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When I am tired, he says, and the plot of which I am hero, villain and Greek chorus suddenly vanish from my mind, I pause and look at something behind plate glass. A bauble catches my eye. Long minutes, half hours pass. There is a marvelous plentitude of baubles to look at. Machines digging, excavations, scaffoldings, advertisements, never are lacking.
And how fearful would be the avalanche; a broken forest of scaffoldings, a hail of stonework, rushing and bounding through the dust and smoke on to the roofs below; whilst the violence of the shock would threaten the whole of Montmartre, which, it seemed likely, must stagger and sink in one huge mass of ruins! However, Guillaume had again risen.
It was found in a very dirty and disorderly condition, encumbered with benches, scaffoldings, stakes, gibbets, and all the machinery used for public executions upon the market-place. A vast body of men went to work with a will; scrubbing, cleaning, whitewashing, and removing all the foul lumber of the hall; singing in chorus, as they did so, the hymns of Clement Marot.
In the house-painting line it often happens that a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough to get a job as night watchman. But that's over, he's been turned away from everywhere, and, for two months now, he's been lying in this nook waiting to die.
At last the scaffoldings of the lofty engines appeared: carrobalistas, onagers, catapults and scorpions, rocking on chariots drawn by mules and quadrigas of oxen; and in proportion as the army drew out, the captains ran panting right and left to deliver commands, close up the files, and preserve the intervals.
Day after day the work went on. Scaffoldings were raised paper and plastering torn off boards were seasoning in the sun shingles lying upon the ground ladders raised against the wall; and all this while the two new graves showed not a blade of grass, and the earth looked black and fresh as it did when first it was placed there.
So they came to a little run-down park that looked old enough to have survived the conquest. Then they saw the scaffoldings. And there were twelve shapes hanging from ropes and meat-hooks. As they neared, a flock of fat revolting-looking birds arose and complained as they fluttered away.
You may tell me that the terra-cotta constructions within it carry ugliness beyond a joke; you may tell me that in spite of the park's vaunted situation nothing can be seen from it save the chimneys and kilns of earthenware manufactories, the scaffoldings of pitheads, the ample dome of the rate-collector's offices, the railway, minarets of non-conformity, sundry undulating square miles of monotonous house-roofs, the long scarves of black smoke which add such interest to the sky of the Five Towns and, of course, the gold angel.
Not whether he was gentleman or clown rich or poor soldier or sailor. Was he never, then, in those fleets that brought the marbles back from the ravaged Isles of Greece? was he at first only a labourer's boy among the scaffoldings of the Pisan apse, his apron loaded with dust and no man praising him for his speech?
A little crowd had already assembled to see the ladders raised and the scaffoldings put up. The steward advancing politely with his stick to drive the dog away, saw the lady start, and heard her exclaim to herself amazedly: "You here, you beast! Can Nanina have come back to Pisa?" This last exclamation gave the steward, as a gallant man, an excuse for speaking to the elegant stranger.
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