ust of Minerva
with ten _termini_ in a row against the back wall, over which rose the
huge chimney of the adjoining Mint.

Towards four o'clock, when the helmeted shadow of the bust was beginning
to lengthen, the stiff mechanical step of old Jean Rehu woould be heard
upon the flags. He lived over the Astiers, and went out regularly every
day for a long walk, watched from a respectful distance by a servant,
whose arm he persistently refused. Within the barrier of his increasing
deafness his faculties, under the great heat of this summer, had begun
to _give_ way, and especially his memory, no longer effectually guided
by the reminding pins upon the lappets of his coat. He mixed his
stories, and lost himself, like old Livingstone in the marshes of
Central Africa, among his recollections, where he scrambled and
floundered till some one assisted him. Such a humiliation irritated
his spleen, and he now therefore seldom spoke to anyone, but talked to
himself as he went along, marking with a sudden stop and a shake of the
head the end of an anecdote and the inevitable phrase, 'That's a thing
that I have seen.' But he still carried himself upright, and was as
fond of a hoax as in the days of the Directory. It was his amusement to
impose abstinence from wine, abstinence from meat, and every ridiculous
variety of regimen upon cits enamoured of life, crowds of whom wrote to
him daily, asking by what diet he had so miraculously extended his.
He would prescribe sometimes vegetables, milk, or cider, sometimes
shell-fish exclusively, and meanwhile ate and drank without restriction,
taking after each meal a siesta, and every evening a good turn up and
down the floor, audible to Leonard Astier in the room below.

Two months, August and September, had now elapsed since the Permanent
Secretary came in--two clear months of fruitful, delightful peace; such
a pause in the climb of ambition as perhaps in all his life he had
never enjoyed before. Madame Astier, still at Clos Jallanges, talked of
returning soon; the sky of Paris showed the grey of the first fogs;
the Academicians began to come home; the meetings were becoming less
sociable; and Astier, during his working hours in the reception-room of
the great Villemain, found it no longer necessary to screen himself with
blinds from the blazing reflection of the court. He was at his table one
afternoon, writing to the worthy De Freydet a letter of good news about
his candidature, when the old