"Very well, so indeed it is my business.... Will you give me the Piranèses which are upstairs in the big portfolio?" "What do you call the Piranèses?" "Those large black engravings that my father brought back from Italy." "What will you do with them?" "I will find a home for them." My mother shrugged her shoulders dubiously. "Do as you like about them," she said. There was an architect, named Oudet, amongst the staff at the workhouse, who very much wanted our Piranèses. I had always refused him them, telling him that one day I would bring him them myself. The day had come. But it was an unlucky day: Oudet had no money. This was quite conceivable. Oudet, as architect to the Castle, received only a hundred francs per month. True, I was not very exorbitant in the matter of my Piranèses, which were well worth five or six hundred francs; I only asked fifty francs. Oudet offered to pay me these fifty francs in three months' time. In three months!... How could I wait for three months? I left Oudet in despair. I ought to say, in justice to Oudet, that he was probably in even lower straits than I was. In leaving Oudet, I ran up against another of my friends, whose name was Gondon. He was a shooting comrade. He had a property three leagues from Villers-Cotterets,--at Cœuvre, the country of the beautiful Gabrielle,--and we had very often spent whole weeks together there, shooting by day and poaching by night. It was at his place that I nearly lost my life one evening, in the most ridiculous fashion imaginable. It was the evening before the opening of the shooting season. Five or six of us shooters had come from Villers-Cotterets, and we were putting up at Gondon's, in order to be up early for a start at daybreak. Now, as we had neither rooms nor beds enough for everybody, the sitting-room had been transformed into a dormitory, in the four corners of which four beds were set up--that is to say, four mattresses were laid down. When the candles were extinguished, my three companions took it into their heads to start a bolster fight. As, for some reason or another, I did not feel inclined for the sport, I announced my intention of remaining neutral. The result of this compact was that after a quarter of an hour's fight between Austrians, Russians and Prussians, the Austrians, Russians and Prussians became allies and united to fall upon me, who represented France. So they hurled themselves on my bed, and began to belabour me with the afore-mentioned bolsters, as threshers beat out corn with their flails in a barn. I drew up my sheet over my head, and waited patiently till the storm should have passed over, which could not be long first, at the rate they were beating. And as I anticipated, the storm calmed down. One thrasher retired, then another. But the third, who was my cousin, Félix Deviolaine, upheld no doubt by the tie of kinship, continued striking in spite of the retreat of the others. Suddenly he stopped, and I heard