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are off, side by side. She takes my arm proudly. From time
to time she looks at me, and I at her, and her smile is an affectionate
grimace amid the sunshine.
When we have gone a little way, my aunt stops, "You go on," she says;
"I'll catch you up."

She has gone up to Apolline, the street-sweeper. The good woman, as
broad as she is long, was gaping on the edge of the causeway, her two
parallel arms feebly rowing in the air, an exile in the Sabbath idleness,
and awkwardly conscious of her absent broom.
Mame brings her along, and looking back as I walk, I hear her talking
of me, hastily, as one who confides a choking secret, while Apolline
follows, with her arms swinging far from her body, limping and
outspread like a crab.
Says Mame, "That boy's bedroom is untidy. And then, too, he uses too
many shirt-collars, and he doesn't know how to blow his nose. He stuffs
handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you find them again like stones."
"All the same, he's a good young man," stammers the waddling street
cleanser, brandishing her broom-bereaved hands at random, and
shaking over her swollen and many-storied boots a skirt weighted
round the hem by a coat-of-mail of dry mud.
These confidences with which Mame is in the habit of breaking forth
before no matter whom get on my nerves. I call her with some
impatience. She starts at the command, comes up, and throws me a
martyr's glance.
She proceeds with her nose lowered under her black hat with green
foliage, hurt that I should thus have summoned her before everybody,
and profoundly irritated. So a persevering malice awakens again in the
depths of her, and she mutters, very low, "You spat on the window the
other day!"
But she cannot resist hooking herself again on to another interlocutor,
whose Sunday trousers are planted on the causeway, like two posts, and
his blouse as stiff as a lump of iron ore. I leave them, and go alone into
Brisbille's.
The smithy hearth befires a workshop which bristles with black objects.
In the middle of the dark bodies of implements hanging from walls and
ceiling is the metallic Brisbille, with leaden hands, his dark apron

rainbowed with file-dust,--dirty on principle, because of his ideas, this
being Sunday. He is sober, and his face still unkindled, but he is
waiting impatiently for the church-going bell to begin, so that he may
go and drink, in complete solitude.
Through an open square, in the ponderous and dirt-shaggy glazing of
the smithy, one can see a portion of the street, and a sketch, in bright
and airy tones, of scattered people. It is like the sharply cut field of
vision in an opera-glass, in which figures are drawn and shaded, and
cross each other; where one makes out, at times, a hat bound and
befeathered, swaying as it goes; a little boy with sky-blue tie and
buttoned boots, and tubular knickers hanging round his thin, bare
calves; a couple of gossiping dames in swollen and somber petticoats,
who tack hither and thither, meet, are mutually attracted and dissolve in
conversation, like rolling drops of ink. In the foreground of this colored
cinema which goes by and passes again, Brisbille, the sinister, is
ranting away, as always. He is red and lurid, spotted with freckles, his
hair greasy, his voice husky. For a moment, while he paces to and fro
in his cage, dragging shapeless and gaping shoes behind him, he speaks
to me in a low voice, and close to my face, in gusts. Brisbille can shout,
but not talk; there must be a definite pressure of anger before his
resounding huskiness issues from his throat.
Mame comes in. She sits on a stool to get her breath again, all the while
brandishing the twisted key which she clasps to the prayer-book in her
hand. Then she unburdens herself and begins to speak in fits and starts
of this key, of the mishap which twisted it, and of all the multiple
details which overlap each other in her head. But the slipshod, gloomy
smith's attention is suddenly attracted by the hole which shows the
street.
"The lubber!" he roars.
It is Monsieur Fontan who is passing, the wine-merchant and
café-proprietor. He is an expansive and imposing man, fat-covered,
and white as a house. He never says anything and is always alone. A
great personage he is; he makes money; he has amassed hundreds of
thousands of francs. At noon and in the evening he is not to be seen,

having dived into the room behind the shop, where he takes his meals
in solitude. The rest of the time he just sits at the receipt of custom and
says nothing. There