“It is a matter of common talk, then,” said he, when he saw this name. “Little rascals on their way to school proclaim it on the walls and I am the talk of the town. This woman has probably been deceiving me for a long time, and with all sorts of men. This mere scrawl tells me more of the truth than I could have gained by a prolonged and searching investigation.” And standing in the rain, with his feet in the mud, he made a closer examination of the _graffito_; he noticed that the letters of the inscription were badly written and that the lines of the drawing corresponded with the slope of the writing. As he went away in the falling rain, he remembered the _graffiti_ once traced by clumsy hands on the walls of Pompeii and now uncovered, collected and expounded by philologists. He recalled the clumsy furtive character of the Palatine _graffito_ scratched by an idle soldier on the wall of the guard-house. “It is now eighteen hundred years since that Roman soldier drew a caricature of his comrade Alexandros in the act of worshipping an ass’s head stuck on a cross. No monument of antiquity has been more carefully studied than this Palatine _graffito_: it is reproduced in numberless collections. Now, following the example of Alexandros, I, too, have a _graffito_ of my own. If to-morrow an earthquake were to swallow up this dismal, accursed town, and preserve it intact for the scientists of the thirtieth century, and if in that far distant future my _graffito_ were to be discovered, I wonder what these learned men would say about it. Would they understand its vulgar symbolism? Or would they even be able to spell out my name written in the letters of a lost alphabet?” With a fine rain falling through the dreary dimness, M. Bergeret finally reached the Place Saint-Exupère. Between the two buttresses of the church he could see the stall which bore a red boot as a sign. At the sight, he suddenly remembered that his shoes, being worn out by long service, were soaked with water; now, too, he remembered that henceforth he must look after his own clothes, although hitherto he had always left them to Madame Bergeret. With this thought in his mind, he went straight into the cobbler’s booth. He found the man hammering nails into the sole of a shoe. “Good-day, Piedagnel!” “Good-day, Monsieur Bergeret! What can I do for you, Monsieur Bergeret?” So saying, the fellow, turning his angular face towards his customer, showed his toothless gums in a smile. His thin face, which ended in a projecting chin and was furrowed by the dark chasm of his eyes, shared the stern, poverty-stricken air, the yellow tint, the wretched aspect of the stone figures carved over the door of the ancient church under whose shadow he had been born, had lived, and would die. “All right, Monsieur Bergeret, I have your size and I know that you like your shoes an easy fit. You are quite in the right, Monsieur Bergeret, not to try to pinch your feet.”