The vehicle, to which four dappled gray horses were now being harnessed—steeds worthy of the Messageries royales—was in four divisions, the coupé, the intérieur, the rotonde behind, and the imperiale at top. It was identically the same as the diligences called Gondoles, which, in our day, still maintain a rivalry on the Versailles road with two lines of railway. Strong and light, well painted and clean, lined with good blue cloth, furnished with blinds of arabesque design and red morocco cushions, the Hirondelle de l’Oise could carry nineteen travelers. Pierrotin, though he was by this time fifty-six, was little changed. He still wore a blouse over his black coat, and still smoked his short pipe, as he watched two porters in stable-livery piling numerous packages on the roof of his coach.
“Have you taken seats?” he asked of Madame Clapart and Oscar, looking at them as if he were searching his memory for some association of ideas.
“Yes, two inside places, name of Bellejambe, my servant,” said Oscar. “He was to take them when he left the house last evening.”
“Oh, then monsieur is the new collector at Beaumont,” said Pierrotin. “You are going down to take the place of Monsieur Margueron’s nephew?”
“Yes,” replied Oscar, pressing his mother’s arm as a hint to her to say nothing. For now he in his turn wished to remain unknown for a time.
At this instant Oscar was startled by recognizing Georges’ voice calling from the street:
“Have you a seat left, Pierrotin?”
“It strikes me that you might say Monsieur Pierrotin without breaking your jaw,” said the coach-owner angrily.
But for the tone of his voice Oscar could never have recognized the practical joker who had twice brought him such ill-luck. Georges, almost bald, had but three or four locks of hair left above his ears, and carefully combed up to disguise his bald crown as far as possible. A development of fat in the wrong place, a bulbous stomach, had spoiled the elegant figure of the once handsome young man. Almost vulgar in shape and mien, Georges showed the traces of disaster in love, and of a life of constant debauchery, in a spotty red complexion, and thickened, vinous features. His eyes had lost the sparkle and eagerness of youth, which can only be preserved by decorous and studious habits.
Georges, dressed with evident indifference to his appearance, wore a pair of trousers with straps, but shabby, and of a style that demanded patent leather boots; the boots he wore, thick and badly polished, were at least three-quarters of a year old, which is in Paris as much as three years anywhere else. A shabby waistcoat, a tie elaborately knotted, though it was but an old bandanna, betrayed the covert penury to which a decayed dandy may be reduced. To crown all, at this early hour of the day Georges wore a dress-coat instead of a morning-coat, the symptom of positive poverty. This coat, which must have danced at many a ball, had fallen, like its owner, from the opulence it once represented, to the duties of daily scrub. The seams of the black cloth showed white ridges, the collar was greasy, and wear had pinked out the cuffs into a dog’s tooth edge. Still, Georges was bold enough to invite attention by wearing lemon-colored gloves—rather dirty, to be sure, and on one finger the outline of a large ring was visible in black.
Round his tie, of which the ends were slipped through a pretentious gold ring, twined a brown silk chain in imitation of hair, ending no doubt in a watch. His hat, though stuck on with an air, showed more evidently than all these other symptoms the poverty of a man who never has sixteen francs to spend at the hatter’s when he lives from hand to mouth. Florentine’s ci-devant lover flourished a cane with a chased handle, silver-gilt, but horribly dinted. His blue trousers, tartan waistcoat, sky-blue tie, and red-striped cotton shirt, bore witness, in spite of so much squalor, to such a passion for show that the contrast was not merely laughable, but a lesson.
“And this is Georges?” said Oscar to himself. “A man I left in possession of thirty thousand francs a year!”
“Has Monsieur de Pierrotin still a vacant seat in his coupé?” asked Georges ironically.
“No, my coupé is taken by a peer of France, Monsieur Moreau’s son-in-law, Monsieur le Baron de Canalis, with his wife and his mother-in-law. I have only a seat in the body of the coach.”
“The deuce! It would seem that under every form of government peers of France travel in Pierrotin’s conveyances! I will take the seat in the intérieur,” said Georges, with a reminiscence of the journey with Monsieur de Sérizy.
He turned to stare at Oscar and the widow, but recognized neither mother nor son. Oscar was deeply tanned by the African sun; he had a very thick moustache and whiskers; his hollow cheeks and marked features were in harmony with his military deportment. The officer’s rosette, the loss of an arm, the plain dark dress, would all have been enough to mislead Georges’ memory, if indeed he remembered his former victim. As to Madame Clapart, whom he had scarcely seen on the former occasion, ten years spent in pious exercises of the severest kind had absolutely transformed her. No one could have imagined that this sort of Gray Sister hid one of the Aspasias of 1797.
A huge old man, plainly but very comfortably dressed, in whom Oscar recognized old Léger, came up slowly and heavily; he nodded familiarly to Pierrotin, who seemed to regard him with the respect due in all countries to millionaires.
“Heh! why, it is Père Léger! more ponderous than ever!” cried Georges.
“Whom have I the honor of addressing?” asked the farmer
