instant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He was also
renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded in
bronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen to
twenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was not
wealthy, and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the wine-shops.

He was a man brought up in the street. The street had been his mother,
his nurse and his school. The street had given him his self-assurance,
his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the
people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. All
that falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, the
strainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, the
things that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters,
the contact with the covers of books, bits of _feuilletons_ swallowed
between two glasses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, had
endowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though without
education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible,
imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in
original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the
comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the
unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and
buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of
house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts
called _lists_, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never
tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And if
you merely looked at him you laughed at him, as at a comic actor.

A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited Germinie.

Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing but her work in her
head. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with the
frightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and
mistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her
shell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris.
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interested
after the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had
long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she had
gleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house and
the street; and this habit of narration, of talking w