le Surveillant's opinion,
while the audience roared and rocked with laughter of a somewhat
ferocious sort. I have rarely seen the Surveillant so pleased with
himself as after producing this _bon mot_. Only fear of his superior, the
ogre-like Directeur, kept him from letting off entirely all concerned in
what after all (from the European point of view) was an essentially human
proceeding. As nobody could prove anything about Meme, he was not locked
up in a dungeon; but he lost his job of sweeper--which was quite as bad,
I am sure, from his point of view--and from that day became a common
inhabitant of The Enormous Room like any of the rest of us.
His successor, Garibaldi, was a corker.
How the Almighty French Government in its Almighty Wisdom ever found
Garibaldi a place among us is more than I understand or ever will. He was
a little tot in a faded blue-grey French uniform; and when he perspired
he pushed a _kepi_ up and back from his worried forehead which a lock of
heavy hair threateningly overhung. As I recollect Garibaldi's terribly
difficult, not to say complicated, lineage, his English mother had
presented him to his Italian father in the country of France. However
this trilogy may be, he had served at various times in the Italian,
French and English armies.
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