He felt, without knowing why, the danger of the place. A painted creature, half clad, came out of a house—a base animal whom the accident of sex had made a woman. She called to him to come in. He turned and went by her in haste and horror. A man in a red shirt ran toward him, crying out some ordures of speech. As he fled there was a sudden peopling of window and doorway with half-naked drunken men and women. He had never before seen such faces. He was in that pit of crime and bestiality which before long was to overflow and riot in a limitless debauch of blood. The boy’s long legs served him well. He dodged and ran this way and that. At the mouth of the _cul-de-sac_ a lank boy caught him by the arm. François struck him fiercely, and with a sense of joy in the competence of the first blow he had ever given one of his own years, he fled again; nor did he pause until, free from foes, he stood panting in the open sunshine below the great buttresses of Notre Dame. He saw here that no one took notice of him, and, once more at ease, crossed from the Cité to the right bank of the Seine. Thus wandering he came at last to one of the low bridges which spanned the broad ditches then bounding the Place Louis XV, where now is the Place de la Concorde. The ducks and swans in these canals delighted him. He lingered, liking the gaiety and careless joy of the children with their nurses. The dogs, acrobats, musketeers, and the pomp of heavy, painted carriages rolling by with servants in liveries, the Swiss guards, the magnificence of the king’s palace, were all to him as a new world might have been. He went on, and at last along the Rue St. Honoré and to the Palais Royal, where, amid its splendid shops, cafés, jugglers, fortune-tellers, and richly clad people, he forgot for an hour his poor little stomach and its claims. By and by he took note of the success of a blind beggar. He watched him for an hour, and knew that he had in this time gathered in sous at least a franc. The shrunken stomach of the boy began to convert its claims into demands, and with this hint he put on a sad face and began to beg. It was not a very prosperous business; but he stated his emptiness so pitifully, and his voice had such sweet, pleading notes, that at last he thus acquired six or eight sous, and retired to the outer gate to count them.