"I say! Go and settle up the sideboard in the corner over there. You are to put the bottles at the left and the provisions at the right." Saval, getting quite distracted, exclaimed: "But messieurs, I am a notary!" There was a moment's silence, and then a wild outburst of laughter. One suspicious gentleman asked: "How are you here?" He explained, telling about his project of going to the Opera, his departure from Vernon, his arrival in Paris, and the way in which he had spent the evening. They sat around him to listen to him; they greeted him with words of applause, and called him Scheherazade. Romantin did not come back. Other guests arrived. M. Saval was presented to them so that he might begin his story over again. He declined; they forced him to relate it. They fixed him on one of the three chairs between two women who kept constantly filling his glass. He drank; he laughed; he talked; he sang, too. He tried to waltz with his chair, and fell on the ground. From that moment, he forgot everything. It seemed to him, however, that they undressed him, put him to bed, and that his stomach got sick. When he awoke, it was broad daylight, and he lay stretched with his feet against a cupboard, in a strange bed. An old woman with a broom in her hand was glaring angrily at him. At last, she said: "Clear out, you blackguard! Clear out! What right has anyone to get drunk like this?" He sat up in the bed, feeling very ill at ease. He asked: "Where am I?" "Where are you, you dirty scamp? You are drunk. Take your rotten carcass out of here as quick as you can,--and lose no time about it!" He wanted to get up. He found that he was naked in the bed. His clothes had disappeared. He blurted out: "Madame, I--" Then he remembered.... What was he to do? He asked: "Did Monsieur Romantin come back?" The door-keeper shouted: "Will you take your dirty carcass out of this so that he at any rate may not catch you here?" M. Saval said, in a state of confusion: "I haven't got my clothes; they have been taken away from me." He had to wait, to explain his situation, give notice to his friends, and borrow some money to buy clothes. He did not leave Paris till evening. And, when people talk about music to him in his beautiful drawing-room in Vernon, he declares with an air of authority that painting is a very inferior art. BOITELLE Pere Boitelle (Antoine) had the reputation through the whole county of a specialist in dirty jobs. Every time a pit, a dunghill, or a cesspool required to be cleared away, or a dirt-hole to be cleansed out he was the person employed to do it. He would come there with his nightman's tools and his wooden shoes covered with muck, and would set to work, whining incessantly about the nature of his occupation. When people asked him, then, why he did this loathsome work, he would reply resignedly: "Faith, 'tis for my children whom I must support. This brings me in more than anything else."