The dirty creatures!
Oh! I would give you a package of it for the purpose.
That's an idea!"
Then:
"By the way, you know? Kleber? my little ferret?"
"Yes. Well?"
"Well, I ate him.
Alas! alas!" "He was not very good, was he?"
"Alas! he tasted like bad rabbit."
And that was all the funeral sermon that the poor animal got.
The captain tells me also that a week or two ago he caught a hedge-hog under a wood-pile.
He is engaged in taming him.
He calls him Bourbaki.
Ah! that's an idea!
An intelligent, comical, extraordinary beast that eats everything!
"Yes, indeed!" he exclaims.
"In the same day this confounded hedge-hog has eaten beefsteak, mutton stew, salt bacon, gruyere cheese, and preserves. He is astonishing.
It is impossible to satisfy him. He is like me; he eats everything!"
Just then the little domestic passes the path, with a wheelbarrow full of stones, old sardine-boxes, and a heap of debris, which he is carrying to the refuse-heap.
"Come here!" calls the captain.
And, as, in answer to his question, I tell him that Monsieur has gone hunting, that Madame has gone to town, and that Joseph has gone on an errand, he takes from the wheelbarrow each of the stones, each bit of the debris, and, one after another, throws them into the garden, crying in a loud voice:
"There, pig!
Take that, you wretch!"
The stones fly, the bits of debris fall upon a freshly-worked bed, where Joseph the day before had planted peas.
"Take that!
And this, too!
And here is another, in the bargain!"
The bed, soon covered with debris, becomes a confused heap.
The captain's joy finds expression in a sort of hooting and disorderly gestures. Then, turning up his old grey moustache, he says to me, with a triumphant and rakish air:
"Mademoiselle Celestine, you are a fine girl, for sure!
You must come and see me, when Rose is no longer here, eh?
Ah! that's an idea!"
Well, indeed!
He has no cheek! _____
VIII
October 28.
At last I have received a letter from Monsieur Jean.
It is very dry, this letter.
From reading it, one would think that there never had been any intimacy between us.
Not a word of friendship, not a particle of tenderness, not a recollection!
He tells me only of himself.
If he is to be believed, it seems that Jean has become an important personage.
That is to be seen and felt from the patronizing and somewhat contemptuous air which he assumes toward me at the beginning of his letter.
In short, he writes to me only to astonish me.
I always knew that he was vain,—indeed, he was such a handsome fellow!—but I never realized it so much as to-day.
Men cannot stand success or glory.
Jean is still first valet de chambre in the house of the Countess Fardin, and at this moment the countess is perhaps the most-talked-of woman in France.
To his capacity of valet de chambre Jean adds the role of a participant in political manifestations and of royalist conspirator.
He manifests with Coppee, Lemaitre, Quesnay de Beaurepaire; he conspires with General Mercier,—and all to overturn the republic.
The other evening he accompanied Coppee to a meeting of the