Charles Nodier HISTORY OF THE KING OF BOHÊME AND ITS SEVEN CHÂTEAUX 1830 published by

the Bourlapapey, digital library romande www.ebooks-bnr.com Table of Contents

Introduction .................. .................................................. .......... 6
Retraction. .................................................. ........................... 8
Convention ..................... .................................................. ........ 11
Demonstration. .................................................. ..................... 15
Objection ........................... .................................................. .... 17
Statement ............................................ ................................. 20
Continuation. .................................................. ........................ 23
Protest ........................ .................................................. ...
Dubitation. .................................................. ............................ 30
Narration .................... .................................................. ............... 33
Insertion ..................................... ............................................. 38
Transcription. .................................................. ....................... 41
Conversation. .................................................. ........................ 47
Combustion ........................ .................................................. ... 52
Exhibition ............................................. .................................... 58
Explanation. .................................................. ........................... 59
Annotation. .................................................. ........................... 63
Observation ..................... .................................................. ...... 66
Preterition. .................................................. ............................ 68
Damnation. .................................................. ........................... 70
Commemoration ..................... ................................................ 75
Scholarship . .................................................. .............................. 84
Aberration. .................................................. ............................ 89
Transition .................... .................................................. .......... 92
Mystification. .................................................. ........................ 93
Verification ........................ .................................................. .... 96
Numeration ............................................ ................................. 98
Interlocution. .................................................. ...................... 103
Uprising. .................................................. ........................ 114
Dissertation ........................ .................................................. 118
Meditation ............................................... .............................. 124
Navigation .................. .................................................. ......... 125
Appearance. .................................................. .......................... 127
Exploration. .................................................. ........................ 129
Procreation ........................ .................................................. .. 132
Distinction .............................................. ............................... 137
Remuneration. .................................................. .................... 138
Caution. .................................................. .......................... 146
Installation ...................... .................................................. .... 148
Teething. .................................................. ............................ 152
Exhumation .................... .................................................. ..... 156
Operation. .................................................. ........................... 158 - 3 -
Position. .................................................. .............................. 165
Distraction. .................................................. ......................... 166
Receiving. .................................................. ........................... 167
Remuneration ..................... .................................................. ..... 173
Riding. .................................................. .......................... 175
Imposition ...................... .................................................. ..... 180
Endowment. .................................................. ............................. 186
Donation. .................................................. ............................ 189
Supputation .................... .................................................. ..... 196
Desolation. .................................................. .......................... 198
Humiliation ...................... .................................................. ... 201
Opposition ............................................. ................................ 205
Argumentation ................ .................................................. .... 210
Invention ............................................ ................................... 213
Interpretation. .................................................. .................... 214
Solution ............................ .................................................. ... 217
Summary ............................................. .......................... 219
CORRECTION. .................................................. ................... 223
APPROVAL. .................................................. ................. 225 This
eBook ............................. ................................... 226 - 4 - Once upon a time there was a King of
