tuary police for your gilded girdle."

"Little one, little one;" resumed la Christeuil, with an implacable
smile, "if you were to put respectable sleeves upon your arms they would
get less sunburned."

It was, in truth, a spectacle worthy of a more intelligent spectator
than Phoebus, to see how these beautiful maidens, with their envenomed
and angry tongues, wound, serpent-like, and glided and writhed around
the street dancer. They were cruel and graceful; they searched and
rummaged maliciously in her poor and silly toilet of spangles and
tinsel. There was no end to their laughter, irony, and humiliation.
Sarcasms rained down upon the gypsy, and haughty condescension and
malevolent looks. One would have thought they were young Roman dames
thrusting golden pins into the breast of a beautiful slave. One would
have pronounced them elegant grayhounds, circling, with inflated
nostrils, round a poor woodland fawn, whom the glance of their master
forbade them to devour.

After all, what was a miserable dancer on the public squares in the
presence of these high-born maidens? They seemed to take no heed of her
presence, and talked of her aloud, to her face, as of something unclean,
abject, and yet, at the same time, passably pretty.

The gypsy was not insensible to these pin-pricks. From time to time a
flush of shame, a flash of anger inflamed her eyes or her cheeks; with
disdain she made that little grimace with which the reader is already
familiar, but she remained motionless; she fixed on Phoebus a sad,
sweet, resigned look. There was also happiness and tenderness in that
gaze. One would have said that she endured for fear of being expelled.

Phoebus laughed, and took the gypsy's part with a mixture of
impertinence and pity.

"Let them talk, little one!" he repeated, jingling his golden spurs. "No
doubt your toilet is a little extravagant and wild, but what difference
does that make with such a charming damsel as yourself?"

"Good gracious!" exclaimed the blonde Gaillefontaine, drawing up her
swan-like throat, with a bitter smile. "I see that messieurs the archers
of the king's police easily take fire at the handsome eyes of gypsies!"

"Why not?" said Phoebus.

At this reply uttered carelessly by the captain, like a stray stone,
whose fall one does not even watch, Colombe began to laugh, as well as
Diane, Amelotte, and Fleur-de-Lys, into whose eyes at the same time a
tear started.

The gypsy, who had dropped her e