and sensual beast. And I feel a sort of light tremor at my heart. I ask him further:
"Do they know who did it?"
Joseph shrugs his shoulders. Half jesting, half serious, he answers:
"Some vagabonds, undoubtedly; some dirty sheenies."
Then, after a short silence:
"Puuutt! you will see that they will not pinch them. The magistrates are all sold."
He hangs up the finished harnesses, and, pointing to Drumont's portrait, in its laurel halo, he adds:
"If we only had him? Oh, misfortune!"
I know not why I left him with a singular feeling of uneasiness in my soul.
At any rate, this story is going to give us something to talk about, something to divert us a little.
Sometimes, when Madame is out, and I cannot stand the ennui, I go to the iron fence by the roadside, where Mlle. Rose comes to meet me. Always on the watch, nothing that goes on in our place escapes her. She sees all who come in and go out. She is redder, fatter, flabbier than ever. Her lips hang more than they did, and she is more and more haunted by obscene ideas. Every time that we meet, her first look is at my person, and her first words, uttered in her thick voice, are:
