by notes on stamped paper.  By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired himself out for any extra labor which was well paid.  Though he possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs now in Gaubertin’s hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and gleaned at the harvests.  He wore Gaubertin’s receipt for his money sewn into the waist-belt of his trousers,—­having it renewed every year with its own added interest and the amount of his savings.

“Hey! what do I care,” cried Nicolas, replying to Godain’s prudent advice not to talk before Niseron.  “If I’m doomed to be a soldier I’d rather the sawdust of the basket sucked up my blood than have it dribbled out drop by drop in the battles.  I’ll deliver this country of at least one of those Arminacs that the devil has launched upon us.”

And he related what he called Michaud’s plot against him, which Marie and Bonnebault had overheard.

“Where do you expect France to find soldiers?” said the white-haired old man, rising and standing before Nicolas during the silence which followed the utterance of this threat.

“We serve our time and come home again,” remarked Bonnebault, twirling his moustache.

Observing that all the worst characters of the neighborhood were collecting, Pere Niseron shook his head and left the tavern, after offering a farthing to Madame Tonsard in payment for his glass of wine.  When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief and satisfaction passed through the assembled drinkers which would have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he was rid of the living image of his own conscience.

“Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?” asked Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related Vatel’s attempt.

Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set his glass on the table.

“Vatel put himself in the wrong,” he said.  “If I were Mother Tonsard, I’d give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have that Shopman and his keeper up before the assizes and get twenty crowns damages.  Monsieur Sarcus would give them.”

“In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would make,” said Godain.

Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall, with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker, kept silence with a hesitating air.

“Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?” asked Tonsard, attracted by the idea of damages.  “If they had broken twenty crowns’ worth of my mother’s bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip—­”

“And break it, too,” interrupted Madame Tonsard; “they do that in Paris.”