“Parbleu! I have a shrewd suspicion why you had that name given you, if you always make your entrée as you did just now, by throwing people down.—But this pretty flower girl doesn’t like the way you treat her customers, and she is right.”
“Bless me! monsieur,” said Violette, “it’s the second time in two days that he has run into my counter like that.”
“It’s the last time, Mamzelle Violette; I promise you I won’t do it again; I’m done.”
“This girl is really lovely!” muttered the gentleman, as he paid for his bouquet. “Whom in the devil does she look like? Faith! I’ve known so many!—Follow me,” he said, turning to Chicotin.
He walked away, leaning on his cane and putting his left foot to the ground with great precaution, which necessarily kept him from walking fast.
And Monsieur Chicotin followed him, taking several steps very rapidly, then falling back to cut a caper or some monkey trick.
“If we keep on at this pace,” he said, “we shan’t beat the railway train.”
X
A DOMESTIC INTERIOR
In a very handsome salon of an apartment on Boulevard Beaumarchais, in one of those fine houses recently built, which make that quarter one of the most attractive in Paris, three persons were assembled: Monsieur Glumeau, his wife and his daughter.
We know the ladies. Monsieur Glumeau, formerly a commission merchant, was a man of fifty years, of medium height, who had never been handsome, but who might have possessed some attractions when he was young, thanks to his light hair, his china-blue eyes—there are people who like china-blue eyes—and above all, to his slender figure, his shapely leg and his small and well-arched foot. As he grew older, Monsieur Glumeau had not taken on flesh like his excellent wife, but had retained a youthful appearance, especially when seen from behind; as to his face, that had become considerably wrinkled, but his eyes were still china-blue, and although he no longer possessed his fair hair, he had replaced it by a wig of the same color.