"Surely not—on the contrary. But, though Monsieur Paul has a sure foot and a good eye, and is not to say getting old, yet when a person is fifty it is not best for a person to run about the streets as if a person was a young person."
It was Josephine who did me the honor to address me the last remark.
I confess to but forty-five years of age; Hohenfels, quite erroneously, gives me forty-eight; Josephine, with that raw alacrity in leaping at computations peculiar to the illiterate, oppressed me with fifty. Which of us three knew best? I should like to ask. But it is of little consequence. The Easterns generally vaunt themselves on not knowing the day of their birth. And wisdom comes to us from the East.
I decided, for reasons sufficient to myself, to get out of Paris by the opposite side. I determined to make my sortie by way of the Temple Market and the Belleville abattoirs. On the thirtieth of April, at an ambitiously early hour, wearing my gardening cap, with my sketch-book sticking out of my pocket, my tin box in one hand and my stout stick in the other, I emerged among the staring porters of the neighboring houses, and it was in this equipment that I received the renewed lamentations of Charles and Josephine.
"Will you dare to go along the Boulevard looking like that, sir?" said Josephine.
"A gentleman in a cap! They'll take you for a bricklayer—indeed they will, sir," said Charles; "or rather for a milkman, with his tin can. I can't stand that: I will carry it rather myself, though I feel my rheumatics on these damp pavements."
"Monsieur Paul must take a cab—at least to the barrier: it will not be pleasant to make a scandal in the street."
"Who will tend Monsieur Paul these two days, now?" This was uttered with manly grief by Charles.