and half closed, looked down disdainfully on the crowd.

"There goes a remarkably good-looking young man," said a girl in a low
voice, as she made way for him to pass.

"And who is only too well aware of it!" replied her companion aloud
--who was very plain.

After walking all round the arcades, the young man looked by turns at
the sky and at his watch, and with a shrug of impatience went into a
tobacconist's shop, lighted a cigar, and placed himself in front of a
looking-glass to glance at his costume, which was rather more ornate
than the rules of French taste allow. He pulled down his collar and
his black velvet waistcoat, over which hung many festoons of the thick
gold chain that is made at Venice; then, having arranged the folds of
his cloak by a single jerk of his left shoulder, draping it gracefully
so as to show the velvet lining, he started again on parade,
indifferent to the glances of the vulgar.

As soon as the shops were lighted up and the dusk seemed to him black
enough, he went out into the square in front of the Palais-Royal, but
as a man anxious not to be recognized; for he kept close under the
houses as far as the fountain, screened by the hackney-cab stand, till
he reached the Rue Froid-Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street
--a sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified
purlieus of the Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a
careless servant to leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of
the staircase.

The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen's wife