glasses. Though quickly and lightly done, the old man might, perhaps,
have felt the theft, if Vermichel had not happened to appear at that
moment.

"Tonsard, do you know where you father is?" called that functionary
from the foot of the steps.

Vermichel's shout, the theft of the money, and the emptying of old
Fourchon's glass, were simultaneous.

"Present, captain!" cried Fourchon, holding out a hand to Vermichel to
help him up the steps.

Of all Burgundian figures, Vermichel would have seemed to you the most
Burgundian. The practitioner was not red, he was scarlet. His face,
like certain tropical portions of the globe, was fissured, here and
there, with small extinct volcanoes, defined by flat and greenish
patches which Fourchon called, not unpoetically, the "flowers of
wine." This fiery face, the features of which were swelled out of
shape by continual drunkenness, looked cyclopic; for it was lighted on
the right side by a gleaming eye, and darkened on the other by a
yellow patch over the left orb. Red hair, always tousled, and a beard
like that of Judas, made Vermichel as formidable in appearance as he
was meek in reality. His prominent nose looked like an
interrogation-mark, to which the wide-slit mouth seemed to be always
answering, even when it did not open. Vermichel, a short man, wore
hob-nail shoes, bottle-green velveteen trousers, an old waistcoat
patched with diverse stuffs which seemed to have been originally made
of a counterpane, a jacket of coarse blue cloth and a gray hat with a
broad brim. All this luxury, required by the town of Soulanges where