“Clothes,” he replied.
And there was a woman carrying a hen in a basket, and the hen escaped from the basket, laid an egg in the middle of the stage and cackled back into Paris; but the woman saved the egg and said: “Better an egg to-day than a hen to-morrow.”
Another woman was carrying her baby on one arm and leading a child by the hand, and the child was crying because it had to walk too fast and was tired.
“This is the astronomer,” said the buffo.
“Is that his umbrella under his arm? It seems too long and too bright.”
“No; that is Halley’s comet which he has predicted for next spring. He does not want to leave it behind, the Turks might destroy it and he would lose his reputation.”
There was the boy from the barber’s shop opposite; he had been playing with a black kitten when the alarm came and he joined the fugitives just as he was, in his white tunic with the kitten in his arms and a comb stuck in his bushy hair. And there came a troop of old women, chattering and shuffling along and understanding no more about it all than I should have understood if I had not had my buffo, my programme raisonné, to explain it.
Then I said: “Buffo mio, we have had a musician and a painter, where is the poet?”
“Here he comes.” And there came a pale, Alfred de Musset youth with long hair, a roll of paper and a quill pen. “Do you know what he is saying? He is saying: ‘Better to embrace and be betrayed than to suffer and die in ignorance.’“
“Is that the philosophy of the buffo?” I inquired.