Simon Grelu is a great tall fellow, all legs and arms and joints, with a long neck leading up to a long nose, which gives him the look of a heron. From the Marshland to the Woodland there is no more noted spoiler of rivers; he is celebrated for the constancy of his relations with the police. Hampered by his lengthy appendages, he is perpetually letting himself be caught, and disdaining what will be thought of it. Every angle of every rock, every stump by the water's edge, is so familiar and homelike to him that he cannot bear to leave his river, and rather than make good his escape on land, prefers to have a warrant served on him, secure in the fact that he has nothing wherewith to pay a fine.
When the police sergeant rebukes his men for their laziness, they cry with one accord:
"Let us go and look up Grelu!"
They go, and find him without the least trouble.
That was what happened last week, and owing to it I had the pleasure of witnessing the interview I am about to relate. I was taking a walk with the Mayor, when Simon Grelu suddenly stood before us. More elongated than ever, with his bony, sallow face, his pointed skull topped by a little tuft of white hair, his mouth open in a smile truly formidable from the threat of a single great black tooth which the slightest cough would inevitably have flung in one's face, the heron-man stood before us, motionless in his wooden shoes.
"I have come for my certificate, monsieur le maire," said he with a sort of clucking which might express either mirth or despair.
"What certificate?"
"Why, my certificate of mendicancy, as usual, when I am caught."
"What! Again? Is there no end to it?"
"It is better than stealing, isn't it, monsieur le maire?"