“Husband, what are you going to do?”

Michu, who was carefully measuring a charge of powder, poured it into the barrel of his gun, rested the weapon against the parapet and said to Marthe:—­

“No one knows I own that gun.  Stand in front of it.”

Couraut, who had sprung to his feet, was barking furiously.

“Good, intelligent fellow!” cried Michu.  “I am certain there are spies about—­”

Man and beast feel a spy.  Couraut and Michu, who seemed to have one and the same soul, lived together as the Arab and his horse in the desert.  The bailiff knew the modulations of the dog’s voice, just as the dog read his master’s meaning in his eyes, or felt it exhaling in the air from his body.

“What do you say to that?” said Michu, in a low voice, calling his wife’s attention to two strangers who appeared in a by-path making for the rond-point.

“What can it mean?” cried the old mother.  “They are Parisians.”

“Here they come!” said Michu.  “Hide my gun,” he whispered to his wife.

The two men who now crossed the wide open space of the rond-point were typical enough for a painter.  One, who appeared to be the subaltern, wore top-boots, turned down rather low, showing well-made calves, and colored silk stockings of doubtful cleanliness.  The breeches, of ribbed cloth, apricot color with metal buttons, were too large; they were baggy about the body, and the lines of their creases seemed to indicate a sedentary man.  A marseilles waistcoat, overloaded with embroidery, open, and held together by one button only just above the stomach, gave to the wearer a dissipated look,—­all the more so, because his jet black hair, in corkscrew curls, hid his forehead and hung down his cheeks.  Two steel watch-chains were festooned upon his breeches.  The shirt was adorned with a cameo in white and blue.  The coat, cinnamon-colored, was a treasure to caricaturists by reason of its long tails, which, when seen from behind, bore so perfect a resemblance to a cod that the name of that fish was given to them.  The fashion of codfish tails lasted ten years; almost the whole period of the empire of Napoleon.  The cravat, loosely fastened, and with numerous small folds, allowed the wearer to bury his face in it up to the nostrils.  His pimpled skin, his long, thick, brick-dust colored nose, his high cheek-bones, his mouth, lacking half its teeth but greedy for all that and menacing, his ears adorned with huge gold rings, his low forehead,—­all these personal details, which might have seemed grotesque in many men, were rendered terrible in him by two small eyes set in his head like those of a pig, expressive of insatiable covetousness, and of insolent, half-jovial cruelty.  These ferreting and perspicacious blue eyes, glassy and glacial, might be taken for the model of that famous Eye, the formidable emblem of the police, invented during the Revolution.  Black silk gloves were on his hands and he carried a switch.  He was certainly some official personage, for he showed in his bearing, in his way of taking snuff and ramming it into his nose, the bureaucratic importance of an office subordinate, one who signs for his superiors and acquires a passing sovereignty by enforcing their orders.