horister. At four
o'clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy and
gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife, he has
no time to be jealous: he is a man of action rather than of sentiment.
His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter; their bright
eyes storm the customers; he expands in the midst of all the finery, the
lace and muslin kerchiefs, that their cunning hands have wrought. Or,
again, more often still, before his dinner he waits on a client, copies
the page of a newspaper, or carries to the doorkeeper some goods that
have been delayed. Every other day, at six, he is faithful to his
post. A permanent bass for the chorus, he betakes himself to the opera,
prepared to become a soldier or an arab, prisoner, savage, peasant,
spirit, camel's leg or lion, a devil or a genie, a slave or a
eunuch, black or white; always ready to feign joy or sorrow, pity or
astonishment, to utter cries that never vary, to hold his tongue, to
hunt, or fight for Rome or Egypt, but always at heart--a huckster still.

At midnight he returns--a man, the good husband, the tender father;
he slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still afire with the
illusive forms of the operatic nymphs, and so turns to the profit
of conjugal love the world's depravities, the voluptuous curves of
Taglioni's leg. And finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and hurries
through his slumber as he does his life.

This man sums up all things--history, literature, politics, government,
religion, military science. Is he not a living encyclopaedia, a
grotesque Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris itself, and knowing
not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity
amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his
stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy, will be held, according to
certain leisured philosophers, to be happier than the huckster is.
The one perishes in a breath, and the other by degrees. From his eight
industries, from the labor of his shoulders, his throat, his hands,
from his wife and his business, the one derives--as from so many
farms--children, some thousands of francs, and the most laborious
happiness that has ever diverted the heart of man. This fortune and
these children, or the children who sum up everything for him, become
the prey of the world above, to which he brings his ducats and his
daughter or his son, reared at college, who, wit