the great
Napoleon, and fought with him at Waterloo. She also bears, since
music goes with war, a worn accordion. She is the old woman to whose
shrivelled, expectant countenance you sometimes offer up a copper coin,
as she kneels by the flagged crossway path of the Park.

She is succeeded, perhaps, by a couple of black-haired, short,
broad-shouldered men, leading a waddling, unconcerned bear, and talking
earnestly together in a language which you will hardly follow.

Then you will see six or eight or ten other sons and daughters of toil,
most of them with balloons.

All these people will turn, between the high, ball-topped gate-posts,
into the alley, and descend at once to the left, by a flight of three or
four steps, to a side basement door.

As they begin to flock in, you will see through the alley gate a dark,
thick-set man, of middle age, but with very little hair, come and stand
at the foot of the steps, in the doorway. It is Sorel, the master of the
house; for this is the _Maison Sorel_. Some of his guests he greets
with a Noachian deluge of swift French words and high-pitched cries of
welcome. It is thus that he receives those capitalists, the bear-leaders
from the Pyrenees; it is thus that he greets the grizzled man in the
blue cap and blouse,--Fidele the old soldier, Fidele the pensioner, to
whom a great government, far away, at Washington, doubtless with much
else on its mind, never forgets to send by mail, each quarter-day
morning, a special, personal communication, marked with Fidele's own
name, enclosing the preliminaries of a remittance: "Accept" (as it
were) "this slight tribute." "_Ah! que c'est un gouvernement! Voila une
republique!_"

Even a Frenchman may be proud to be an American!

Most of his guests, however, Sorel receives with a mere pantomime
of wide-opened eyes and extended hands and shrugged-up shoulders,
accompanied by a long-drawn "_Eh!_" by which he bodies forth a thousand
refinements of thought which language would fail to express. Does a
fresh immigrant from the Cevennes bring back at night but one or two of
the gay balloons with which she was stocked in the morning, or, better,
none; or, on the other hand, does a stalwart man just from the rich Brie
country return at sundown in abject despair, bringing back almost all
of the red and blue globes which floated like a radiant constellation
of hope about his head when he set forth in the early morning, Sorel can
express, by his "_Eh!_"