ht hand with a mother's care; concealing it under
the skirts of his coat to keep it from collisions in the crowd, and
still more, when you remarked that important air always assumed by an
idler when intrusted with a commission, you would have suspected him of
recovering some piece of lost property, some modern equivalent of the
marquise's poodle; you would have recognized the assiduous gallantry of
the "man of the Empire" returning in triumph from his mission to some
charming woman of sixty, reluctant as yet to dispense with the daily
visit of her elderly _attentif_.

In Paris only among great cities will you see such spectacles as this;
for of her boulevards Paris makes a stage where a never-ending drama is
played gratuitously by the French nation in the interests of Art.

In spite of the rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought,
after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an
artist--that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the
same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois
and philistine mind, the most _mirific_ joviality, in short (to use the
old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had
once taken the medal and the traveling scholarship; he had composed
the first cantata crowned by the Institut at the time of the
re-establishment of the Academie de Rome; he was M. Sylvain Pons, in
fact--M. Sylvain Pons, whose name appears on the covers of well-known
sentimental songs trilled by our mothers, to say nothing of a couple
of operas, played in 1815 and 1816, and divers unpublished scores. The
worthy soul was now ending his days as the conductor of an orchestra
in a boulevard theatre, and a music master in several young ladies'
boarding-schools, a post for which his face particularly recommended
him. He was entirely dependent upon his earnings. Running about to give
private lessons at his age!--Think of it. How many a mystery lies in
that unromantic situation!

But the last man to wear the spencer carried something about him besides
his Empire Associations; a warning and a lesson was written large over
that triple waistcoat. Wherever he went, he exhibited, without fee or
charge, one of the many victims of the fatal system of competition which
still prevails in France in spite of a century of trial without result;
for Poisson de Marigny, brother of the Pompadour and Director of Fine
Arts, somewhere about 1746 inv