unlovely border to the city, Choulette took
from his pocket an old book which he began to fumble. The writer, hidden
under the vagabond, revealed himself. Choulette, without wishing to
appear to be careful of his papers, was very orderly about them. He
assured himself that he had not lost the pieces of paper on which
he noted at the coffeehouse his ideas for poems, nor the dozen of
flattering letters which, soiled and spotted, he carried with him
continually, to read them to his newly-made companions at night. After
assuring himself that nothing was missing, he took from the book a
letter folded in an open envelope. He waved it for a while, with an air
of mysterious impudence, then handed it to the Countess Martin. It was
a letter of introduction from the Marquise de Rieu to a princess of the
House of France, a near relative of the Comte de Chambord, who, old and
a widow, lived in retirement near the gates of Florence. Having enjoyed
the effect which he expected to produce, he said that he should perhaps
visit the Princess; that she was a good person, and pious.

"A truly great lady," he added, "who does not show her magnificence
in gowns and hats. She wears her chemises for six weeks, and sometimes
longer. The gentlemen of her train have seen her wear very dirty white
stockings, which fell around her heels. The virtues of the great queens
of Spain are revived in her. Oh, those soiled stockings, what real glory
there is in them!"

He took the letter and put it back in his book. Then, arming himself
with a horn-handled knife, he began, with its point, to finish a figure
sketched in the handle of his stick. He complimented himself on it:

"I am skilful in all the arts of beggars and vagabonds. I know how to
open locks with a nail, and how to carve wood with a bad knife."

The head began to appear. It was the head of a thin woman, weeping.

Choulette wished to express in it human misery, not simple and touching,
such as men of other times may have felt it in a world of mingled
harshness and kindness; but hideous, and reflecting the state of
ugliness created by the free-thinking bourgeois and the military
patriots of the French Revolution. According to him the present regime
embodied only hypocrisy and brutality.

"Their barracks are a hideous invention of modern times. They date from
the seventeenth century. Before that time there were only guard-houses
where the soldiers played cards and told tales. Louis XIV was a