After his discharge from prison, Crainquebille trundled his barrow along the Rue Montmartre, crying: ‘Cabbages! Turnips! Carrots!’ He was neither ashamed nor proud of his adventure. The memory of it was not painful. He classed it in his mind with dreams, travels, and plays. But, above all things, he was glad to be walking in the mud, along the paved streets, and to see overhead the rainy sky as dirty as the gutter, the dear sky of the town. At every corner he stopped to have a drink; then, gay and unconstrained, spitting in his hands in order to moisten his horny palms, he would seize the shafts and push on his barrow. Meanwhile a flight of sparrows, as poor and as early as he, seeking their livelihood in the road, flew off at the sound of his familiar cry: ‘Cabbages! Turnips! Carrots!’ An old housewife, who had come up, said to him as she felt his celery:

‘What’s happened to you, Père Crainquebille? We haven’t seen you for three weeks. Have you been ill? You look rather pale.’

‘I’ll tell you M’ame Mailloche, I’ve been doing the gentleman.’

Nothing in his life changed, except that he went oftener to the pub, because he had an idea it was a holiday and that he had made the acquaintance of charitable folk. He returned to his garret rather gay. Stretched on his mattress he drew over him the sacks borrowed from the chestnut-seller at the corner which served him as blankets and he pondered: ‘Well, prison is not so bad; one has everything one wants there. But all the same one is better at home.’

His contentment did not last long. He soon perceived that his customers looked at him askance.

‘Fine celery, M’ame Cointreau!’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘What! nothing! do you live on air then?’

And M’ame Cointreau without deigning to reply returned to the large bakery of which she was the mistress. The shopkeepers and caretakers, who had once flocked round his barrow all green and blooming, now turned away from him. Having reached the shoemaker’s, at the sign of l’Ange Gardien, the place where his adventures with justice had begun, he called:

‘M’ame Bayard, M’ame Bayard, you owe me sevenpence halfpenny from last time.’

But M’ame Bayard, who was sitting at her counter, did not deign to turn her head.

The whole of the Rue Montmartre was aware that Père Crainquebille had been in prison, and the whole of the Rue Montmartre gave up his acquaintance. The rumour of his conviction had reached the Faubourg and the noisy corner of the Rue Richer. There, about noon, he perceived Madame Laure, a kind and faithful customer, leaning over the barrow of another costermonger, young Martin. She was feeling a large cabbage. Her hair shone in the sunlight like masses of golden threads loosely twisted. And young Martin, a nobody, a good-for-nothing, was protesting with his hand on his heart that there were no finer vegetables than his. At this sight Crainquebille’s heart was rent. He pushed his barrow up to young Martin’s, and in a plaintive broken voice said to Madame Laure: ‘It’s not fair of you to forsake me’.

As Madame Laure herself admitted, she was no duchess. It was not in society that she had acquired her ideas of the prison van and the police-station. But can one not be honest in every station in life? Every one has his self-respect; and one does not like to deal with a man who has just come out of prison. So the only notice she took Crainquebille was to give him a look of disgust. And the old costermonger resenting the affront shouted:

‘Dirty wench, go along with you.’

Madame Laure let fall her cabbage and cried: