resented their exploits; they
stood there with their heads down, their legs apart, and their muscular
arms crossed upon their chests. Near them the marshal of the
establishment, an old sub-officer, with the drooping mustache of a
brandy-drinker, belted in at the waist, a heart of red cloth on his
leather breastplate, leaned on a pair of foils. The feminine attraction,
a rose in her hair, with a man's overcoat protecting her against the
freshness of the evening air over her ballet-dancer's dress, played at
the same time the cymbals and the big bass-drum a desperate
accompaniment to three measures of a polka, always the same, which were
murdered by a blind clarionet player; and the ringmaster, a sort of
Hercules with the face of a galley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers,
roared out his furious appeal in a loud voice. Mixed with the crowd of
loafers, soldiers, and women, I regarded the abject spectacle with
disgust--the last vestige of the olympic games.

Suddenly the music ceased, and the crowd broke into roars of laughter.
The clown had just made his appearance.

[Illustration]

He wore the ordinary costume of his kind, the short vest and
many-colored stockings of the peasants of the opera comique, the three
horns turned backward, the red wig with its turned-up queue and its
butterfly on the end. He was a young man, but alas, his face, whitened
with flour, was already seamed with vice. Planting himself before the
public, and opening his mouth in a silly grin, he showed bleeding gums
almost devoid of teeth. The ringmaster kicked him violently from behind.

"Come in," he said, tranquilly.

Then the traditional dialogue, punctuated by slaps in the face, began
between the mountebank and his clown, and the entire audience applauded
these souvenirs of the classic farce, fallen from the theatre to the
stage of the mountebank, and whose humor, coarse but pungent, seemed a
drunken echo of the laughter of Moliere. The clown exerted his low
talent, throwing out at each moment some low jest, some immodest pun, to
which his master, simulating a prudish indignation, responded by thumps
on the head. But the adroit clown excelled in the art of receiving
affronts. He knew to perfection how to bend his body like a bow under
the impulse of a kick, and having received on one cheek a full-armed
blow, he stuffed his tongue at once in that cheek and began to whine
until a new blow passed the artificial swelling into the other cheek.
B