He dances it, all alone. Some of the audience, making a humming sound with their hands, the rest whistling or else beating time with cans and _gamelles_, form an improvised orchestra, half Spanish, half negro. The dancer's big round face, flanked with little tufts of black whiskers, lights up. He is both the Auvergnat and his betrothed--advancing, receding, seeming to escape from himself. When you think he is utterly exhausted, he still finds it possible to shout out in joyous accents-- "Now, ladies and gentlemen, a collection for 'l'artisse.'" And he mimics in succession a lion-tamer and a lady walking the tight rope. The sous rain down into his _képi_. Thereupon Charensac strikes a lyrical vein. He sings in the _patois_ of Auvergne, and, being in an expansive mood, relates the whole of his life, from his birth down to the present day, forgetting nothing, not even his wedding festivities, in the course of which he assures us that he thrashed his mother-in-law. Charensac's eloquence is made up of hiccoughs and invocations, songs and laughter, but we understand all the same. We gather that this giant of an Auvergnat is a compound of landowner, estate manager, Government official, and representative of his syndicate at the _Bourse du Travail_. I find I have had to come to the front to learn that a keen sense of the rights of property is not incompatible with the spirit of revolutionary claims. Charensac stops for a moment, exhausted. Thereupon Reymond, who has had his eyes fixed on him for some time, leans on his elbow, and from the corner in which he has been lying, remarks-- "You don't know whom you make me think of, Charensac, always shouting and stuffing like a huge ogre? I'll tell you; you remind me of old Ubu." "Who's old Ubu?" asks the other. "Old Ubu----" begins Reymond. Startled, I burst out-- "You're not going to tell the first squadron who old Ubu was?" "Don't you interrupt." And Reymond explains. In profound silence we listen as he relates how Ubu was the first man who recommended that eight bullets should be put into a rifle, because with eight bullets it is possible to kill eight of the enemy, and you have that number the less to account for. The thing that delights the first squadron is Ubu's prophetic description of the modern battle: "... We have the foot-soldiers at the foot of the hill ... the cavalry behind them to burst upon the jumbled mass of combatants, and the artillery round by the windmill here to fire upon them all." The men clap their hands in delight and exclaim knowingly: "Yes, that's it! The very thing!" Finally Reymond says that Ubu, like Charensac, was a sort of enormous giant, with a voice of thunder and an insatiable appetite. After this, Charensac is never called anything but old Ubu, and as the sly rascal sees here a new excuse for the satisfaction of his appetites, he accepts the surname with enthusiasm.