in the most sedate manner, and scuttled off in the direction of the Alcazar d’Été, the Ambassadeurs, the Moulin Rouge, and the very gayest quarter of Paris.

[6]

Monsieur Bouchard was sitting on the balcony at the time. He was rather younger looking, with his clean-shaven face and wiry figure, than most men of his age, but thanks to Mademoiselle Céleste, he patronized the same tailors that had made for his father and his grandfather. Their cut and style indicated that they had been tailors to Cardinal Richelieu and others of that time, and they dressed Monsieur Bouchard in coats and trousers and waistcoats of the pliocene age of tailoring. As for his hats, they might have been dug out of Pompeii, for any modernity they had, and the result was that Monsieur Bouchard’s back and legs looked about seventy-five, while his face looked little more than forty.

Instead of giving the alarm when Pierrot trotted gaily off, Monsieur[7] Bouchard felt a strange thrill of sympathy with the runaway.

[7]

“Poor devil!” thought he. “No doubt he is sick of the Rue Clarisse—tired of the moral maxims—weary of the whole business. He isn’t so young as he was, but there’s a good deal of life in him still”—Pierrot was just scampering around the corner—“and he wants to see life.”

“There is a psychologic moment for everything,” so Otto von Bismarck said. The parrot’s escape made a psychologic moment for Monsieur Bouchard, and quietly putting on his hat, and telling Mademoiselle Bouchard that he was going to a meeting of the Society of French Antiquarians at St. Germains, and afterward for a stroll through the museum in the town, made straight for a street in the neighborhood of the Champs[8] Élysées. He remembered seeing in that quarter a handsome new apartment house lately finished and thoroughly modern. He had for curiosity’s sake entered it. He had seen furnished apartments so bright, so light, so cheery, so merry that he longed to establish himself there. He had gone back once, twice, thrice, each time more infatuated with the place. To-day he walked in, selected a vacant apartment, and in ten minutes had taken a lease of it for a year.

[8]

And then he had to go back to the Rue Clarisse to tell about it.

Of course, he had not thrown off the yoke of thirty years without secret alarms, agitations and palpitations. He walked up and down the Rue Clarisse 

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