Page:The fortunes of Fifi (IA fortunesoffifi00seawiala).pdf/83

 his work. He went off, therefore, and had not a minute to himself, until just before it was time to dress for the play. Then he went to his room, and taking his tin box from the chink in the chimney, he counted over his twenty-two francs—saved by doing without food and fire.

Clothes and shoes he must have to keep his place in the theater. Duvernet had been a good friend to him, and he could not go in rags, so that people would say: "There goes one of Duvernet's actors. That man does not pay his people enough to give them decent clothes to their backs."

But food and fire were a man's own affairs, and, by keeping on the near side of both, Cartouche had been able to save twenty-two francs in three weeks of the coldest weather he had ever felt. And how little it was! How contemptible alongside of a hundred thousand francs! Cartouche, sighing, put the box back. It was all in vain: those days when he battled with his hunger, those bitter nights when the snow lay deep on the roofs below his garret, and his old, cracked stove was as cold as the snow. And yet, there had been a tender, piercing sweetness in the very endurance of those privations—it was for Fifi. And Fifi would never more need his savings,