two francs_,
they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading into a dark
passage, at the end of which shone the red light of an Argand lamp. At
the entrance to the passage, these words were printed in black on a
wooden sign:

_Hotel of the Little Blue Hand._

XLIX

Mederie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen who
make their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lips
forever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with
tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundians
graphically call _boyaux rouges_.[3] Always a little tipsy, tipsy from
yesterday when he had drunk nothing to-day, he looked at life through
the sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with
the easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps of
the wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretched
away into the darkness. _Ennui_, care, want, had gained no hold upon
him; and if by chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his mind,
he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation that sounded like
_psitt_! which was his way of saying _pshaw_! and, raising his right
arm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his
melancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superb
after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knew
neither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three
sous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle
of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and
found food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in the
world seemed sad to him--except a glass of water.

With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent
health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety
of his profession, the good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free,
unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks
distraction in singing, and flings the workmen's _blague_ at passers-by,
from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did
lettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without a
measure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the letters
in white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters in
position inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an