Ten Tales | Page 7

she knew how to make so well. And the Captain, smiling at the child's requests, but charmed with the homelike atmosphere of his room, promised to think of it, and on the morrow replaced his Londres by cigars for a sou each, hesitated to offer five points at ecart��, and refused his third glass of beer or his second glass of chartreuse.
[Illustration]
Certainly the struggle was long; it was cruel. Often, when the hour came for the glass that was denied him by economy, when thirst seized him by the throat, the Captain was forced to make an heroic effort to withdraw his hand already reaching out towards the swan's beak of the caf��; many times he wandered about, dreaming of the king turned up and of quint and quatorze. But he almost always courageously returned home; and as he loved Pierette more through every sacrifice that he made for her, he embraced her more fondly every day. For he did embrace her. She was no longer his servant. When once she stood before him at the table, calling him "Monsieur," and so respectful in her bearing, he could not stand it, but seizing her by her two hands, he said to her, eagerly:
"First embrace me, and then sit down and do me the pleasure of speaking familiarly, confound it!"
And so to-day it is accomplished. Meeting a child has saved that man from an ignominious age.
He has substituted for his old vices a young passion. He adores the little lame girl who skips around him in his room, which is comfortable and well furnished.
He has already taught Pierette to read, and, moreover, recalling his calligraphy as a sergeant-major, he has set her copies in writing. It is his greatest joy when the child, bending attentively over her paper, and sometimes making a blot which she quickly licks up with her tongue, has succeeded in copying all the letters of an interminable adverb in ment. His uneasiness is in thinking that he is growing old and has nothing to leave his adopted child.
And so he becomes almost a miser; he theorizes; he wishes to give up his tobacco, although Pierette herself fills and lights his pipe for him. He counts on saving from his slender income enough to purchase a little stock of fancy goods. Then when he is dead she can live an obscure and tranquil life, hanging up somewhere in the back room of the small shop an old cross of the Legion of Honor, her souvenir of the Captain.
Every day he goes to walk with her on the rampart. Sometimes they are passed by folks who are strangers in the village, who look with compassionate surprise at the old soldier, spared from the wars, and the poor lame child. And he is moved--oh, so pleasantly, almost to tears--when one of the passers-by whispers, as they pass:
"Poor father! Yet how pretty his daughter is."
[Illustration]

TWO CLOWNS.
[Illustration: TWO CLOWNS]
The night was clear and glittering with stars, and there was a crowd upon the market-place. They crowded in gaping delight around the tent of some strolling acrobats, where red and smoking lanterns lighted the performance which was just beginning. Rolling their muscular limbs in dirty wraps, and decorated from head to foot with tawdry ruffles of fur, the athletes--four boyish ruffians with vulgar heads--were ranged in line before the painted canvas which represented their exploits; they stood there with their heads down, their legs apart, and their muscular arms crossed upon their chests. Near them the marshal of the establishment, an old sub-officer, with the drooping mustache of a brandy-drinker, belted in at the waist, a heart of red cloth on his leather breastplate, leaned on a pair of foils. The feminine attraction, a rose in her hair, with a man's overcoat protecting her against the freshness of the evening air over her ballet-dancer's dress, played at the same time the cymbals and the big bass-drum a desperate accompaniment to three measures of a polka, always the same, which were murdered by a blind clarionet player; and the ringmaster, a sort of Hercules with the face of a galley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers, roared out his furious appeal in a loud voice. Mixed with the crowd of loafers, soldiers, and women, I regarded the abject spectacle with disgust--the last vestige of the olympic games.
Suddenly the music ceased, and the crowd broke into roars of laughter. The clown had just made his appearance.
[Illustration]
He wore the ordinary costume of his kind, the short vest and many-colored stockings of the peasants of the opera comique, the three horns turned backward, the red wig with its turned-up queue and its butterfly on the end. He was a young man, but alas, his face, whitened with flour, was already seamed with vice. Planting himself before the public,