olded one of
her sheets, and cried as loudly and distinctly as her husky voice
permitted--

"Sentence pronounced by the Parliament of Paris against John Robert
Cassel, accused and convicted of Fraudulent Bankruptcy!"

Derues looked up and saw a street-hawker who used to come to his shop
for a drink, and with whom he had had a violent quarrel about a month
previously, she having detected him in a piece of knavery, and abused
him roundly in her own style, which was not lacking in energy. He had
not seen her since. The crowd generally, and all the gossips of the
quarter, who held Derues in great veneration, thought that the woman's
cry was intended as an indirect insult, and threatened to punish her for
this irreverence. But, placing one hand on her hip, and with the other
warning off the most pressing by a significant gesture--

"Are you still befooled by his tricks, fools that you are? Yes, no doubt
there was a fire in the cellar last night, no doubt his creditors will
be geese enough to let him off paying his debts! But what you don't know
is, that he didn't really lose by it at all!"

"He lost all his goods!" the crowd cried on all sides. "More than nine
thousand livres! Oil and brandy, do you think those won't burn? The old
witch, she drinks enough to know! If one put a candle near her she would
take fire, fast enough!"

"Perhaps," replied the woman, with renewed gesticulations, "perhaps; but
I don't advise any of you to try. Anyhow, this fellow here is a rogue;
he has been emptying his cellar for the last three nights; there were
only old empty casks in it and empty packing-cases! Oh yes! I have
swallowed his daily lies like everybody else, but I know the truth
by now. He got his liquor taken away by Michael Lambourne's son, the
cobbler in the rue de la Parcheminerie. How do I know? Why, because the
young man came and told me!"

"I turned that woman out of my shop a month ago, for stealing," said
Derues.

Notwithstanding this retaliatory accusation, the woman's bold assertion
might have changed the attitude of the crowd and chilled the enthusiasm,
but at that moment a stout man pressed forward, and seizing the hawker
by the arm, said--

"Go, and hold your tongue, backbiting woman!"

To this man, the honour of Derues was an article of faith; he had not
yet ceased to wonder at the probity of this sainted person, and to doubt
it in the least was as good as suspecting his own.

"My dear friend," he said, "we