This is how Jean-Paul bought his rabbit at the Gingerbread Fair.
Monsieur le Maire was a very important person. I shall not tell about his duties, or all that he did in the little white Mayory over the post-office. Dear me, that would be dry reading! After one had climbed the steep cliff straight up from the village, and walked three kilometres or more, all the fertile farm-lands, and those forests with the green-trunked trees, and the white château with its high gables belonged to M. le Maire. His ancestors had been royalists, and fought for and served many kings and princes. But M. le Maire of Freport was a good republican, and he used to say he belonged to the people, which, of course, pleased them very much indeed; and those of the town who loved the days of the Emperor loved M. le Maire for his ancestry, and the rest honored him as a good servant of the republic.
Jean-Paul saw him go in and out of the Mairie, and drive home every afternoon in his red dog-cart. He thought the Maire was a great man, and admired him, and stood in awe of him a little, perhaps. He would have told you, that he knew the Mayor very well, but the Mayor did not know Jean-Paul—less than he knew Philip or Joseph or the other fisher-lads—for his grandmother had enough to keep them far from want, and never applied for charity to the government. And then the knitting that she did—well, that was an important item, for she turned off an astounding number of thick stockings, and every six weeks Jean-Paul carried the little package to a village by the cross-roads, where another old woman bought the stockings, and sold them to a dealer at Havre.
The brown rabbit had become Jean-Paul's constant companion. She ate sitting close to the boy's elbow, slept at night huddled in a brown heap at the foot of his bed. He called her La Belle Hélène; it brought him a little nearer to the beloved ship he was never to board to say the name over and over, for although he made no sign, and spoke not at all of his great desire, still his heart was on the sea, and the thought that he must spend his youth and strength fishing a little with Père Guillaume, loitering about the town with a few young fellows, that he was never to see the great ice-fields or know the wild joy of catching the mighty fish, that the fisher-seaman's life was forbidden him, it was hard, bitter hard to bear.
He stood with Père Guillaume on the beach; a fierce October storm was coming thick and fast from the west, and the fishermen stood talking together in little groups; and watching the ink-black clouds.
"How ugly it is," said the old fisherman. "From now on we have the black weather. I shall not venture out to-day, Jean-Paul."
"I should like nothing better," said the boy, eagerly. "It is fine out there. One can hear the waves crash. That is real sea. I will do all the work, Père Guillaume," he added. "The fish fairly leap into the boat to-day."
The old man could not be moved. "It is well enough for you," he said; "you are a strong swimmer, Jean-Paul, but for me, to capsize is death. When one is old one hugs the fireside."
"Oh, it must be dreadful to be old," thought the boy; "one fears everything!" Then he remembered that it was the day for his trip to St. Julian with the parcel of stockings that his grandmother had knitted for sale, and he hurried back to the cabin, while the storm gathered faster and the wind swept along the hard flint roads.