He informed me with great sorrow of the death of the leader of the Cherbourg bar. “He was an old retainer,” he said (meaning probably “campaigner”) and gave me to understand that his end had been hastened by the quickness, otherwise the fastness, of his life. “For some time past I noticed that after dinner he would take a doss in the reading-room” (take a doze, presumably). “The last times, he was so changed that if you hadn’t known who it was, to look at him, he was barely recognisant” (presumably, recognisable).

A happy compensation: the chief magistrate of Caen had just received his “bags” (badge) as Commander of the Legion of Honour. “Surely to goodness, he has capacities, but seems they gave him it principally because of his general ‘impotence.’ ” There was a mention of this decoration, as it happened, in the previous day’s Echo de Paris , of which the manager had as yet read only “the first paradox” (meaning paragraph). The paper dealt admirably with M.