his situation, give notice to his friends,
and borrow some money to buy clothes. He did not leave Paris till
evening.

And, when people talk about music to him in his beautiful drawing-room
in Vernon, he declares with an air of authority that painting is a
very inferior art.

BOITELLE

Pere Boitelle (Antoine) had the reputation through the whole county of
a specialist in dirty jobs. Every time a pit, a dunghill, or a
cesspool required to be cleared away, or a dirt-hole to be cleansed
out he was the person employed to do it.

He would come there with his nightman's tools and his wooden shoes
covered with muck, and would set to work, whining incessantly about
the nature of his occupation. When people asked him, then, why he did
this loathsome work, he would reply resignedly:

"Faith, 'tis for my children whom I must support. This brings me in
more than anything else."

He had, indeed, fourteen children. If anyone asked him what had become
of them, he would say with an air of indifference:

"There are only eight of them left in the house. One is out at
service, and five are married."

When the questioner wanted to know whether they were well married, he
replied vivaciously:

"I did not cross them. I crossed them in nothing. They married just as
they pleased. We shouldn't go against people's likings, it turns out
badly. I am a night-cart-man because my parents went against my
likings. But for that I would have become a workman like the others."

Here is the way his parents had thwarted him in his likings:

He was at the time a soldier stationed at Havre, not more stupid than
another, or sharper either, a rather simple fellow, in truth. During
his hours of freedom his greatest pleasure was to walk along the quay,
where the bird-dealers congregate. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a
soldier from his own part of the country, he would slowly saunter
along by cages where the parrots with green backs and yellow heads
from the banks of the Amazon, the parrots with gray backs and red
heads from Senegal, enormous macaws, which look like birds brought up
in conservatories, with their flower-like feathers, their plumes and
their tufts, the paroquets of every shape, who seem painted with
minute care by that excellent miniaturist, God Almighty, and the
little ones, all the little young birds, hopping about, yellow, blue,
and variegated, mingling their cries with the noise of the quay, add
to the din caused by the