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dulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.
‘What’s this? What’s this? Lord God! He’s battering the
door down! He’s knocking the house down.’
The kicks continued.
The old woman strained her lungs.
‘Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?’
All at once she paused.
She had recognized the gamin.
‘What! so it’s that imp!’
‘Why, it’s the old lady,’ said the lad. ‘Good day, Bougon-
muche. I have come to see my ancestors.’
The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and
a wonderful improvisation of hatred taking advantage of
feebleness and ugliness, which was, unfortunately, wasted
in the dark:—
‘There’s no one here.’
‘Bah!’ retorted the boy, ‘where’s my father?’
‘At La Force.’
‘Come, now! And my mother?’
‘At Saint-Lazare.’
‘Well! And my sisters?’
‘At the Madelonettes.’
The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at
Ma’am Bougon, and said:—
‘A h! ’
Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later,
the old woman, who had remained on the door-step, heard
him singing in his clear, young voice, as he plunged under
the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:—