Boh who had seven castles. Trimm. - 5 - Introduction. Yes ! when I only have for my mount the
sophist and pedantic donkey who argued against Balaam! ... When I would be reduced to riding
on the ticklish horse that made another Absalon of F. John of the Entomers - or the repetitive
mule whose stubbornness Infernal one day compromises the salvation of the Abbess of
Andouillettes and sweet Margaret! ... When it would be prescribed by a law of the state - or by a
canon of the Church - never to run a post that on the Fantastic hackney of Lenore - or on the
phantom horse of the Apocalypse, which carried a horseman named DEATH! Alas! that one
pawing at my door ... But who else can tell me what a pale horse is? - 6 - When I should borrow
(to go) the adventurous rise of the hippogriff, hang me as a Montgolfier to a bladder of gummed
cloth, driven by the wind, or to perch like Sindbad the sailor on the shoulders of a Afraid
cursed ... I'll go! Funete ambition, where do you pretend to lead me? Is it in Corinth? - No,
Theodore, it's in Bohemia. I will open the diptychs, I will mark the diplomas, I will collate the
charters - I will know in what time lived this king of Bohemia, and I will mark the place of his
seven castles with a precision worthy of Pausanias, Antonin, Rutilius - so as to kill in spite of the
exact, punctual and careful Dodwell, if he had not died in 1711, that good Henry Dodwell, a few
days before Easter bloomed. Moreover, in Dodwell's time, so little attention was paid to the King
of Bohemia and his seven castles! And that's why corporations walk slowly. Every century has its
needs. The most pressing need of our time for a reasonable man who appreciates the world and
life to their value is to know the end of the history of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles. I
only need a horse: either necessity or caprice, I will not go to Bohemia without horse. A business
like this is worth the expense of a horse, and yet I have seen twenty subscriptions without a
horse to go to Bohemia! Horse ! horse ! A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse! - 7 -
Retractation. What would I do to the rest of a horse? I would not give the univalve shell - I do not
know if it's a cone or a spindle, an olive or a hoof, a propeller or a whelk - I think it's a porcelain -
no, - I do not give not a fragment of this little money of the savage that the sea rolls on your
beaches, poor and happy islander, for the horse of Alexander who had the head of the egg, and
for that of Caesar who had the foot of the ram . Can not I travel without a horse in all the spaces
that God has opened to the imagination of man? Have I not in my service the convenient and
obedient carriage which he presented to me for every part of my heavenly inheritance, and
which I sometimes preferred to Pharaoh's chariots? I will not tell you exactly how your
bodybuilder would call. This is not the solitary derogatory of M. Dessein; it is not the
presumptuous tilbury of the little master. It is neither the rapid sediole of the Italian who flees
on two burning wheels, nor the smoking sledge of the Lapland, who whistles on the snow, and
disappears in the midst of a cloud of icy dust. It is a carriage of my own, where I sleep peacefully
on the four corners, sometimes alone, often accompanied, and whom I direct at will to all points
of the universe. All I had to do was to slap my thumb against the middle finger, or to slap my
tongue against the palace three times, to carry it from Delhi to Tobolsk, or to send it back from
Orkney to Chandernagore - and if I took some leaves from that great convolvulus which gives
betel; if the juice of the poppy, transformed into solid and perfumed pellets, awakens in my
minds the laughing family of dreams; if I have sucked into a long glass the spirit and spirit gas
which emanates from the tons of Epernay, or if I have frequently shot from my pretty Lumloch
snuff-box this intoxicating and poetic powder of which a thin diplomat of the sixteenth century
century endowed France ... oh! how far I leave you, timid Vesta, grave and modest Pallas! that I
have crossed many times, Jupiter, the orb where your satellites roll! how many times I have
broken your pale, dark and silent ring Saturn! I remember touching a barrier where letters of
unknown form and color were read on the earth: GRANTING OF URANUS God! it was cold! What
is convenient in my car is always ready. Madam, do you want to ride? There is not a hub to
grease, not a key to tighten. He does not miss a bolt. Do not be afraid of road accidents. If the
crew of Cervantes or Rabelais, if that of the beneficiary of Sutton or the Dean of Saint Patrick
passed by here - I followed the order with so much care - or I departed with so much of address!
The ditches are really deep as space. They would make an eagle dizzy! But the way is broad as
the channel of the Channel, multiplied by all the drops of water of the Ocean. I pour sometimes,
but only when I want it - 9 - - or when you want it - and it's on a sand so soft, on a grass so soft,
so elastic and so fresh, that you would regret it, I swear, neither the soft quilt of your daybed,
nor the floss of silk that swells your sofa. Yesterday still, Fanny, staring at this little tawny fly that
dominates your black eyebrow, because there is too much danger for me to look down ... - Just
this morning, Victorine, the fingers tied to the curls of Or your floating hair ... " " Tell me,
tratressess, who has thus disheveled you? O Victorine, O Fanny, how far you have gone with me
without knowing it! But today it is more serious things. For the first time in my life, I advised
myself to have a fixed will, a determined goal. I leave. I left. " Where are you going, Theodore?
"In Bohemia," I say to you! Whip, coachman! - 10 - Convention. Only I will not go without them. I
have such good reasons for that! One is don Pic de Fanferluchio! The other is my faithful Charm.
The first secretly tells me about these studies of little value, with which we slowly forget to live.
