Madame shrugged her shoulders.
“Ah, bah! the stuff is supplied by contract. I am not to blame, my little fellows. Yet some of you manage better.” (She pointed to the retreating hound.) “Voilà le délinquent! He was caught red-handed—discussing the bribe of a sheep’s trotter; and his sentence is five hours in a cell.”
She nodded again and jingled her keys.
“But, yes,” she said, “consider it as a club——” and off she went across the yard.
“A club? Oh, mon Dieu!” murmured St Prest.
“Well,” said I, “I am inclined to fall in with the idea. What livelier places of sojourn are there, in these days of gravity and decorum, than the prisons?”
He pursed his lips and wagged his old head like a mandarin.
“At least,” he said, leeringly, “she is a fine figure of a woman. She dates, like myself, from the era of the Bien-aimé, when women knew how to walk and to hold themselves; and to reveal themselves, too. Oh, je m’entends bien! I have been entertained in the Parc aux cerfs, M. Thibaut.”
I could certainly believe it. This effete old carpet-admiral? Had he ever smelt salt water? I could understand, perhaps, that he had crossed in the packet to the land of fogs. But now he was to exhibit himself to me in a more honourable aspect—to confess the man under the powder and the rubbish.
We stood close by where the wall was pierced by the running sewer. The whole yard was alive with laughter and babble; and now and again one would leave a friend or party of triflers and, kneeling down over the infected sink, would call some name through the opening. Then, summoned to the other side, Lucille, poor ange déchu, would exchange a few earnest pitiful words with husband or brother or lover, and her tears, perhaps, would fall into the gushing drain and sanctify its abomination to him. Was not that for love to justify itself in the eyes of the most unnatural misogynist?