But this was only a beginning.  She halted the children before every stall.  She made them play for macaroons at rouge et noir.  She had them try their skill at every sort of shooting-game, with crossbows loaded with little clay pellets, with pistols and carbines, old-fashioned weapons with caps and leaden bullets, at all sorts of distances, and at all kinds of targets—­plaster images, revolving pipes, dolls, balls bobbing up and down on top of a jet of water.

Never in his life had Jean Servien been so busy or done so many different things in so short a space of time.

His eyes dazzled with uncouth shapes and startling colours, his throat parched with dust, elbowed, crushed, mauled, hustled by the crowd, he was intoxicated with this debauch of diversions.

He watched Madame Ewans for ever opening her little purse of Russia leather, and a new power was revealed to him.  Nor was this all.  There was the Dutch top to be set twirling, the wooden horses of the merry-go-round to be mounted; they had to dash down the great chute and take a turn in the Venetian gondolas, to be weighed in the machine and touch the arm of the “human torpedo.”

But Madame Ewans could not help returning again and again to stand before the booth of a hypnotist from Paris, a clairvoyante boasting a certificate signed by the Minster of Agriculture and Commerce and by three Doctors of the Faculty.  She gazed enviously at the servant-girls as they trooped up blushing into the van meagrely furnished with a bed and a couple of chairs; but she could not pluck up courage to follow their example.

She recalled to mind how a hypnotist had once helped a friend of hers to recover some stolen forks and spoons.  She had even gone so far as to consult a fortune-teller shortly before Edgar’s birth, and the cards had foretold a boy.

All three were tired out and overloaded with crockery, glass, reed-pipes, sticks of sugar-candy, cakes of ginger-bread and macaroons.  For all that, they paid a visit to the wax-works, where they saw Monseigneur Sibour’s body lying in state at the Archbishop’s Palace, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, models of people’s legs and arms disfigured by various hideous diseases, and a Circassian maiden stepping out of the bath—­“the purest type of female beauty,” as a placard duly informed the public.  Madame Ewans examined this last exhibit with a curiosity that very soon became critical.

“People may say what they please,” she muttered; “if you offered me the whole world, I wouldn’t have such big feet and such a thick waist.  And then, your regular features aren’t one bit attractive.  Men like a face that says something.”

When they left the tent, the sun was low and the dust hovered in golden clouds over the throng of women, working-men, and soldiers.