appetite, as a closer scrutiny showed how tough and
leathery his victim was. Jean could not help
laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as
it was. His aunt had never got clearly to the
bottom of the little farce that dogged her heels,
but more than once, turning her head sharply, she
had found reason to suspect something disrespectful
was going on. Nevertheless, she put up with the
lad because of his lowly origin. The only folks
she really hated were the rich. She was furious
because the butcher’s wife had gone to a wedding
in a silk dress.
At the upper end of the Rue de Rennes, beside
a plot of waste and, was a stall where an old woman
sold dusty ginger-bread and sticks of stale barley-sugar.
She had a face the colour of brick dust under a striped
cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a pale, steely blue.
Her whole stock-in-trade had not cost a couple of
francs, and on windy days the white dust from houses
building in the neighbourhood covered it like a coat
of whitewash. Nurses and mothers would anxiously
pull away their little ones who were casting sheep’s
eyes at the sweetstuff:
“Dirty!” they would say dissuasively;
“dirty!”
But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps she was
past feeling anything. She did not beg.
Mademoiselle Servien used to bid her good-day in passing,
address her by name and fall into talk with her before
the stall, sometimes for a quarter of an hour at a
time. The staple of conversation with them both
was the neighbours, accidents that had occurred in
the public thoroughfares, cases of coachmen ill-using
their horses, the troubles and trials of life and
the ways of Providence, “which are not always
just.”
Jean happened to be present at one of these colloquies.
He was a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the
petty lives of the poor, this peep into sordid existences
of idle sloth and spiritless resignation, stirred
all the blood in his veins. In an instant, as
he stood between the two old crones, with their drab
faces and no outlook on life save that of the streets,
now gloomy and empty, now full of sunshine and crowded
traffic, the young man learned more of human conditions
than he had ever been taught at school. His thoughts
flew from this woman to that other, who was so beautiful
and whom he loved, and he saw life before him as a
whole—a melancholy panorama. He told
himself they must die both of them, and a hideous
old woman, squatted before a few sodden sweetmeats,
gave him the same impression of solemn serenity he
had experienced at sight of the jewels from the Queen
of Egypt’s sepulchre.
