Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SWEET SMELLER In 1870, Eugene Cauchoit, nicknamed the Sweet Smeller, was living in the rue des Couronnes, in a house that contained sixty-three families. He was a leather-dresser and the smell of his working clothes,— no worse, perhaps, than that of the staircase he climbed so often,—had brought him this worthy designation. He wasn't at all a bad sort. During the Siege, the Sweet Smeller had no job, and began by being delighted to earn thirty sous a day in the national guard, but he soon became obsessed by the fear of stopping a bullet by the wall of Pere- Lachaise. Old Moreau, one of his neighbours, was also in the national guard, and he had no job either, for his trade was cleaning out cesspools, and, as he said, " Those places don't fill up very fast, while the siege is on." Out of those sixty-three families who lived in the house in the rue des Couronnes, only three people escaped the" bullets of the Versailles people: two old women who were wounded, and Eugene Jr., the Sweet Smeller's youngest child. The sombre glory of the riot mounted guard, gnawing its fists over the heroes slaughtered for the God of their kind: Revolution. Life resumed its usual pace again, and when our martyr's destitute son was asked by his cronies to spend a sou, he always said, " But I haven't a pttaudl" So he came to be called Pelaud in the neighbourhood where he passed his dreary childhood. His only pleasure was to scream, " To hell with the police! " And never did enthusiasm for a new religion take such complete possession of the minds of its devotees as did hatred of the police that of this little savage. But he never got into any trouble, and with the help of some neighbours later on he set up as a lamp-maker: hand-lamps and carriage-lamps. And he earned from forty to fifty fr... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.