She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the ground between the shafts of a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in sable furs.  Who was it?  She knew him.  The carriage darted by and disappeared.

Why, it was he—­the Viscount.  She turned away; the street was empty.  She was so overwhelmed, so sad, that she had to lean against a wall to keep herself from falling.

Then she thought she had been mistaken.  Anyhow, she did not know.  All within her and around her was abandoning her.  She felt lost, sinking at random into indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on reaching the “Croix-Rouge,” she saw the good Homais, who was watching a large box full of pharmaceutical stores being hoisted on to the “Hirondelle.”  In his hand he held tied in a silk handkerchief six cheminots for his wife.

Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras and huge boars’ heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured.  The druggist’s wife crunched them up as they had done—­heroically, despite her wretched teeth.  And so whenever Homais journeyed to town, he never failed to bring her home some that he bought at the great baker’s in the Rue Massacre.

“Charmed to see you,” he said, offering Emma a hand to help her into the “Hirondelle.”  Then he hung up his cheminots to the cords of the netting, and remained bare-headed in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic.

But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot of the hill he exclaimed—­

“I can’t understand why the authorities tolerate such culpable industries.  Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work.  Progress, my word! creeps at a snail’s pace.  We are floundering about in mere barbarism.”

The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at the door, as if it were a bag in the lining that had come unnailed.

“This,” said the chemist, “is a scrofulous affection.”

And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to see him for the first time, murmured something about “cornea,” “opaque cornea,” “sclerotic,” “facies,” then asked him in a paternal tone—­

“My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity?  Instead of getting drunk at the public, you’d do better to die yourself.”

He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and good joints.  The blind man went on with his song; he seemed, moreover, almost idiotic.  At last Monsieur Homais opened his purse—­

“Now there’s a sou; give me back two lairds, and don’t forget my advice:  you’ll be the better for it.”

Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it.  But the druggist said that he would cure himself with an antiphlogistic pomade of his own composition, and he gave his address—­“Monsieur Homais, near the market, pretty well known.”