CHAPTER II—­HIS BOOTS

“Eh! well then, Monsieur Mutuel!  What do I know, what can I say?  I assure you that he calls himself Monsieur The Englishman.”

“Pardon.  But I think it is impossible,” said Monsieur Mutuel,—­a spectacled, snuffy, stooping old gentleman in carpet shoes and a cloth cap with a peaked shade, a loose blue frock-coat reaching to his heels, a large limp white shirt-frill, and cravat to correspond,—­that is to say, white was the natural colour of his linen on Sundays, but it toned down with the week.

“It is,” repeated Monsieur Mutuel, his amiable old walnut-shell countenance very walnut-shelly indeed as he smiled and blinked in the bright morning sunlight,—­“it is, my cherished Madame Bouclet, I think, impossible!”

“Hey!” (with a little vexed cry and a great many tosses of her head.) “But it is not impossible that you are a Pig!” retorted Madame Bouclet, a compact little woman of thirty-five or so.  “See then,—­look there,—­read!  ‘On the second floor Monsieur L’Anglais.’  Is it not so?”

“It is so,” said Monsieur Mutuel.

“Good.  Continue your morning walk.  Get out!” Madame Bouclet dismissed him with a lively snap of her fingers.

The morning walk of Monsieur Mutuel was in the brightest patch that the sun made in the Grande Place of a dull old fortified French town.  The manner of his morning walk was with his hands crossed behind him; an umbrella, in figure the express image of himself, always in one hand; a snuffbox in the other.  Thus, with the shuffling gait of the Elephant (who really does deal with the very worst trousers-maker employed by the Zoological world, and who appeared to have recommended him to Monsieur Mutuel), the old gentleman sunned himself daily when sun was to be had—­of course, at the same time sunning a red ribbon at his button-hole; for was he not an ancient Frenchman?

Being told by one of the angelic sex to continue his morning walk and get out, Monsieur Mutuel laughed a walnut-shell laugh, pulled off his cap at arm’s length with the hand that contained his snuffbox, kept it off for a considerable period after he had parted from Madame Bouclet, and continued his morning walk and got out, like a man of gallantry as he was.

The documentary evidence to which Madame Bouclet had referred Monsieur Mutuel was the list of her lodgers, sweetly written forth by her own Nephew and Bookkeeper, who held the pen of an Angel, and posted up at the side of her gateway, for the information of the Police:  “Au second, M. L’Anglais, Proprietaire.”  On the second floor, Mr. The Englishman, man of property.  So it stood; nothing could be plainer.