"Faineant!... Unless you brand yourself as shamefully as any Red Mark
that ever lived.... Sit down!"

He had been sidling, bit by bit: he had taken himself almost to the
door-sill: but under that tone of thunder--under that sudden amazing and
cryptic jibe--he started, he faltered, he obeyed. She bulked above him
and it was about this time I began truly to be sorry for my harlequin
friend.

It was plain enough by this time, you understand, that I was witnessing
one of those obscure human tangles which ravel themselves in the depths
of a penal society. Possible nowhere else, I suppose. Yet its threads
were the passions and its center was the heart: and poor Bibi-Ri no
poorer hero than you or I or any of us might prove. At this point he
had fallen back to his defense: sullen, awed, but also intently curious
of her. How she expected to force him to her design I could not guess.
But breathlessly I watched while she wove about him and about.

Back by the hearth she stood meditative for a space in silence: a dim
presence in that room where the kettle hissed and gave off its
vapors--of brewing fates, perhaps.

"Give me a man if he be a bad one. A man who can stand to his game two
days on end--how do they put it: those savants?--'developing his
capabilities.' Ah! Not like these others. Waffles! Half-baked. Mixed
with small impulses good and evil. Let him be saint or devil, so he
develop that capability. Let me see him anyway stand to it!... As I have
seen a few:

"I remember many years ago at the prison of Mazas," she went on, as if
in casual retrospect, "they kept a certain famous captive. Myself, I was
never a resident there--no thanks!--I prefer the comforts of honesty.
But my one sister, now dead, she was beginning her own silly career
about then. She lacked the brains to steer it safe. So for a time she
inhabited that same institution. And one day as we went by the visitors'
room she pinched my arm to look.

"'There goes the wickedest man in France,' she said.

"Down the courtyard came a dozen of gendarmes parading a prisoner. That
was a devil--if you like! That was a type--for example. Tall and fierce
and unbeaten, with the eyes of a tiger. Once to see him was never to
forget him again.... While he was still newly-caught they had always to
guard him that way lest he slay some one with his manacled fists.

"He belonged to the very oldest stock of the South, it appeared: the old
high noblesse. And was he rich? And