On the day after that in which these events occurred in the house on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, a lad, who apparently came from the bridge of Austerlitz, was trudging along the right-hand walk in the direction of the Barrière de Fontainebleau, at about nightfall. This boy was pale, thin, dressed in rags, wearing canvas trousers in the month of February, and singing at the top of his lungs. At the corner of the Rue du Petit Banquier an old woman was stooping down and fumbling in a pile of rubbish by the lamplight; the lad ran against her as he passed, and fell back, with the exclamation,—
"My eye! why, I took that for an enormous, an enormous dog!"
He uttered the word enormous the second time with a sonorous twang which might be expressed by capitals,—"an enormous, an ENORMOUS dog." The old woman drew herself up furiously.
"You young devil!" she growled, "if I had not been stooping, I know where my foot would have been now."
The lad was already some distance off.
"Kisss! kisss!" he said; "after all, I may not have been mistaken."
The old woman, choked with indignation, drew herself up to her full height, and the street lantern fully lit up her livid face, which was hollowed by angles and wrinkles, and crow's-feet connecting the corners of the mouth. The body was lost in the darkness, and her head alone could be seen; she looked like a mask of Decrepitude lit up by a flash darting through the night. The lad looked at her.
"Madame," he said, "yours is not the style of beauty which would suit me."
He went his way, and began singing again,—
"Le Roi Coup de sabot
S'en allait à la chasse,
À la chasse aux corbeaux."