Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions’ whips, which twined snakelike about their heads in the evening air, as if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him. He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before Monseigneur of the Court⁠—only the difference was, that these faces drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate⁠—when a grizzled mender of the roads joined the group.

“Bring me hither that fellow!” said the Marquis to the courier.