the week and beats them on Monday![2] And with all that not jealous, not ugly, not a wife-beater, but a real love of a man, who never harmed one of the fair sex in his life! If you want physique, _parbleu_! I'm your man!" He rose to his feet and, drawing up his wavering body, clad in an old blue coat with gilt buttons, to its full height, removing his gray hat so as to show his perspiring, polished, bald skull, and tossing his old plucked _gamin's_ head, he continued: "You see what it is! It isn't a very attractive piece of property; it doesn't help it to exhibit it. But it yields well, it's a little dilapidated, but well put together. Dame! Here I am with my little forty nine-years--no more hair than a billiard ball, a witchgrass beard that would make good herb-tea, foundations not too solid, feet as long as La Villette--and with all the rest thin enough to take a bath in a musket-barrel. There's the bill of lading! Pass the prospectus along! If any woman wants all that in a lump--any respectable person--not too young--who won't amuse herself by painting me too yellow--you understand, I don't ask for a Princess of Batignolles--why, sure as you're born, I'm her man!" Germinie seized Gautruche's glass, half emptied it at a draught and held out the side from which she had drunk to him. * * * * * At nightfall the party returned on foot. When they reached the fortifications, Gautruche drew a large heart with the point of his knife on the stone, and all the names with the date were carved inside. In the evening Gautruche and Germinie were upon the outer boulevards, near Barriere Rochechouart. Beside a low house with these words, in a plaster panel: _Madame Merlin_. _Dresses cut and tried on, two francs_, they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading into a dark passage, at the end of which shone the red light of an Argand lamp. At the entrance to the passage, these words were printed in black on a wooden sign: _Hotel of the Little Blue Hand._ XLIX