arters the other day, he played at
skipping-rope with the kiddies. In our ill-assorted flock, in this
family without kindred, this home without a hearth at which we gather,
there are three generations side by side, living, waiting, standing
still, like unfinished statues, like posts.

Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere. I look at the
two men beside me. Poterloo, the miner from the Calonne pit, is pink;
his eyebrows are the color of straw, his eyes flax-blue. His great
golden head involved a long search in the stores to find the vast
steel-blue tureen that bonnets him. Fouillade, the boatman from Cette,
rolls his wicked eyes in the long, lean face of a musketeer, with
sunken cheeks and his skin the color of a violin. In good sooth, my two
neighbors are as unlike as day and night.

Cocon, no less, a slight and desiccated person in spectacles, whose
tint tells of corrosion in the chemical vapors of great towns,
contrasts with Biquet, a Breton in the rough, whose skin is gray and
his jaw like a paving-stone; and Mesnil Andre, the comfortable chemist
from a country town in Normandy, who has such a handsome and silky
beard and who talks so much and so well--he has little in common with
Lamuse, the fat peasant of Poitou, whose cheeks and neck are like
underdone beef. The suburban accent of Barque, whose long legs have
scoured the streets of Paris in all directions, alternates with the
semi-Belgian cadence of those Northerners who came from the 8th
Territorial; with the sonorous speech, rolling on the syllables as if
over cobblestone, that the 144th pours out upon us; with the dialect
blown from those ant-like clusters that the Auvergnats so obstinately
form among the rest. I remember the first words of that wag, Tirette,
when he arrived--"I, mes enfants, I am from Clichy-la-Garenne! Can any
one beat that?"--and the first grievance that Paradis brought to me,
"They don't give a damn for me, because I'm from Morvan!"

* * * * *

Our callings? A little of all--in the lump. In those departed days when
we had a social status, before we came to immure our destiny in the
molehills that we must always build up again as fast as rain and
scrap-iron beat them down, what were we? Sons of the soil and artisans
mostly. Lamuse was a farm-servant, Paradis a carter. Cadilhac, whose
helmet rides loosely on his pointed head, though it is a juvenile
size--like a dome on a steeple, says Tirette--o