"One shall see, my children!" she cried, in her shrill voice. "It is not the first time, you know. Variety, one has need of that in life. Perhaps we do not know each other, that story and I! Wait a little. In six weeks we shall be here in company as before, and the little one it will be who is planted. But I remain. And she who laughs last—what? But, above all, not a word against Bombiste, unless you have need of the wherewithal to make broken heads. It is a brave gars, do you understand, and one who has often enough paid your drinks, types of good-for-nothings!"
And she planted herself at a table amidst a burst of laughter and applause (for loyalty is greatly esteemed on the boulevard Rochechouart), and proceeded to collect interest, in the form of repeated glasses of cognac, on the past generosities of Bombiste Fremier.
But the eternal feminine had its part in the make-up of La Trompette, and so it was that one evening, just at nightfall, she presented herself at the door of Papa Labesse's little shop. He was always at home now, poor Papa Labesse, for the growing church of Sacré-Cœur had never once seen him emerging, breathless but smiling, from the little rue St. Rustique, since the day when Marcelle disappeared. He stopped his simple toil at the same hour still, but, instead of stepping out briskly upon the long, curving incline of the rue Lepic, he would seat himself in his doorway, and, oftentimes forgetting to light the pipe which he had filled, stare out wistfully across the street, to where a trim little laundress stood, busily ironing shirts, in the window of the shop that had formerly been the dairy of Madame Clapot.
He looked up as La Trompette drew up before his door, and a slight frown wrinkled for an instant above his patient blue eyes, from which all the singular intensity seemed gone.
"Thou hast a strange air of solitude, Papa Labesse," began La Trompette, affecting a tone of solicitude.
Papa Labesse made no reply.
"And Marcelle," said the woman,—"she is always with Bombiste? Poor little one! The end is so sure! Is there one who knows him better than I? Ah, non! It is always the same story,—a pair of bright eyes, a good figure, and v'là! But, without fail, he comes back to me, ce sacré coureur!"
She glanced up and down the street with an air of complete unconcern, and then her eyes came back to Papa Labesse with a vindictive snap.
"Happily," she added, "he will have taught her a way of earning white pieces in abundance. She is not the first, thy Marcelle. They are sprinkled from here to La Villette, the gonzesses who know the name of Bombiste Fremier. Wouldst thou prove it? Walk, then, from the place Pigalle to the place de la Rotonde to-night at twelve!" And La Trompette laughed.