ook at the wares spread out in
some bric-a-brac shop or in some book store window. This also was his
habit and his method. He ran his eye over the illustrated papers lying
in a row in front; over the Socialistic placards, the song books. He
kept himself _au courant_ with everything which was thought, seen,
proclaimed and sung.

"When one governs," thought Bernardet, "one ought to have the habit of
going afoot in the street. One can learn nothing from the depths of a
coupe, driven by a coachman wearing a tri-colored cockade." He was going
to the Prefecture, the Permanence, when in the Rue des Bons-Enfants he
was instinctively attracted to a shop window where rusty old arms,
tattered uniforms, worn shakos, garments without value, smoky pictures,
yellowed engravings and chance ornaments, rare old copies of books, old
romances, ancient books, with eaten bindings, a mass of dissimilar
objects--lost keys, belt buckles, abolished medals, battered sous--were
mixed together in an oblong space as in a sort of trough. On either side
of this shop window hung some soiled uniforms, a Zouave's vest, an
Academician's old habit, lugubrious with its embroideries of green, a
soiled costume which had been worn by some Pierrot at the Carnival. It
was, in all its sad irony, the vulgar "hand-me-down that!" which makes
one think of that other Morgue where the clothing has been rejected by
the living or abandoned by the dead.

Bernardet was neither of a melancholy temperament nor a dreamer, and he
did not give much time to the tearful side of the question, but he was
possessed of a ravenous curiosity, and the sight, however frequent, of
that shop window always attracted him. With, moreover, that sort of
magnetism which the searchers, great or small, intuitively feel--a
collector of knick-knacks, discoverers of unknown countries, book worms
bent over the volumes at four sous apiece, or chemists crouched over a
retort--Bernardet had been suddenly attracted by a portrait exposed as
an object rarer than the others, in the midst of this detritus of
abandoned luxury or of past military glory.

Yes, among the tobacco boxes, the belt buckles, the Turkish poniards,
watches with broken cases, commonplace Japanese ornaments, a painting,
oval in form, lay there--a sort of large medallion without a frame, and
at first sight, by a singular attraction, it drew and held the attention
of the police officer.

"Ah!" said Bernardet out loud, "but this is singu