of the silt of the Basins, his stomach already swarming with eels?
He excited, on the contrary, among this rabble a sort of superstitious respect and deferential sympathy. They had, moreover, tried him out, and he had come through because of his discretion. The spirit of contumacy brought together the declassed youth and those without the pale of the law.
To flatter and tickle their instinct of combativeness, to justify their life on the fringe of society in their own eyes, to stretch their riotous feelings, to excite their red-blooded bodies to rape, pillage and murderous frenzy, he told them about his reading, during calm hours, transposed Shakespeare for their understanding; Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, but especially the perpetual homicides of the Wars of the Roses, kings and queens of sinful days, stags with horns always gory, spotted with heroism.
More than once, leaving one of these readings, awakened by the vehement acclamation, the quivering of their gladitorial bodies, the fluid of these souls as irresponsible as nature herself, it seemed to him that his dream had just poured itself into reality.
It was among the young runners that the pigeon breeders recruited their youths on the Sundays when races were held. It befell Laurent to enter these relays and, clutching between his teeth the corner of the bag that held the winning dove, to run barefoot, his limbs as elastic as those of a hero of the palæstra.
He discovered the photographer charged by the courts with perpetuating the images of criminals at the issue of their trials, and procured for himself proofs of the entire collection. He became absorbed, with a bitter joy, in the contemplation of that gallery
