warning off the most pressing by a significant gesture--

"Are you still befooled by his tricks, fools that you are? Yes, no doubt
there was a fire in the cellar last night, no doubt his creditors will be
geese enough to let him off paying his debts! But what you don't know
is, that he didn't really lose by it at all!"

"He lost all his goods!" the crowd cried on all sides. "More than nine
thousand livres! Oil and brandy, do you think those won't burn? The old
witch, she drinks enough to know! If one put a candle near her she would
take fire, fast enough!"

"Perhaps," replied the woman, with renewed gesticulations, "perhaps; but
I don't advise any of you to try. Anyhow, this fellow here is a rogue;
he has been emptying his cellar for the last three nights; there were
only old empty casks in it and empty packing-cases! Oh yes! I have
swallowed his daily lies like everybody else, but I know the truth by
now. He got his liquor taken away by Michael Lambourne's son, the
cobbler in the rue de la Parcheminerie. How do I know? Why, because the
young man came and told me!"

"I turned that woman out of my shop a month ago, for stealing," said
Derues.

Notwithstanding this retaliatory accusation, the woman's bold assertion
might have changed the attitude of the crowd and chilled the enthusiasm,
but at that moment a stout man pressed forward, and seizing the hawker by
the arm, said--

"Go, and hold your tongue, backbiting woman!"