"_Parbleu!_ It is quite impossible to get a glimpse of her; for the governor is more resolute than ever in preventing us from entering into the pavilion in the courtyard." "And besides, as it is the porter who now cleans out the office, how can one see this damsel?" "Well, I've seen her." "You?" "When I say I've seen her, I've seen her cap; such a rum cap!" "Oh, pooh! What sort?" "It was cherry-coloured velvet, I think; a kind of skull-cap like the 'buy-a-broom' girls wear." "Like the Alsaciennes? Why, that's simple enough, as she is an Alsacienne!" "I was passing across the yard the day before yesterday, and she was leaning with her back against one of the windows of the ground floor." "What! The yard?" "No, donkey, no,--the servant! The panes of the lower part are so dirty that I could not see much of the Alsacienne; but those in the middle of the window were not so grubby, and I saw her cherry-coloured cap and a profusion of curling hair as black as jet, for she had her head dressed _a la Titus_." "I'm sure the governor has not seen even as much as that through his spectacles; for he is one who, as they say, if he were left alone with one woman on the earth, then the world would end." "That is not astonishing. 'He laughs best who laughs last!' And the more so, as 'Punctuality is the politeness of monarchs!'" "Jupiter! How stupid Chalamel is when he likes!" "Deuce take it! Tell me where you go, and I'll tell you who you are!" "Beautiful!" "As for me, I think it is superstition which makes our governor more and more hoggish." "And, perhaps, it is as a penitence that he gives us forty sous a day for our breakfast." "He must, indeed, have taken leave of his senses." "Or be ill." "I have thought him very much bewildered these many days past." "It is not that we see so much of him. He who, for our misery, was in his study at sunrise, and always at our backs, is now two days without even poking his nose into the office." "That gives the head clerk so much to do." "And we are obliged to die of hunger waiting for him this morning." "What a change in the office!"