shop, some of them laughing fit to split. So that at last a police agent came up and asked us to settle it before the commissary. We went, and he dismissed the case. Since then I get my meat elsewhere, and don’t even pass his door, in order to avoid his slanders.”
She ceased talking, and Duroy asked: “Is that all?”
“It is the whole truth, sir,” and having offered him a glass of cordial, which he declined, the old woman insisted on the short weight of the butcher being spoken of in the report.
On his return to the office, Duroy wrote his reply:
“An anonymous scribbler in the Plume seeks to pick a quarrel with me on the subject of an old woman whom he states was arrested by an agent des mœurs , which fact I deny. I have myself seen Madame Aubert—who is at least sixty years of age—and she told me in detail her quarrel with the butcher over the weighing of some chops,