"I thought of it; you are all for these people."
François, in turn, looked his man over curiously. He had now a queer expression of self-satisfied elation. "A good joke, that," said François. "Wait a moment; I left Toto outside." He went to the door, and looked up and down the street. "Wait," he cried to Pierre. "Hang the dog!" And in an instant he had left the citizen to abide his return. Once in his garret, he cried: "Toto, thou hast no sense. The sane scoundrels are bad enough, but why didst thou fetch on me this crazy rascal? And so the marquis got away, Toto. The man with the wart is not as clever as I thought him. But some folks have luck."
The sad winter of the Terror wore on, while François continued to live unmolested, and pursued his estimable occupation always with an easy conscience, but often with an uneasy mind.
It was near the end of the pleasant month of May, 1794—the month Prairial of the new calendar. The roses were in bloom. The violets were seeking sunshine here and there, half hidden in the rare grasses of the trampled space of the Place of the Revolution. On the six bridges which spanned the canals, its boundaries, children were looking at the swans. In the middle space, the scaffold and cross-beams of the guillotine rose dark red against the blue sky of this afternoon of spring. Two untidy soldiers marched back and forth beside it. The every-day tragedy of the morning was over; why should the afternoon remember? The great city seemed to have neither heart nor memory. The drum-beat of a regiment going to the front rang clear down the Quai des Tuileries. People ran to see; children and their nurses left the swans. The birds in the trees listened, and, liking not this crude music, took wing, and perched on the beams of the monstrous thing in the center of the Place.
François crossed the open ground, with Toto close to heel. The keeper of the little café where he liked to sit had just told him that the citizen with whom he had twice come thither had been asking for him, and that with this citizen had also come once a stout man, who would know where Citizen François lived. This last was of the fourth section, one Grégoire, a man with a wart.
"Thou didst notice the man?" said François, much troubled.
"Notice him? I should think so. Dame! I am of the Midi. A wart on a man's nose is bad luck; the mother of that man saw a cocatrice egg in the barn-yard."
"A cocatrice egg! What the mischief is that!"
"Tiens! if you were of the Midi, you would know. When a hen cackles loud, 't is that she hath laid a great egg; the father is a basilisk."
"Tonnerre! a basilisk?"