He was the most assiduous friend of my youth. At twenty-five, I had never looked for any other
conversation than his, and what a conversation! The longest, the thinnest, the narrowest, the
most geometrically abstract in all its dimensions - the most rubbed with Greek, Latin,
etymologies, onomatopoeia, theses, diatheses, hypotheses, metatheses - tropes, syncopes and
apocopes - the head which contains the most words against an idea, sophisms against reasoning,
para-doxes against an opinion - names Pr enoms, nicknames - forgotten titles and useless dates -
biological idiocy, bibliological balances, philological billeves - the living table of Adelung
Mithridate and Onomasticon of Saxius! ... The second, bizarre and capricious creature - a
singular game of Providence which amuses itself, after having molded a genie in the form of
Achilles or Apollo, to build with the trimmings escaped from his sublime chisel a deformed and
grotesque monster - a fortuitous mixture of elements One would think it incompatible - a
transitory but unique accident in the innumerable modes of being - the ridiculous sketch of a
man who will never be finished - to be without a name, without purpose, without destiny,
always seen laughing, always singing, always mocking, always gabant, always frolicking, always
ready to do anything or to make nothing - H elas! my dear Victor, I do not have your pen of gold
and your ink of a thousand colors; I do not have, my dear Tony, the pallet richer than the
rainbow where you load your brushes - and I would try to paint a dwarf! When I won the lottery
this principality of Germany that I lost this morning when I woke up - the plague is rubbing! I
gave Don Pic de Fanferluchio the seals of the chancellery and the keys of the library. Charm had
cash and small apartments. O fortune, which you have exposed in a rank elevated to the jealous
glances of the multitude, and who have not read without fruit the life of Alcibiades, you can
address yourself to Breloque with complete certainty. He will cut the tail of your dogs. No ...
never have we experienced the same degree as me ... - No, Cl éobis and Biton who died of
fatigue dragging the triumphal chariot of their mother ... No, the Lord Gontran de Léry who
expired by dropping his fiancée on top of the Coast of the Two Lovers ... No, Euthymius of Locri,
to whom nothing less came, for having transported a huge rock, destined to close the walls of his
city - What do I say! that giant who supported the world - Anthée , Epiméthée, Prométhée, or
Atlas - I would be fooled to deceive myself on his name, but I do not even have an almanac here
- No, no one felt what p esis this compact and great virtue, the idealism of the absolute
perfection, this prototyping of all the innate abilities and acquired moral and rational, it χαλον το
of the soul and the human mind almost deified, the overwhelming superiority exercises
involuntary but hostile and perpetual censorship of the whole society - To me, Charm, I
exclaimed, save me from my innocence! Hide, if need be, my chaste forehead of that crown of
timid purity that women once awarded me. " Tell me of this infallibility of hearts, of that
unyielding austerity, which would at last attract the hatred of the whole human race. - Dance,
Charm, dance again. - Give me defects that are not vices, tastes that are not excesses, fads that
are not passions. - Dance, Charm, always dance; And if your bells never rustle in the formidable
concert of the trumpets of judgment, do not be afraid that they will warn me of remorse! Charm
made the leap . Poor Charm! without you, what would I become? - 13 - What would I have been
without them, I ask? The statue informs of the Titan, the doll of the ideologue, the
anthropomorphous monster of Godwin? When the archangel, which flows the figure of a man in
the furnaces of nature, had perceived the mistake that had made him confuse such diverse
elements - Don Pic, Charm and Thodore - his first movement was to break the image, and throw
fragments through space. - O povero mi! How many centuries ago would it have been necessary
to put my constituent molecules back in harmony, to hang up my atoms, to idiosyncrase my
monads, to restore the perfect and intimate adherence of so many unpleasant surfaces between
the myrmidon Charm and the filiform patagon don Pic de Fanferluchio? Fortunately, the
practitioner angel looked at it twice, three times, came back again, got used to tolerate first,
then to love his model. He even went so far as to confide to him an emanation of that breath of
kindness whose angels are avaricious, and strongly impressing the thumb at the end of the nose
of his mannequin still inanimate, in order to recognize it one day at this original flat: "Go," said
he, "be the eodore. And my father cried with joy on a cradle. - 14 - Demonstration. If, however,
by chance, this fiction did not suit you ... because I see no difficulty in declaring it a fiction ... If
you are among those positive minds who are content with absolute truths, and who would not
receive not an idea struck at the corner of Montaigne and Plato without subjecting him to the
trial of the trebuchet ... If you make more cases of a good addition than a similarity and even a
comparison ... Hey, my God! you only have to speak! We must only agree on a point of
departure, that is, on the calculation of Diocles of Smyrna, which represents the spirit of man by
