wishes to make money out of his daughter, this kind of justice costs five
hundred francs; you must give it up, my poor Jeanne."

"Fortune," said the unhappy mother, bursting into tears, "you kill me!"

"And does it not kill me to think of your lot, and that of your family, and
seeing that I can do nothing? I seem always gay; but do not be deceived; I
have two kinds of gayety, Jeanne; my gayety gay, and my gayety sad. I have
neither the strength nor the courage to be bad, angry, nor malicious, as
others are, that always passes over with me in words more or less farcical.
My cowardice and my weakness of body have prevented me from becoming worse
than I am. It needed the chance of this lonely hut, where there was neither
cat, nor, above all, a dog, to have urged me to steal. And then, again, it
chanced to be a fine moonlight night; for alone, and in the dark, I am as
cowardly as the devil!"

"That is what I have always said, my poor Fortune, that you are better than
you think. Thus I hope the judges will have pity on you."

"Pity on me? a returned criminal? reckon on it! After that, I don't wish
it; to be here, there, or elsewhere, all the same to me; and then, you are
right, I am not wicked; and those who are, I hate them, after my fashion,
by making fun of them; you must think that, from relating stories where, to
please my audience, I make it come out that those who torment others from
pure cruelty receive, in the end, their pay, I become accustomed to feel as
I relate."

"Do these people like stories, my brother? I should not have thought it."

"A moment! If I tell them a story where a fellow who robs, or who kills to