She laid her hand on the arm of the officer at her side. "My husband, Colonel Montrésor," she added. "Paul, this is the officer of whom I spoke to you--who was so kind--Lieutenant"-- She turned to Eugène, blushing divinely, with an embarrassed little laugh. "Oh, pray forgive me!" she said. "I am _so_ stupid--but--but--I have forgotten your name!" [Illustration] Papa Labesse UP on the Butte Montmartre life is a matter of first principles, and conventionality an undiscovered affliction. A spade is a spade, and the blacker it happens to be, the more apt it is to receive its proper appellation, and the less likely to be confused with the hearts and diamonds. That is why Papa Labesse had no hesitation in referring to Bombiste Fremier as a good-for-nothing,--a vaurien. Just off the boulevard de Rochechouart, in the rue Veron, Papa Labesse kept a tiny joiner's shop, in which, in his velvet cap with a long tassel and his ample apron of blue denim, he might be seen daily, toiling upon various small orders for the quartier. But daily, also, when the light began to fail, he would discard his apron, and, locking his shop door, walk slowly up the long curving incline of the rue Lepic, and through the appropriately rural-looking rue St. Rustique, until he emerged upon the broad summit of the Butte. Here he would light his pipe, and, with his legs spread wide, stand motionless by the low wattled fence at the brink of the bluff, looking off across the city. In appearance Papa Labesse was not the type of man in whom one would be apt to look for sentimentality. He was short and very thin, with a hooked nose and a gray moustache turned up fiercely at the ends, and his skin was brown and deeply wrinkled, as if he had somehow shrunk or warped; but then, as Marcelle said of him, it is the rough and crinkled Brazil-nut that is as full as possible of sweet white meat. Between these two there had always existed a firm bond of camaraderie. Marcelle was the daughter of Madame Clapot, who presided over a little dairy directly opposite the joiner's shop, and on the day when she first made the astounding discovery that small girls can stand upright and walk alone, as if by instinct she had made a bee-line for the doorway of Papa Labesse, and, staggering in, triumphant, had fallen headlong, with a gurgle of satisfaction, into a great pile of shavings. Thenceforward she came often and tarried long, and Papa Labesse built houses for her out of odds and ends of wood, and fashioned miniature articles of furniture in his spare moments, and had always a bit of sucre-candi or a little gingerbread figure tucked away in a certain drawer of his table, which she soon learned to find for herself.