The little cobbler struggled on, and presently the lights of Nîmes shone in his face and he entered the gate and passed along the Rue St. Antoine to his shop. Babet had been there three times that day to find him, and had gone back at last to St. Cyr without news, and found M. d’Aguesseau there, talking with old madame. Unconscious that he had disappointed such a visitor, Charlot unlocked his door and entered, feeling his way until he could light a candle. There had been another visitor at his door too, though he knew it not, an old woman with a red handkerchief around her head, and with a wide, red mouth. But the cobbler was ignorant of all these things and went about as usual. He had tasted nothing since midday, but he had no appetite and he went up the ladder to his room and lighted a taper before the shrine there. After that he threw himself on the bed, dressed as he was, and all night he wrestled with a temptation that beset him, with a new-born hatred of the man whom he had befriended in the market-place. If he had left M. d’Aguesseau in that tent with the body of the damned person, how different the end might have been! Ah, the desolate soul and the desolate hearth, the misery and the poverty! _Dame de Dieu!_ some men possessed the earth and the fulness thereof, and others starved! Morning found Charlot stirring the fire in the kitchen; the commonplace world possessed him again; he was no longer an individual, only one of many, the little cobbler of Nîmes. He made his coffee and he ate his black bread, and then he went to his bench and worked patiently, finishing a pair of high military riding-boots. They were of fine leather, and he fastened burnished buckles on the high insteps. They were elaborate, and he had put some fine labor upon them, and he looked at them now with a recognition of their perfections; no one made better shoes than the hunchback.