the number Mille. - 15 - I do not need to synthesize in front of you; but you can easily check it
with your math teacher, your steward, or your laundress. - I boldly set the total ...... 1000. Which
means identically: the author of the History of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles; for the
spirit is the whole man, and it is from these three faculties, imagination, memory, and judgment,
that the mysterious trinity of the world is composed (unless something has been changed). our
intelligence, in rather irregular proportions, as you see, and which may suffer so many
modifications that the meeting of two intellectual menechms will probably be the most
unexpected event of the other world, and that which will add the most to spicy charm of our
future palingenesis. What an incredible variety of faces! what an inexhaustible source of
harmonies and contrasts! how many souls will be amazed at not having stolen one from the
other! what affections which will revolt against the yoke which a deceptive sympathy has caused
them! what admiration has been deceived! only reassured modesty too late! how many great
men I have seen, and, it costs me to confess, who will arrive there, negatively stamped with
three zeros, under the beard of Diocles! Charm has not reserved any other pleasure for the first
thirty myriads of centuries of eternity. - 16 - Objection - Hey, sir, I see what it is! still a bad
pastiche of the innumerable pastiches of Sterne and Rabelais ... - Bad, you have to say ... and
then, what the hell do you need if you do not want pastiches? Dare I ask you what book is not
pastiche, what idea can boast today of hatching first and typical? ... (Dalgarno reduced all
primitive ideas to six, and don Pic de Fanferluchio claims that there had luxury.) Dare I ask you, I
say, which author is proceeded from himself as God, except the unknown author who made up
the day after the invention of the letters? was perhaps Enoch; but his book was not found - it
was perhaps Abraham; but the Jezirah is apocryphal, and the Holy Ghost swept him, like the
false gospels, from the table of the Council of Nicaea - perhaps it was Mercury, otherwise
Hermes or Trismegistus; but it is no more a question of this peculiarity in Apollodorus than in
Gautruche's father. - 17 - Who thought to draw for the first time ... on the sand - Or on a rock -
Or on a brick - Or on an ivory tabella covered with virgin wax - Or on any other natural or plastic
surface, but perishable and tenacious - Or on a leaf of papyrus - Or on the membrane of the
placenta of a quadruped - Or on porridge of hemp or linen, cotton or silk, straw or nettle ,
extended, flattened and dried - with a sharpened ed reed - Or a pointed chisel - or friable m etal
pencil - or a fragment of stone color ed - or a quill pen - to draw (I was there) a few vertical or
horizontal lines - from bottom to top or from top to bottom - from right to left or from left to
right - or even from left to right and from right to left alternately, as was practiced in the
Boustrophedon - And to exclaim in a language that died before the slaughter: Exegi
monumentum! This one (original writer, I salute you!) Wrote, however, according to all
appearance, only what had been said before him; and, wonderful thing! the first written book
was itself a pastiche of tradition, a plagiarism of the word! A new idea, great God! there was not
one left in the circulation of Solomon's time - and Solomon only said it after Job. And you want
me, plagiarist of the plagiarists of Sterne - Who was a plagiarist of Swift - Who was plagiarist of
Wilkins - Who was a plagiarist of Cyrano - - 18 - Who was plagiarist of Reboul - Who was
plagiarist of William of the Altars - Who was plagiarist Rabelais - Who was plagiarist Morus -
Who was plagiarist of Erasmus - Who was plagiarist Lucien - or Lucius of Patras - or Apul ed -
because no one knows which of the three was stolen by the other two, and I never cared to
know it ... You would like, I repeat, that I invent the form and the content of a book! heaven help
me! Condillac says somewhere that it would be easier to create a world than to create an idea.
And this is also the opinion of Polydore Virgile and Bruscambille. - 19 - D ecarration. For the rest,
it will be admitted that I have not displayed at least the senseless pretension of being new in the
most fastidiously used profession that one can exercise in the world, that, Rabelais would say, of
sophisticated thinking and word-grafting. . For a hundred years you would needlessly look for a
title that would reveal plagiarism more naively than these ingenuous lines: History of the King of
Bohemia and its Seven Castles. Hardly have they struck your eyes that three or four sudden ideas
spring up armed with so many huts of your memory, like Minerva at the head of Jupiter, laden
with insignia, blazons, plans, specifications; surrounded by ramparts, glacis and counterscarps;
bristling with horns and bastions - Ah! ah! you say, I saw it somewhere, in Ola üs Magnus, in
Rudbeck, in Sterne perhaps ... A last box opens, that of the reflection, and it leaves a more
intelligent, clear idea, more lucid, who tells you - 20 - in a sardonic tone by slightly raising his
shoulders (oh divine Entelechy, the shoulders of an idea! ...) ... "But that's it, that's absolutely it!
