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to hear people laughing at him, it was fine to feel them slap his shoulder and tell him he was a young rascal.
    ‘I’m a Blançard - I’m a Blançard.’
    The smell of the market was good too, the sight of the stalls, the familiar cries. Cheese, leeks, carrots, sausages, liver, fat over-ripe plums - all of these mingled together, and a blue silk handkerchief, a coloured carpet, green glass beads jingling on a string, white dust of the cobbled stones, a cart rumbling by. A packet of straw blowing past in a litter of paper, somebody laughing, a large-breasted woman shaking her hips, a whiff of cigarette smoke borne on the wind, workmen in their blue overalls clattering by on clogs, smiling at a dark girl with gold ear-rings, blue sky, and the white clouds flying. ‘I’m happy,’ thought Julius. ‘I’m happy,’ and his hands closed over a pile of sous, round and small, chinking together, his own sous that belonged to him. ‘Will it always be like this? Will there be other things? Shall I be old one day?’
    He closed his eyes, the better to breathe, the better to smell - the better to feel the rough edges of his money.
    ‘Which is best to handle,’ he wondered, ‘the chinking hard coins or the warm furry body of my cat? That is a very difficult question. Whom do I like best? What do I want most in the world? Why was I born at all?’
    But the voice of Grandpère broke in upon him. ‘Wake up, you slacker, you dreamer.Those who do not work cannot expect to eat, and those who do not eat will never grow tall. Don’t you hope to be a man one day?’
    So Julius must lean forward in the stall, his eyes sharp, his hands busy.
    The days went past the same as they had always done, and then in a flash as it seemed to Julius there came a morning that for the first time in his life was different to all other mornings, a morning when Grandpère and Père came home from the Halles at seven o’clock, instead of going straight to the market, came clattering over the cobbled stones of the narrow street, the cart empty of produce. Mère, ready dressed, fastening the pin of her petticoat, thrust her head out of the window, Julius beside her.
    ‘But what is it?’ she called in amazement, ‘what in the world are you doing here at this time?’ Then she trailed off in the middle of her sentence, she saw Paul Lévy shrug his shoulders, indifferent and resigned, she saw Jean Blançard stare up at her with his big blue eyes bewildered like a child, his mouth open, his hands outstretched.
    ‘They’ve turned us away,’ he said; ‘everywhere there are soldiers, nothing but soldiers. The Halles are guarded, nobody was allowed inside - soldiers with bayonets stood there. In Neuilly, in Courbevoie, in Boulogne - in all the villages the people are flying from the Prussians, leaving their homes. The soldiers could not tell us anything. All we know is that the barriers are guarded - every gate in Paris will be closed. Soon nobody will be allowed to go in or come out.There are soldiers, I tell you, soldiers everywhere. None knows what it is all about or how long it will last.’ He broke off into a torrent of curses and abuses, curses against the Government, against the soldiers, against the people of Paris themselves.
    ‘Can’t they leave us in peace?’ he shouted. ‘What do they want to meddle with us for, what have we to do with their dirty bloody wars? How are we going to live? What is going to happen to us, to Julius?’
    Mère still leant from her window, frowning, perplexed. She twisted her hands, looking from one face to the other.
    ‘Still I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘why all this fuss, all these precautions? The wife of the baker told me yesterday the Government were going to send the Prussians away. I don’t understand.’
    Then Julius watched Père climb down from the cart and walk towards the window, taking no notice of Grandpère, of the old man’s fury and string of words, but he came to where Mère was leaning