êtes le diable!_"

As we walk under the arbor and by the great trees, towards the cottage,
Lucette following with the oars, I inquire after monsieur, and find that
he is in the city, and very well and very busy, and will return at
sundown. He has a shop of his own in the upper part where he makes
_passe-partouts_. Here, at his home, madame maintains a simple
restaurant for tramps like me.

These delightful people are old friends of mine, François Laguerre and
his wife and their only child Lucette. They have lived here for nearly a
quarter of a century. He is a straight, silver-haired old Frenchman of
sixty, who left Paris, between two suns, nearly forty years ago, with a
gendarme close at his heels, a red cockade under his coat, and an
intense hatred in his heart for that "little nobody," Napoleon III.

If you met him on the boulevard you would look for the decoration on his
lapel, remarking to yourself, "Some retired officer on half pay." If you
met him at the railway station opposite, you would say, "A French
professor returning to his school." Both of these surmises are partly
wrong, and both partly right. Monsieur Laguerre has had a history. One
can see by the deep lines in his forehead and by the firm set of his
eyes and mouth that it has been an eventful one.

His wife is a few years his junior, short and stout, and thoroughly
French down to the very toes of her felt slippers. She is devoted to
François and Lucette, the best of cooks, and, in spite of her scoldings,
good-nature itself. As soon as she hears me calling, there arise before
her the visions of many delightful dinners prepared for me by her own
hand and ready to the minute--all spoiled by my belated sketches. So