As he entered the suburb, he saw a poor woman begging, with one child in her arms and three others clinging to her ragged skirts. Tears came to his eyes, and he put both hands in the pockets of his jacket, for on the day before he had assumed the livery of the common people, resolved to continue to wear it a long time--always if he must. But he found that his pockets were empty, and he remembered that as yet he possessed nothing. "Forgive me, my poor woman," he said, "to-morrow I will give you something. Be here to-morrow, I will come again." The poor creature thought that he was making sport of her, and said to him in a solemn tone, drawing herself up in her rags with the majesty of the southern peoples: "You must not make sport of the poor, my boy; it brings bad luck." "Yes, yes!" said Michel, as he walked away; "I believe it, I am sure of it! that shall never happen to me." A little farther on he met some laundresses who were coolly hanging their linen on a line stretched across the street, over the heads of the passers-by. Michel stooped, as he would not have done the day before; he would have thrust the obstacle aside with an impatient hand. The two pretty girls who held the line to keep it taut were grateful to him and smiled upon him; but when Michel had passed this first curtain of the _biancheria_, and as he stooped to pass under a second, he heard the old laundress say to her apprentices in the tone of an angry sibyl: "Lower your eyes, Ninetta; don't turn your head like that, Rosalina! that's little Michelangelo Lavoratori, who sets himself up for a great painter, but he will never be the man his father is! A fig for children who turn up their noses at their father's trade!" "I absolutely must adopt the profession of prince," thought Michel with a smile, "for the profession of artist would have drawn too much blame upon me." He entered his house, and for the first time it seemed to him picturesque and attractive in its wretched disorder. "It is a genuine artist's house of the Middle Ages," he said to himself; "I have lived here only a few days, but I shall always remember them as among the sweetest and purest days of my life." It seemed to him that he already regretted that humble family nest, and the vague longing he had felt the day before for a less prosaic, a more splendid abode seemed to him an unhealthy, insane longing, so true it is that one exaggerates the value of the good things of life when one has them not. "I could have passed years here very comfortably," he thought, "as happy as I shall be in a palace, provided that my conscience was always as well satisfied with itself as it was when Pier-Angelo said to me: 'Well, you are a man of heart, that you are!' All the portraits of the Palmarosas and Castro-Reales may tell me that they are pleased with me; they will afford me no more joy than those words from my father the artisan."