He was going to ring, more at home and at ease than the old mother herself.  She stopped him.

“No, no, I don’t want anything.  I have still something left in my basket.”  And she put two figs and a crust of bread on the edge of the table.  Then, while she was eating:  “And you, lad, your business?  You look very much sprucer than you did the last time you were at Bourg.  How smart you are!  What do you do in the house?”

“Professor of massage,” said Aristide gravely.

“Professor—­you?” said she with respectful astonishment; but she did not dare ask him what he taught, and Cabassu, who felt such questions a little embarrassing, hastened to change the subject.

“Shall I go and find the children?  Haven’t they told them that their grandmother is here?”

“I didn’t want to disturb them at their work.  But I believe it must be over now—­listen!”

Behind the door they could hear the shuffling impatience of the children anxious to be out in the open air, and the old woman enjoyed this state of things, doubling her maternal desire, and hindering her from doing anything to hasten its pleasure.  At last the door opened.  The tutor came out first—­a priest with a pointed nose and great cheek-bones, whom we have met before at the great dejeuners.  On bad terms with his bishop, he had left the diocese where he had been engaged, and in the precarious position of an unattached priest—­for the clergy have their Bohemians too—­he was glad to teach the little Jansoulets, recently turned out of the Bourdaloue College.  With his arrogant, solemn air, overweighted with responsibilities, which would have become the prelates charged with the education of the dauphins of France, he preceded three curled and gloved little gentlemen in short jackets, with leather knapsacks, and great red stockings reaching half-way up their little thin legs, in complete suits of cyclist dress, ready to mount.

“My children,” said Cabassu, “that is Mme. Jansoulet, your grandmother, who has come to Paris expressly to see you.”

They stopped in a row, astonished, examining this old wrinkled visage between the folds of her cap, this strange dress of a simplicity unknown to them; and their grandmother’s astonishment answered theirs, complicated with a heart-breaking discomfiture and constraint in dealing with these little gentlemen, as stiff and disdainful as any of the nobles or ministers whom her son had brought to Saint-Romans.  On the bidding of their tutor “to salute their venerable grandmother,” they came in turn to give her one of those little half-hearted shakes of the hand of which they had distributed so many in the garrets they had visited.  The fact is that this good woman, with her agricultural appearance and clean but very simple clothes, reminded them of the charity visits of the College Bourdaloue.  They felt between them the same unknown quality, the same distance, which no remembrance, no word of their parents had ever helped to bridge.  The abbe felt this constraint, and tried to dispel it—­speaking with the tone of voice and gestures customary to those who always think they are in the pulpit.