Then, arming himself with a horn-handled knife, he began, with its point, to finish a figure sketched in the handle of his stick.

He complimented himself on it: "I am skilful in all the arts of beggars and vagabonds.

I know how to open locks with a nail, and how to carve wood with a bad knife." The head began to appear.

It was the head of a thin woman, weeping.
Choulette wished to express in it human misery, not simple and touching, such as men of other times may have felt it in a world of mingled harshness and kindness; but hideous, and reflecting the state of ugliness created by the free-thinking bourgeois and the military patriots of the French Revolution.

According to him the present regime embodied only hypocrisy and brutality.
"Their barracks are a hideous invention of modern times.