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Updated: May 31, 2025
If I go out I find the streets full of people, and, when I am tired of walking, I go into some cafe crowded with smokers and billiard players. I tell you what, it is the life of a galley slave." I said: "Why did you not take up some other line, Monsieur Piquedent?" He exclaimed: "What, my little friend? I am not a shoemaker, or a joiner, or a hatter, or a baker, or a hairdresser.
She was a woman of about twenty, small, rather thin, pale, rather pretty, with a roguish air and laughing eyes beneath her ill-combed fair hair. Pere Piquedent, affected, began murmuring: "What an occupation for a woman! Really a trade only fit for a horse." And he spoke with emotion about the misery of the people.
At the corner of the Rue de Serpent a shop caught my eye. Over the door were the words: "Colonial Products Piquedent;" then underneath, so as to enlighten the most ignorant: "Grocery." I exclaimed: "'Quantum mutatus ab illo!" Piquedent raised his head, left his female customer, and rushed toward me with outstretched hands. "Ah! my young friend, my young friend, here you are!
What luck! what luck!" A beautiful woman, very plump, abruptly left the cashier's desk and flung herself on my breast. I had some difficulty in recognizing her, she had grown so stout. I asked: "So then you're doing well?" Piquedent had gone back to weigh the groceries. "Oh! very well, very well, very well. I have made three thousand francs clear this year!"
"Very well, monsieur, thank you." "Will you have a cigarette?" "Oh! not in the street." "You can smoke it at home." "In that case, I will." "Let me tell you, mademoiselle, there's something you don't know." "What is that, monsieur?" "The old gentleman my old professor, I mean " "Pere Piquedent?" "Yes, Pere Piquedent. So you know his name?" "Faith, I do! What of that?"
These private lessons were given in a little room looking out on the street. It so happened that Pere Piquedent, instead of talking Latin to me, as he did when teaching publicly in the institution, kept telling me his troubles in French. Without relations, without friends, the poor man conceived an attachment to me, and poured out his misery to me.
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