In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were playing rounders—la balle au camp—from which I concluded it was a Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on (which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a whole one.
I knew them all, and the two pions, or ushers, M. Lartigue and le petit Cazal; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or interesting in the least.
Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically killing time by a game of bouchon—knocking sous off a cork with other sous—great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the long-dead players.
Close by was a small wooden shed, or baraque, prettily painted and glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mère Manette and Grandmère Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about business, and would not give credit for a centime—not even to English boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world. How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They sold many things: nougat, pain d'èpices, mirlitons, hoops, drums, noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors, neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old and worn and gray-my face badly shaven—my hair almost white. I had never been old in a dream before.
I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus (which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne—my heart was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness, the scaffoldings barely removed—some of them still lying in the dry ditch between—and smiled to think how these little brick and granite walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later (twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin my legs were! and how miserably clad—in old prison trousers, greasy, stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed—and what boots!
[Illustration: "I sat down and rested.">[
Never had I been shabby in a dream before.
Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a header à la hussarde off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the mare once more, very badly.