As the train rolled through the homely scenes of the outskirts, that black fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city, Choulette took from his pocket an old book which he began to fumble.  The writer, hidden under the vagabond, revealed himself.  Choulette, without wishing to appear to be careful of his papers, was very orderly about them.  He assured himself that he had not lost the pieces of paper on which he noted at the coffeehouse his ideas for poems, nor the dozen of flattering letters which, soiled and spotted, he carried with him continually, to read them to his newly-made companions at night.  After assuring himself that nothing was missing, he took from the book a letter folded in an open envelope.  He waved it for a while, with an air of mysterious impudence, then handed it to the Countess Martin.  It was a letter of introduction from the Marquise de Rieu to a princess of the House of France, a near relative of the Comte de Chambord, who, old and a widow, lived in retirement near the gates of Florence.  Having enjoyed the effect which he expected to produce, he said that he should perhaps visit the Princess; that she was a good person, and pious.

“A truly great lady,” he added, “who does not show her magnificence in gowns and hats.  She wears her chemises for six weeks, and sometimes longer.  The gentlemen of her train have seen her wear very dirty white stockings, which fell around her heels.  The virtues of the great queens of Spain are revived in her.  Oh, those soiled stockings, what real glory there is in them!”

He took the letter and put it back in his book.  Then, arming himself with a horn-handled knife, he began, with its point, to finish a figure sketched in the handle of his stick.  He complimented himself on it: 

“I am skilful in all the arts of beggars and vagabonds.  I know how to open locks with a nail, and how to carve wood with a bad knife.”

The head began to appear.  It was the head of a thin woman, weeping.

Choulette wished to express in it human misery, not simple and touching, such as men of other times may have felt it in a world of mingled harshness and kindness; but hideous, and reflecting the state of ugliness created by the free-thinking bourgeois and the military patriots of the French Revolution.  According to him the present regime embodied only hypocrisy and brutality.

“Their barracks are a hideous invention of modern times.  They date from the seventeenth century.  Before that time there were only guard-houses where the soldiers played cards and told tales.  Louis XIV was a precursor of Bonaparte.  But the evil has attained its plenitude since the monstrous institution of the obligatory enlistment.  The shame of emperors and of republics is to have made it an obligation for men to kill.  In the ages called barbarous, cities and princes entrusted their defence to mercenaries, who fought prudently.  In a great battle only five