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“Ay, that’s it,” said old Sariette, who had his eye on the Lucretius the whole time; “that’s the trace those invisible monsters left behind them.”
“What, there were several of them, Monsieur Sariette?” exclaimed Maurice.
“I cannot tell. But I don’t know whether I have a right to have this blot removed since, hike the blot Paul Louis Courier made on the Florentine manuscript, it constitutes a literary document, so to speak.”
Scarcely were the words out of the old fellow’s mouth when the front door bell rang and there was a confused noise of voices and footsteps in the next toom. Sariette ran forward at the sound and collided with Père Guinardon’s mistress, old Zephyrine, who, with her tousled hair sticking up like a nest of vipers, her face aflame, her bosom heaving, her abdominal part like an eiderdown quilt puffed out by a terrific gale, was choking with grief and rage. And amid sobs and sighs and groans and all the innumerable sounds which, on earth, make up the mighty uproar to which the emotions of living beings and the tumult of nature give rise, she cried:
“He’s gone, the monster! He’s gone off with her. He’s cleared out the whole shanty and left me to shift for myself with eighteenpence in my purse.”
And she proceeded to give a long and incoherent account of how Michel Guinardon had abandoned
