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By Root 1707 0

their handlebars, to meet the arrivals by the morning trains. The whirring of a violin was due at one time to the passing of a car, at another to my not having put enough water in my electric hot-water bottle. In the middle of the symphony an old-fashioned tune rang out; replacing the sweet-seller, who generally accompanied her song with a rattle, the toy-seller, to whose kazoo was attached a jumping-jack which he sent bobbing in all directions, paraded other puppets for sale, and, indifferent to the ritual declamation of Gregory the Great, the reformed declamation of Palestrina or the lyrical declamation of the moderns, warbled at the top of his voice, a belated adherent of pure melody:

Come along all you mammies and dads,

Here’s toys for your lasses and lads!

I make them myself,

And I pocket the pelf.

Tralala, tralala, tralalee.

Come along youngsters …

Making no attempt to compete with this lively aria, little Italians in berets offered their statuettes for sale in silence. Soon, however, a young fifer compelled the toy merchant to move on and to chant more inaudibly, though in brisk time: “Come along all you mammies and dads!” Was this young fifer one of the dragoons whom I used to hear in the mornings at Donciéres? No, for what followed was: “Here comes the china restorer. I repair glass, marble, crystal, bone, ivory and antiques. Here comes the restorer.” In a butcher’s shop, between an aureole of sunshine on the left and a whole ox suspended from a hook on the right, a young assistant, very tall and slender, with fair hair and a long neck emerging from a sky-blue collar, was displaying a lightning speed and a religious conscientiousness in putting on one side the most exquisite fillets of beef, on the other the coarsest parts of the rump, and placing them on glittering scales surmounted by a cross from which there dangled a set of beautiful chains, and—although he did nothing afterwards but arrange in the window a display of kidneys, steaks and ribs—was really far more reminiscent of a handsome angel who, on the Day of Judgment, will organise for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the wicked and the weighing of souls. And once again the thin, shrill music of the fife rose into the air, herald no longer of the destruction that Françoise used to dread whenever a regiment of cavalry filed past, but of “repairs” promised by an “antiquary,” simpleton or rogue, who, in either case highly eclectic and very far from specialising, applied his art to the most diverse materials. The little bakers’ girls hastened to stuff into their baskets the long loaves ordered for some luncheon party, while the dairymaids deftly attached the milk-churns to their yokes. Could it, I wondered, be altogether warranted, the nostalgic view I had of these young creatures? Would it not have been different if I had been able to detain for a few moments at close quarters one of those whom from the height of my window I saw only inside their shops or in motion? To estimate the loss that I suffered by my seclusion, that is to say the riches that the day had to offer me, I should have had to intercept in the long unwinding of the animated frieze some damsel carrying her laundry or her milk, transfer her for a moment, like the silhouette of a mobile piece of stage decor between its supports, into the frame of my door, and keep her there before my eyes for long enough to elicit some information about her which would enable me to find her again some day, like the identification discs which ornithologists or ichthyologists attach before setting them free to the legs or bellies of the birds or fishes whose migrations they are anxious to trace.

And so I told Françoise that I wanted some shopping done, and asked her to send up to me, should any of them call, one or other of the girls who were constantly coming to the house with laundry or bread or jugs of milk, and whom she herself used often to send on errands. In doing so I was like Elstir, who, obliged to remain closeted in his studio, on certain days in spring when