“Now, where shall we go?” said Planus, as they left the restaurant.

“Wherever you wish.”

On the first floor of a building on the Rue Montpensier, close at hand, was a cafe chantant, where many people entered.

“Suppose we go in,” said Planus, desirous of banishing his friend’s melancholy at any cost, “the beer is excellent.”

Risler assented to the suggestion; he had not tasted beer for six months.

It was a former restaurant transformed into a concert-hall.  There were three large rooms, separated by gilded pillars, the partitions having been removed; the decoration was in the Moorish style, bright red, pale blue, with little crescents and turbans for ornament.

Although it was still early, the place was full; and even before entering one had a feeling of suffocation, simply from seeing the crowds of people sitting around the tables, and at the farther end, half-hidden by the rows of pillars, a group of white-robed women on a raised platform, in the heat and glare of the gas.

Our two friends had much difficulty in finding seats, and had to be content with a place behind a pillar whence they could see only half of the platform, then occupied by a superb person in black coat and yellow gloves, curled and waxed and oiled, who was singing in a vibrating voice—­

          Mes beaux lions aux crins dores,
          Du sang des troupeaux alteres,
          Halte la!—­Je fais sentinello!

          [My proud lions with golden manes
          Who thirst for the blood of my flocks,
          Stand back!—­I am on guard!]

The audience—­small tradesmen of the quarter with their wives and daughters-seemed highly enthusiastic:  especially the women.  He represented so perfectly the ideal of the shopkeeper imagination, that magnificent shepherd of the desert, who addressed lions with such an air of authority and tended his flocks in full evening dress.  And so, despite their bourgeois bearing, their modest costumes and their expressionless shop-girl smiles, all those women, made up their little mouths to be caught by the hook of sentiment, and cast languishing glances upon the singer.  It was truly comical to see that glance at the platform suddenly change and become contemptuous and fierce as it fell upon the husband, the poor husband tranquilly drinking a glass of beer opposite his wife:  “You would never be capable of doing sentry duty in the very teeth of lions, and in a black coat too, and with yellow gloves!”

And the husband’s eye seemed to reply: 

“Ah! ‘dame’, yes, he’s quite a dashing buck, that fellow.”

Being decidedly indifferent to heroism of that stamp, Risler and Sigismond were drinking their beer without paying much attention to the music, when, at the end of the song, amid the applause and cries and uproar that followed it, Pere Planus uttered an exclamation: 

“Why, that is odd; one would say—­but no, I’m not mistaken.  It is he, it’s Delobelle!”