"Jesus!" she complained, "they want to alter everything,--days, months, seasons of the year, the sun and the moon! Lord God, Monsieur Combalot, what ever is this pair of over-shoes down for the 8 Vendemiaire?" "_Citoyenne_, just cast your eye over your almanac, and you'll get the hang of it." She took it down from the wall, glanced at it and immediately turning her head another way. "It hasn't a Christian look!" she cried in a shocked tone. "Not only that, _citoyenne_," said the cobbler, "but now we have only three Sundays in the month instead of four. And that's not all; we shall soon have to change our ways of reckoning. There will be no more farthings and half-farthings, everything will be regulated by distilled water." At the words the _citoyenne_ Gamelin, whose lips were trembling, threw up her eyes to the ceiling and sighed out: "They are going too far!" And, while she was lost in lamentations, looking like the holy women in a wayside calvary, a bad coal that had caught alight in the fire when her attention was diverted, began to fill the studio with a poisonous smother which, added to the stifling smell of quinces, was like to make the air unbreathable. Elodie complained that her throat was tickling her and begged to have the window opened. But, directly the _citoyen_ Combalot had taken his leave and the _citoyenne_ Gamelin had gone back to her stove, Evariste repeated the same name in the girl's ear: "Jacques Maubel," he reiterated. She looked up at him in some surprise, and very quietly, still going on cutting a quince in quarters: "Well!... Jacques Maubel...?" "He is the man." "The man! what man?" "You once gave him a red carnation." She declared she did not understand and asked him to explain himself. "That aristocrat! that _emigre_! that scoundrel!" She shrugged her shoulders, and denied with the most natural air that she had never known a Jacques Maubel. It was true; she _had_ never known anyone of the name. She denied she had ever given red carnations to anybody but Evariste; but perhaps, on this point, her memory was not very good. He had little experience of women and was far from having fully fathomed Elodie's character; still, he deemed her quite capable of cajoling and deceiving a cleverer man than himself. "Why deny?" he asked. "I know all." Again she asseverated she had never known anybody called Maubel. And, having done peeling the quinces, she asked for a basin of water, because her fingers were sticky. This Gamelin brought her, and, as she washed her hands, she repeated her denials. Again he repeated that he knew, and this time she made no reply.