on account of his gentleness, and for some time they defended him; but, influenced by the stallkeepers of the butter and fruit pavilions, they at last gave way.  Then hostilities began afresh between these huge, swelling women and the lean and lank inspector.  He was lost in the whirl of the voluminous petticoats and buxom bodices which surged furiously around his scraggy shoulders.  However, he understood nothing, but pursued his course towards the realisation of his one haunting idea.

At every hour of the day, and in every corner of the market, Mademoiselle Saget’s black bonnet was now to be seen in the midst of this outburst of indignation.  Her little pale face seemed to multiply.  She had sworn a terrible vengeance against the company which assembled in Monsieur Lebigre’s little cabinet.  She accused them of having circulated the story that she lived on waste scraps of meat.  The truth was that old Gavard had told the others one evening that the “old nanny-goat” who came to play the spy upon them gorged herself with the filth which the Bonapartist clique tossed away.  Clemence felt quite ill on hearing this, and Robine hurriedly gulped down a draught of beer, as though to wash his throat.  In Gavard’s opinion, the scraps of meat left on the Emperor’s plate were so much political ordure, the putrid remnants of all the filth of the reign.  Thenceforth the party at Monsieur Lebigre’s looked on Mademoiselle Saget as a creature whom no one could touch except with tongs.  She was regarded as some unclean animal that battened upon corruption.  Clemence and Gavard circulated the story so freely in the markets that the old maid found herself seriously injured in her intercourse with the shopkeepers, who unceremoniously bade her go off to the scrap-stalls when she came to haggle and gossip at their establishments without the least intention of buying anything.  This cut her off from her sources of information; and sometimes she was altogether ignorant of what was happening.  She shed tears of rage, and in one such moment of anger she bluntly said to La Sarriette and Madame Lecoeur:  “You needn’t give me any more hints:  I’ll settle your Gavard’s hash for him now—­that I will!”

The two women were rather startled, but refrained from all protestation.  The next day, however, Mademoiselle Saget had calmed down, and again expressed much tender-hearted pity for that poor Monsieur Gavard who was so badly advised, and was certainly hastening to his ruin.

Gavard was undoubtedly compromising himself.  Ever since the conspiracy had begun to ripen he had carried the revolver, which caused Madame Leonce so much alarm, in his pocket wherever he went.  It was a big, formidable-looking weapon, which he had bought of the principal gunmaker in Paris.  He exhibited it to all the women in the poultry market, like a schoolboy who has got some prohibited novel hidden in his desk.  First he would allow the barrel to peer out of his pocket, and call attention