When I was eight years old and used to play in the Luxembourg Gardens, there was one who came and sat in a sentry-box, against the railing which runs along the rue Auguste-Comte. He didn’t speak, but every now and then he would stretch his leg out and look at his foot with a terrified expression. This foot wore a boot, but the other foot was in a slipper. The keeper told my uncle that the man was a former schoolmaster. He had been retired because he had turned up to read out the marks at the end of term dressed as an academician. We were terribly afraid of him because we sensed that he was alone. One day he smiled at Robert, holding his arms out to him from a distance: Robert nearly fainted. It wasn’t the fellow’s poverty-stricken appearance which frightened us, nor the tumour he had on his neck which rubbeAnd it terrified against the edge of his collar: but we felt that he was shaping crab-like or lobster-like thoughts in his head. And it terrified us to think that somebody could have lobster-like thoughts about the sentry-box, about our hoops, about the bushes.