It was a curious thing to see the father and the son standing together: the one with his great, powerful, well-developed limbs, and the other with his minute and apparently slender form. One could hardly believe that the one was the offspring of the other. Yet so it was. Maître Simon was the father of that deformed dwarf, whose appearance would have been quite sufficient to draw the hooting boys of Paris after him when he appeared in the streets, had not the vigor and unmerciful severity of his father's arm kept even the little vagabonds of the most turbulent city in the world in awe.
That which might seem most strange, though in reality it was not so at all, was the doting fondness of the stern, powerful father for that misshapen child. It seems a rule of Nature, that where she refuses to any one the personal attractions which, often undeservedly, command regard, she places in the bosom of some other kindred being that strong affection which generously gives gratuitously the love for which there seems so little claim.
The father and the son had obtained, first from the boys of the town, and then from elder people, the nicknames of the big Caboche and the little Caboche, and, with a good-humor very common in France, they had themselves adopted these epithets without offense; so that the cutler was constantly addressed by his companions merely as Caboche, and had even placed that title over his door. During the hours when he tended his shop, or was engaged in the manual labors of his trade, the boy was almost always with him, limping round him, making observations upon every thing, and enlivening his father's occupations by a sort of pungent wit, perhaps a little smacking of buffoonery, which, if not a gift, could be nowhere so well acquired as in the streets of Paris, and in which the hard spirit of the cutler greatly delighted.
Nevertheless, the characters of the father and the son were not less strongly in contrast than their corporeal frames. Notwithstanding an occasional moroseness and acerbity, perhaps engendered by a sad comparison of his own physical powers with those of others of his age, there was in the boy's nature a fund of kindly sympathies and gentle affections, which characterized his actions more than his words: and as we all love contrasts, the secret of his father's strong affection for him might be, in part, the opposition between their several dispositions.
It was about three o'clock in the day, the hour when Parisians are most abroad; but the cold kept many within doors, and but one person had stopped at the booth to buy.
"Trade is ruined," said big Caboche, in a grumbling tone. "No business is doing. The king's sickness and his brother's influence have utterly destroyed the trade of the city. Armorers, and embroiderers, and dealers in idle goldsmiths' work, may make a living; but no one else can gain his bread. There has not been a single soul in the shop this morning, except an old woman who wanted an ax to cut her meat, because it was frozen."
"My father," replied the boy, "it was not the king nor the Duke of Orleans that made the Seine freeze, or pinched old Joaquim's nose, or burned old Jeannette's flannel coat, or kept any of the folks in who would have been out if it had not been so cold. Don't you see there is nobody in the street but those who have only one coat, and that a thin one. They come out because the frosty sunshine is better than no shine at all; and, though they keep their hands in their pockets, they won't draw them out, because you won't let them have goods without money, and they have not money to buy goods. But here comes Cousin Martin, as fine as a popinjay. It must have snowed feathers, I think, to have clothed his back so gayly."
"Ah, the scapegrace!" exclaimed Caboche "I should think that he had just been plundering some empty-headed master, if my pot had not reason to know that he has had no master to plunder for these last three months. Well, Master Never-do-well, what brings you here in such smart plumes? Violet and yellow, with a silver lace, upon my life! If you are so fully fledged, methinks you can pick up your own grain without coming to mine."
"And so I can, and so I will, uncle," replied our friend Martin Grille, pausing at the entrance of the booth to look at himself from head to foot, in evident admiration of his own appearance. "Did you ever see any thing fit better? Upon my life, it is a perfect marvel that any man should ever have been made so perfectly like me as to have worn these clothes before, without the slightest alteration! Nobody would believe it."
"Nobody will believe they are your own, Cousin Martin," said the deformed boy, with a grin.
"But they are my own, Petit Jean," answered Martin Grille, with a very grand air; "for I have bought them, and paid for them; and though they may have been stolen, for aught I know, before I had them, I had no hand in the stealing, foi de valet."
"Ah," said Caboche, dryly, "men always gave you credit for more ingenuity than you possess, and they will in this instance also. I always said you were a good-humored, foolish, hair-brained lad, without wit enough to take a bird's nest or bamboozle a goose; but people would not believe me, even when you were clad in hodden gray. What will they think now, when you dance about in silk and broadcloth?"
"Why they'll think, good uncle, that I have all the wit they imagined, and all the honesty you knew me to have. But I'll tell you all about it, that my own relations, at least, may have cause to glorify themselves."
"Get you gone--get you gone," cried the cutler, in a rough, but not ill-humored tone. "I don't want to know how you got the clothes."
"Tell me, Martin, tell me," said the boy; "I should like to hear, of all things. Perhaps I may get some in the same way, some day."
"Mayhap," answered Martin Grille, seating himself on a bench, and kindly putting his arm round the deformed boy's neck. "Well, you must know, Petit Jean, that there is a certain Signor Lomelini, who is maître d'hôtel to his highness the Duke of Orleans--"
"Big Caboche growled out a curse between his teeth; for while pretending to occupy himself with other things, he was listening to the tale all the time, and the Duke of Orleans was with him an object of that strange, fanciful, prejudiced hatred, which men of inferior station very often conceive, without the slightest cause, against persons placed above them.
"Well, this Signor Lomelini--"
"There, there," cried Caboche; "we know all about that long ago. How his mule put its foot into a hole in the street, and tumbled him head over heels into the gutter, and you picked him out, and scraped, and wiped him, and took him back clean and sound, though desperately frightened, and a little bruised. We recollect all about that, and what gay day-dreams you built up, and thought your fortune made. Has he recollected you at last, and given you a cast off suit of clothes? He has been somewhat tardy in his gratitude, and niggardly, too."
"All wrong, uncle mine, all wrong!" replied Martin Grille, laughing. "There has been hardly a day on which I have not seen him since, and when I hav'n't dined with you, I have dined at the Hôtel d'Orleans. He found out what you never found out: that I was dexterous, serviceable, and discreet, and many has been the little job which required dispatch and secrecy which I have done for him."
"Ay, dirty work, I trow," growled Caboche; but Martin Grille proceeded with his tale, without heeding his uncle's accustomed interruptions.
"Well, Signor Lomelini always promised," he said, "to get me rated on the duke's household. There was a prospect for a penniless lad, Petit Jean!"
"As well get you posted in the devil's kitchen," said Caboche, "and make you Satan's turnspit."
"But are you placed--but are you placed?" cried the deformed boy, eagerly.
"You shall hear all in good time," answered Martin Grille. "He promised, as I have said, to get me rated as soon as there was any vacancy; but the devil seemed in all the people. Not one of them would die, except old Angelo, the squire of the stirrup, and Monsieur De Gray, the duke's secretary. But those places were far too high for me."
"I see not why they should be," answered the deformed boy, "except that the squire is expected to fight at his lord's side, and the secretary to write for him; and I fancy, Cousin Martin, thou wouldst make as bad