Then, after this deliverance, I went on to the Halles. The streets were more ploughed with shells than a German field when the teams go to and fro in the spring.
There were two men with me in the uniform of the Hôtel de Ville, to carry the provisions. For already the new marketings were beginning to come in by the Porte Maillot at Neuilly.
As ever, when we came to the market-stalls, it was "Give place to the Hôtel de Ville!" While I made my purchases, an old man came up to the butcher-fellow who was serving, and asked him civilly for a piece of the indifferent beef he was cutting for me. The rascal, a beast of Burgundy, dazed with absinthe and pig by nature, answered foully after his kind. The old man was very old, but his face was that of a man of war. He lifted his stick as though to strike, for he had a beautiful young girl on his arm. But I saw the lip of the Burgundian butcher draw up over his teeth like a snarling dog, and his hand shorten on his knife.
"Have politeness," I said sharply to the rascal, "or I will on my return report you to the General, and have you fusiladed!"
This made him afraid, for indeed the thing was commonly done at that time.
The old man smiled and held out his hand to me. He said—
"My friend, some day I may be able to repay you, but not now."
Yet I had interfered as much for the sake of the lady's eyes as for the sake of the old man's grey hairs. Besides, the butcher was but a pig of a Burgundian who daily maligned the Prussians with words like pig's offal.
Then we went back along the shell-battered streets, empty of carriages, for all the horses had been eaten, some as beef and some as plain horse.
"Monsieur the Commissary," said one of the porters, "do you know that the old man to whom you spoke, with the young lady, is le Père Félix, whom all the patriots of Paris call the 'Deliverer of Forty-eight'?"