Ten Tales | Page 7

arranged, the fireplace cleaned, the floor polished, and
spiders no longer spun their webs over the deaths of Poniatowski in the
corner. When the Captain came home the inviting odor of
cabbage-soup saluted him on the staircase, and the sight of the smoking
plates on the coarse but white table-cloth, with a bunch of flowers and
polished table-ware, was quite enough to give him a good appetite.
Pierette profited by the good-humor of her master to confess some of
her secret ambitions. She wanted andirons for the fireplace, where there
was now always a fire burning, and a mould for the little cakes that 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 ecarté, 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
café; 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