houses, and pilfering.  From the first day, charitable people gave him something, and Tryballot was content, finding the business good, without advance money or bad debts; on the contrary, full of accommodation.  He went about it so heartily, that he was liked everywhere, and received a thousand consolations refused to rich people.  The good man watched the peasants planting, sowing, reaping, and making harvest, and said to himself, that they worked a little for him as well.  He who had a pig in his larder owed him a bit for it, without suspecting it.  The man who baked a loaf in his oven often baked it for Tryballot without knowing it.  He took nothing by force; on the contrary, people said to him kindly, while making him a present, “Here Vieux par-Chemins, cheer up, old fellow.  How are you?  Come, take this; the cat began it, you can finish it.”

Vieux par-Chemins was at all the weddings, baptisms, and funerals, because he went everywhere where there was, openly or secretly, merriment and feasting.  He religiously kept the statutes and canons of his order—­namely, to do nothing, because if he had been able to do the smallest amount of work no one would ever give anything again.  After having refreshed himself, this wise man would lay full length in a ditch, or against a church wall, and think over public affairs; and then he would philosophise, like his pretty tutors, the blackbirds, jays, and sparrows, and thought a great deal while mumping; for, because his apparel was poor, was that a reason his understanding should not be rich?  His philosophy amused his clients, to whom he would repeat, by way of thanks, the finest aphorisms of his science.  According to him, suppers produced gout in the rich:  he boasted that he had nimble feet, because his shoemaker gave him boots that do not pinch his corns.  There were aching heads beneath diadems, but his never ached, because it was touched neither by luxury nor any other chaplet.  And again, that jewelled rings hinder the circulation of the blood.  Although he covered himself with sores, after the manner of cadgers, you may be sure he was as sound as a child at the baptismal font.

The good man disported himself with other rogues, playing with his three dice, which he kept to remind him to spend his coppers, in order that he might always be poor.  In spite of his vow, he was, like all the order of mendicants, so wealthy that one day at the Paschal feast, another beggar wishing to rent his profit from him, Vieux par-Chemins refused ten crowns for it; in fact, the same evening he spent fourteen crowns in drinking the health of the alms-givers, because it is the statutes of beggary that one should show one’s gratitude to donors.  Although he carefully got rid of that of which had been a source of anxiety to others, who, having too much wealth went in search of poverty, he was happier with nothing in the world than when he had his father’s money.  And seeing what are the conditions of nobility, he