as I surveyed Madame, stranded beside her empty boxes, deader than if she had been really dead,—for she was conscious of this death, the most horrible death conceivable to a being who had never loved anything but the valuation in money of those invaluable things,—our pleasures, our caprices, our charities, our love, the divine luxury of the soul. This shameful sorrow, this crapulous dejection, was also a revenge for the humiliations and severities that I have undergone, that came to me from her, in every word that issued from her mouth, in every look that fell from her eyes. This deliciously grim enjoyment I tasted to the full. I would have liked to cry out: "Well done! Well done!" And, above all, I would have liked to know these admirable and sublime thieves, in order to thank them in the name of all the ragamuffins, and to embrace them, as brothers. Oh! good thieves, dear figures of justice and pity, through what a series of intense and delightful sensations you have made me pass!
Madame was not slow in recovering her self-possession. Her combative, aggressive nature suddenly reawakened in all its violence.
"And what are you doing here?" she said to Monsieur, in a tone of anger and supreme scorn. "Why are you here? How ridiculous you are, with your big puffy face, and in your shirt-tail! Do you think that will get us back our silver
