Like most of the places where the elements of the huge meal daily
devoured by Paris are every day prepared, the yard Derville now
entered showed traces of the hurry that comes of the necessity for
being ready at a fixed hour. The large pot-bellied tin cans in which
milk is carried, and the little pots for cream, were flung pell-mell
at the dairy door, with their linen-covered stoppers. The rags that
were used to clean them, fluttered in the sunshine, riddled with
holes, hanging to strings fastened to poles. The placid horse, of a
breed known only to milk-women, had gone a few steps from the cart,
and was standing in front of the stable, the door being shut. A goat
was munching the shoots of a starved and dusty vine that clung to the
cracked yellow wall of the house. A cat, squatting on the cream jars,
was licking them over. The fowls, scared by Derville's approach,
scuttered away screaming, and the watch-dog barked.

"And the man who decided the victory at Eylau is to be found here!"
said Derville to himself, as his eyes took in at a glance the general
effect of the squalid scene.

The house had been left in charge of three little boys. One, who had
climbed to the top of the cart loaded with hay, was pitching stones
into the chimney of a neighboring house, in the hope that they might
fall into a saucepan; another was trying to get a pig into a cart, to
hoist it by making the whole thing tilt. When Derville asked them if
M. Chabert lived there, neither of them replied, but all three looked
at him with a sort of bright stupidity, if I may combine those two
words. Derville repeated his questions, but without success. Provoked
by the saucy cunning of these three imps, he abused them with the sort
of pleasantry which young men think they have the right to address to
little boys, and they broke the silence with a horse-laugh. Then