him.”
“I can believe it, for he thoroughly comprehends the abstruse principles of finance.”
“Yes,” said the innkeeper, “and for my part, I am sorry he is a lunatic.”
“A lunatic! What do you mean?”
“Well, crazy, – cracked, as people are when they are insane,” answered Mitouflet. “But he is not dangerous; his wife takes care of him. Have you been arguing with him?” added the pitiless landlord; “that must have been funny!”
“Funny!” cried Gaudissart. “Funny! Then your Monsieur Vernier has been making fun of me!”
“Did he send you there?”
“Yes.”
“Wife! wife! come here and listen. If Monsieur Vernier didn’t take it into his head to send this gentleman to talk to Margaritis!”
“What in the world did you say to each other, my dear, good Monsieur?” said the wife. “Why, he’s crazy!”
“He sold me two casks of wine.”
“Did you buy them?”
“Yes.”
“But that is his delusion; he thinks he sells his wine, and he hasn’t any.”
“Ha!” snorted the traveller, “then I’ll go straight to Monsieur Vernier and thank him.”
And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer, whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom he had already recounted the tale.
“Monsieur,” said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at his enemy, “you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain of being thought a turn-key, – a species of being far below a galley-slave, – you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared to offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?”
Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.
“What!” cried Vernier, delighted at the presence of an audience, “do you think we have no right to make fun of a man who comes here, bag and baggage, and demands that we hand over our property because, forsooth, he is pleased to call us great men, painters, artists, poets, – mixing us up gratuitously with a set of fools who have neither house nor home, nor sous nor sense? Why should we put up with a rascal who comes here and wants us to feather his nest by subscribing to a newspaper which preaches a new religion whose first doctrine is, if you please, that we are not to inherit from our fathers and mothers? On my sacred word of honor, Pere Margaritis said things a great deal more sensible. And now, what are you complaining about? You and Margaritis seemed to understand each other. The gentlemen here present can testify that if you had talked to the whole canton you couldn’t have been as well understood.”
“That’s all very well for you to say; but I have been insulted, Monsieur, and I demand satisfaction!”
“Very good, Monsieur! consider yourself insulted, if you like. I shall not give you satisfaction, because there is neither rhyme nor reason nor satisfaction to be found in the whole business. What an absurd fool he is, to be sure!”
At these words Gaudissart flew at the dyer to give him a slap on the face, but the listening crowd rushed between them, so that the illustrious traveller only contrived to knock off the wig of his enemy, which fell on the head of Mademoiselle Clara Vernier.
“If you are not satisfied, Monsieur,” he said, “I shall be at the Soleil d’Or until to-morrow morning, and you will find me ready to show you what it means to give satisfaction. I fought in July, Monsieur.”
“And you shall fight in Vouvray,” answered the dyer; “and what is more, you shall stay here longer than you imagine.”
Gaudissart marched off, turning over in his mind this prophetic remark, which seemed to him full of sinister portent. For the first time in his life the prince of travellers did not dine jovially. The whole town of Vouvray was put in a ferment about the “affair” between Monsieur Vernier and the apostle of Saint-Simonism. Never before had the tragic event of a duel been so much as heard of in that benign and happy valley.
“Monsieur Mitouflet, I am to fight to-morrow with Monsieur Vernier,” said Gaudissart to his landlord. “I know no one here: will you be my second?”
“Willingly,” said the host.
Gaudissart had scarcely finished his dinner before Madame Fontanieu and the assistant-mayor of Vouvray came to the Soleil d’Or and took Mitouflet aside. They told him it would be a painful and injurious thing to the whole canton if a violent death were the result of this affair; they represented the pitiable distress of Madame Vernier, and conjured him to find some way to arrange matters and save the credit of the district.
“I take it all upon myself,” said the sagacious landlord.
In the evening he went up to the traveller’s room carrying pens, ink, and paper.
“What have you got there?” asked Gaudissart.
“If you are going to fight to-morrow,” answered Mitouflet, “you had better make some settlement of your affairs; and perhaps you have letters to write, – we all have beings who are dear to us. Writing doesn’t kill, you know. Are you a good swordsman? Would you like to get your hand in? I have some foils.”
“Yes, gladly.”
Mitouflet returned with foils and masks.
“Now, then, let us see what you can do.”
The pair put themselves on guard. Mitouflet, with his former prowess as grenadier of the guard, made sixty-two passes at Gaudissart, pushed him about right and left, and finally pinned him up against the wall.
“The deuce! you are strong,” said Gaudissart, out of breath.
“Monsieur Vernier is stronger than I am.”
“The devil! Damn it, I shall fight with pistols.”
“I advise you to do so; because, if you take large holster pistols and load them up to their muzzles, you can’t risk anything. They are SURE to fire wide of the mark, and both parties can retire from the field with honor. Let me manage all that. Hein! ‘sapristi,’ two brave men would be arrant fools to kill each other for a joke.”
“Are you sure the pistols will carry WIDE ENOUGH? I should be sorry to kill the man, after all,” said Gaudissart.
“Sleep in peace,” answered Mitouflet, departing.
The next morning the two adversaries, more or less pale, met beside the bridge of La Cise. The brave Vernier came near shooting a cow which was peaceably feeding by the roadside.
“Ah, you fired in the air!” cried Gaudissart.
At these words the enemies embraced.
“Monsieur,” said the traveller, “your joke was rather rough, but it was a good one for all that. I am sorry I apostrophized you: I was excited. I regard you as a man of honor.”
“Monsieur,
