onsieur l'Abbé Coignard, who should rather have been nourished at the Prytaneum by a grateful republic, gained his bread by writing letters for servant-girls in a stall near the cemetery of the Innocents. There he happened to serve in the office of secretary to a Portuguese lady who was crossing France, with her nigger-boy. She gave him a liard for a letter written to her husband, and an écu of six livres for another to her lover. It was the first écu my good master had handled since the feast of St. John; and since he was open-handed, even to magnificence, he straightway took me to the Pomme d'Or, on the Quai de Grève, close to the Town-hall, where the wine is not doctored, and the sausages are of the best. And the big dealers, who buy apples on the Mall, go there ordinarily towards midday to try to best one another. It was spring-time, and sweet to be alive on such a day. My good master had our table spread on the embankment, and we hearkened, as we dined, to the lapping of the water under the oars of the boatmen. A light caressing breeze laved us with gentle breath, and we were glad to be alive and in the sunlight. While we were eating our fried gudgeons a noise of men and horses at our elbow made us turn round.
Guessing what made us curious a dingy little old man, at the next table, said, with an obliging smile:
"It is nothing, gentlemen—a servant-girl whom they are taking to be hanged for stealing some bits of lace from her mistress."
And indeed, as he spoke, we saw, seated at the tail of a cart between two mounted police-sergeants, a girl, quite pretty, her appearance bewildered, her bosom forced into relief by the drag of her arms, which were bound behind her back. She passed in a moment, and yet I shall always see before my eyes that vision of a white face, and that look that already stared out upon nothing.
"Yes, gentlemen," said the dingy little old man, "she is the servant of Madame Josse, the councillor's wife, and to make herself smart when going with her lover to Ramponneau's stole from her mistress a lace head-dress in point a' Alençon, and then, having committed the theft, ran away. She was taken in a house by the Pont-au-Change, and at once confessed her crime. Accordingly she was not put to the torture for more than an hour or two. What I tell you, gentlemen, I know to be true, as I am beadle at the court where she was tried."
The dingy little old man attacked his sausage, for it was getting cold, and continued:
"She should be at the scaffold by now, and in five minutes, perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, the pretty rogue will have given up the ghost. Some of the hanged give no trouble to the executioner. No sooner is the cord round their neck than they quietly expire. But there are others who positively live at the rope's end, and make a furious to-do about it. The most demoniacal of all was a priest, who was sentenced last year for forging the Royal signature on lottery tickets. For more than twenty minutes he fought like a carp on the end of a line.
"He! He!" chuckled the little old man, "the Abbé was modest and did not want the honour of a step up in the world. I saw him when they took him out of the cart. He cried and struggled so that the hangman said to him: 'Do not be a child, Monsieur l'Abbé!' But the oddest thing was, that, there being another thief along with him, he was, at first, taken for the chaplain, and that by the executioner, whom the police-officer had the greatest difficulty in undeceiving. Wasn't that amusing?"
"No, Monsieur," replied my good master, letting the fish, he had held to his lips for some moments, fall on his plate. "No, it is not amusing, and the thought that that nice-looking girl is at this moment yielding up her soul spoils the taste of my gudgeons for me, and the joy of seeing the sky above, which smiled on me but a moment back."
"Ah, Monsieur l'Abbé," said the little official, "if you are so sensitive as all that, you could never have witnessed without fainting what my father saw with his own eyes, when yet a child, at Dijon, his native town. Have you ever heard speak of Hélène Gillet?"