white breast, marbled blackly by the truffles showing through its skin.  It was something barbaric and superb, suggesting a paunch amidst a halo of glory; but there was such a cutting, sarcastic touch about it all that people crowded to the window, alarmed by the fierce flare of the shop-front.  When my aunt Lisa came back from the kitchen she was quite frightened, and thought I’d set the fat in the shop on fire; and she considered the appearance of the turkey so indelicate that she turned me out of the place while Auguste re-arranged the window after his own idiotic fashion.  Such brutes will never understand the language of a red splotch by the side of a grey one.  Ah, well! that was my masterpiece.  I have never done anything better.”

     [*] An allusion to the “midnight mass” usually celebrated in
     Roman Catholic churches on Christmas Eve.—­Translator.

He relapsed into silence, smiling and dwelling with gratification on this reminiscence.  The cart had now reached the Arc de Triomphe, and strong currents of air swept from the avenues across the expanse of open ground.  Florent sat up, and inhaled with zest the first odours of grass wafted from the fortifications.  He turned his back on Paris, anxious to behold the country in the distance.  At the corner of the Rue de Longchamp, Madame Francois pointed out to him the spot where she had picked him up.  This rendered him thoughtful, and he gazed at her as she sat there, so healthy-looking and serene, with her arms slightly extended so as to grasp the reins.  She looked even handsomer than Lisa, with her neckerchief tied over her head, her robust glow of health, and her brusque, kindly air.  When she gave a slight cluck with her tongue, Balthazar pricked up his ears and rattled down the road at a quicker pace.

On arriving at Nanterre, the cart turned to the left into a narrow lane, skirted some blank walls, and finally came to a standstill at the end of a sort of blind alley.  It was the end of the world, Madame Francois used to say.  The load of vegetable leaves now had to be discharged.  Claude and Florent would not hear of the journeyman gardener, who was planting lettuces, leaving his work, but armed themselves with pitchforks and proceeded to toss the leaves into the manure pit.  This occupation afforded them much amusement.  Claude had quite a liking for manure, since it symbolises the world and its life.  The strippings and parings of the vegetables, the scourings of the markets, the refuse that fell from that colossal table, remained full of life, and returned to the spot where the vegetables had previously sprouted, to warm and nourish fresh generations of cabbages, turnips, and carrots.  They rose again in fertile crops, and once more went to spread themselves out upon the market square.  Paris rotted everything, and returned everything to the soil, which never wearied of repairing the ravages of death.

“Ah!” exclaimed Claude, as he plied his fork for the last time, “here’s a cabbage-stalk that I’m sure I recognise.  It has grown up at least half a score of times in that corner yonder by the apricot tree.”