“Monsieur the Rector, it is without a mistake : the little slaughter-house— parva boucheria!”

“Jehan! friend Jehan! you know I promised to meet that girl at the end of the Saint-Michel bridge; that I can take her nowhere but to La Falourdel’s, and that I must pay for the room. The old white-whiskered jade won’t give me credit. Jehan, I beseech you! Have we drunk the whole contents of the curè’s pouch?”

“The consciousness of having employed the other hours well is a right and savoury condiment to our table.”

“Liver and spleen! a truce to your gibberish! Tell me, little limb of the devil, have you any money left? Give it me, or, by Heaven, I’ll search you though you were as leprous as Job and as scabby as Cæsar!”

“Sir, the Rule Galiache is a street which has the Rue de la Verrerie at one end and the Rue de la Tixanderie at the other.”

“Yes, yes, my good friend Jehan— my poor boy— the Rue Galiache— yes, you’re right, quite right. But for the love of Heaven collect yourself! I want but one sou parisis, and seven o’clock is the hour.”

“Silence all round and join in the chorus:

“Well, scholar of Antichrist, the foul fiend strangle thee!” cried Phœbus, roughly pushing the tipsy scholar, who reeled against the wall and slid gently down upon the pavement of Philippe Augustus. Out of that remnant of fraternal sympathy which never wholly deserts the heart of a bottle companion, Phœbus with his foot rolled Jehan to one of those pillows of the poor which Heaven provides at every street corner of Paris, and which the rich scornfully stigmatize with the name of rubbish-heap. The captain propped Jehan’s head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and forthwith the scholar struck up a magnificent tenor snore. However, the captain still entertained some slight grudge against him. “So much the worse for thee if the dust-cart come and shovel thee up in passing,” said he to the poor, slumbering student; and he went on his way.

The man with the cloak, who still dogged his footsteps, halted a moment as if struggling with some resolve; then, heaving a deep sigh, he went on after the soldier.

Like them, we will leave Jehan sleeping under the friendly eye of heaven, and, with the reader’s permission, follow their steps.

On turning into the Rue Saint-Andrè-des-Arcs, Captain Phœbus perceived that some one was following him. Happening to glance behind him, he saw a sort of shade creeping after him along the wall. He stopped; he went on, the shade also moved forward. However, it caused him but little uneasiness. “Ah, bah!” he said to himself, “I haven’t a sou on me.”

In front of the College d’Autun he made a halt. It was here that he had shuffled through what he was pleased to call his studies, and from a naughty school-boy habit which still clung to him he never passed the College without offering to the statue of Cardinal Pierre Bertram, which stood to the right of the entrance, that kind of affront of which Priapus complains so bitterly in Horace’s satire: “Olim truncus eram ficulnus.” He therefore paused as usual at the effigy of the cardinal. The street was perfectly empty. As he was preparing to proceed on his way, he saw the shadow approaching him slowly; so slowly that he had the leisure to observe that it wore a cloak and a hat. Arrived at his side, it stopped and stood as motionless as the statue of the cardinal; but it fixed on Phœbus a pair of piercing eyes which gleamed with the strange light that the pupils of a cat give forth at night.