While we were talking an old man-older and more bent and
wrinkled even than the woman-appeared from behind the shanty. "Here
is Pierre," said she. "M'sieur can hear stories now if he wishes,
for Pierre was in everything, from the Bastille to Waterloo." The
old man took another stool at my request and we plunged into a sea
of revolutionary reminiscences. This old man, albeit clothed like a
scare-crow, was like any one of the six veterans.
I was now sitting in the centre of the low hut with the woman on
my left hand and the man on my right, each of them being somewhat
in front of me. The place was full of all sorts of curious objects
of lumber, and of many things that I wished far away. In one corner
was a heap of rags which seemed to move from the number of vermin
it contained,
