They put the whole calf in the oven, and when it was cooked Boudoux ate it all. When he had picked the last bone, my father complimented him on his performance. "I hope your hunger is satisfied now, Boudoux?" he said. "Put the mother on the spit, general," replied Boudoux, "and you will see." My father drew back, for he was fond of his cow, and Boudoux was likely to leave nothing of her but her horns. I could cite other instances than this; but they would pale before the one I have just given. One day at the opening of the hunting season M. Danré, of Vouty, had two dozen chickens on the spit. Boudoux looked at them as he had looked at my father's veal; and M. Danré was unwise enough to make a proposal to him similar to the one which had been made at our house. Boudoux made twenty-four mouthfuls of the twenty-four chickens. Later (I must not stop much longer over Boudoux's appetite), after the Restoration, when the prince de Condé came to hunt at Villers-Cotterets, he brought a pack of a hundred and twenty hounds. Boudoux obtained the post of kennelman to the huntsmen, and it was therefore his business to distribute food to the princely Roquadors and Barbaros. It was soon discovered that although the purchase of bread and meat was the same as always, the poor beasts grew thin and languid and unsteady on their legs. Suspicions were aroused, and Boudoux was watched. It was found out that he himself had eaten the portions of forty dogs--one-third, that was, of the whole food supply. The prince ordered that Boudoux's portion of food should be served separately to him each day, and that this portion should be as much as for forty dogs. So much, then, for Boudoux's appetite. We will next speak of his physical attainments, and lastly of his moral qualities. Physically, Boudoux seemed as though he were of the refuse of creation; Quasimodo would have appeared almost beautiful beside him. Boudoux's face was not merely pitted, it was scarred, furrowed and almost eaten away by smallpox; his eyes, drawn out of their sockets by the hollowness of his eyelids, seemed to hang over his cheeks, watery and bloodshot; his nose was depressed instead of being raised, and flattened down on his upper lip; from his lips flowed a constant trickle of saliva blackened by the quids of tobacco he chewed; the upper lip curved like a serpent's, almost round to his ears, and gave his mouth the appearance of being able to accommodate a whole leg of mutton at once; the picture was completed by hair that Polyphemus himself might have envied; his beard was scanty, red and coarse, and only grew out of the rare spaces not covered with pox marks.