, laid an egg in the middle of the stage and cackled back
into Paris; but the woman saved the egg and said: "Better an egg to-day
than a hen to-morrow."

Another woman was carrying her baby on one arm and leading a child by the
hand, and the child was crying because it had to walk too fast and was
tired.

"This is the astronomer," said the buffo.

"Is that his umbrella under his arm? It seems too long and too bright."

"No; that is Halley's comet which he has predicted for next spring. He
does not want to leave it behind, the Turks might destroy it and he would
lose his reputation."

There was the boy from the barber's shop opposite; he had been playing
with a black kitten when the alarm came and he joined the fugitives just
as he was, in his white tunic with the kitten in his arms and a comb
stuck in his bushy hair. And there came a troop of old women, chattering
and shuffling along and understanding no more about it all than I should
have understood if I had not had my buffo, my programme raisonne, to
explain it.

Then I said: "Buffo mio, we have had a musician and a painter, where is
the poet?"

"Here he comes." And there came a pale, Alfred de Musset youth with long
hair, a roll of paper and a quill pen. "Do you know what he is saying?
He is saying: 'Better to embrace and be betrayed than to suffer and die
in ignorance.'"

"Is that the philosophy of the buffo?" I inquired.

"It is the philosophy of the poet," he replied.

"Isn't it rather beyond the public? Will they understand?"

"The public won't hear that; it is only for you and me. There are many
things we do not tell the public because they are the public; but we
understand because we are artists."