it's in Sterne! it is only a pastiche. And then she returns with disdain ... Thank you, ma'am! And
why not a pastiche? It was so easy for me to conceal this borrowing of an exhausted imagination,
saying, for example: HISTORY OF THE KING OF HUNGARY AND ITS EIGHT FORTERESSES or better
still: CHRONICLE OF THE EMPERORS OF TREBIZONDE, AND DESCRIPTION OF THEIR FOURTEEN
PALACE. But my natural candor is repugnant to these artifices; A pastiche, a real pastiche, all
there is more pastiche ... And it suits me all the better that I did not know what it was. It is even
up to you to make me bring this sincere abnegation of all personal merit to its last expression - -
21 - (I speak to this snide idea, which stubbornly comes out of its niche at the end of all my
pages, as the importunate automaton of the Nuremberg clocks.) Sweet and Modesty Modesty!
Inspire me a concession so humble, so resigned, that it finally disarms the anger of my
enemies! ... ... I found it! ... - I found it ! - And I must reassure my pretty readers - I do not write
this in the simple device ... in the negative suit of Archimedes. I have a blue barber coat that has
served me only three times. It's not me, anyway, that it's about watching. This is the next page
where you will find the definitive title of this volume ... Definitive, as much as it is allowed to the
man to attach to one of his conceptions this reckless adjective ... Definitive, if God and my
aneurism allow it ... Poor Theodore! - 22 - Continuation. As for the imitators without conscience!
... As for the mongrel monkey who counterfeit without taste what he sees without intelligence,
living automaton whose face is a caricature and laughter a grimace ... As for the sullen parrot
who sings the song of Psaphon because Psaphon has sung it, and who thinks to invent what he
repeats ... As for the shameless crow who insolently adorns himself with the remains of some
unknown peacock, and who displays in your museums and in your academies a plume of
diamonds and gold feathers with azure eyes that she has not worn ... - 23 - I would have been
more inclined to count the goats of the Toralva, a calculation that terrified the infallible judicial
Don Quixote, and that the The most insightful infinitesimal mathematicians, from the Marquis
de l'Hospital to the editor of the last Almanac des Muses, have wisely left out. Who would dare
to complain today that there was a goat, one goat too many in the flock of the Toralva, and that
she would prance, the poor beast, in the manner of others? the sheep of Dindenaut were too
numerous, but they drowned, while the goats of the Toralva only wanted to jump. And as long as
my goat passes in the number. - She is neither old, nor deformed, nor sullen - she is clean, she is
elegant, she is speckled - she has the feeling of her natural dignity and the proprieties of her sex
- ... Provided, I say she d eFile into the wind, the half-open nostrils to suck away the flowers and
dew, head slightly tilted to the right clavicle, because it gives grace ... - 24 - Or that , standing on
her hind legs, those in front modestly curved on themselves, neck outstretched, eye protruding,
mouth lengthened and quivering, it can break from time to time, at the top of a bush that does
not belong to anyone, one of those long bunches of leaves or parasitic fruits that exhaust the
shrub and do not embellish it ... (It was probably the corymb of a mountain ash before maturity.)
- O ruthless critic, we do not ask you more ... Gentlemen, will you allow? Place the goat of
Theocritus! - 25 - Plagiarism protest! me, plagiarist! - When I would like to find a way to escape
this reproach of arranging the letters in such a NEW order, or to subject the lines to rules of
disposition so weird, or to say it so wildly disparate !!! When such violent reversals, I would like
to torture the words! Or marry incompatibly enemy ideas and words that roar to meet! When I
only aspire to take you on the wings of the Eastern Condor at the summit of some mountain
which braved, inaccessible, the invasion of the deluge; Or to rush with me on a steed near which
that of Mazeppa would not look better than the Sancho's grison, in depths dug five hundred
million leagues below the underworld of Klimius ... - - 26 - You m would accuse you of
imprisoning you with impotence in this little corner of our little land called Bohemia! Alas! I may
never go to Bohemia, whatever it is, I swear on the honor, the only project I am dealing with
today - and if I go there, I will get there so late that nobody of this generation and of the twenty-
two generations who will follow it, will not be able to read the news in the posters of Prague. - I
have so much to do on the way! First, I am determined: I will enter Bohemia only by Austria ... In
Austria that by Styria ... In Styria only by Carinthia, where I have a tear to the empty tomb of
Edward ... En Carinthia only through Carniola, my second and dear homeland ... In Carniola only
through Istria, where, lying on the laughing beaches of the blue golph, we will mislead at leisure
our delighted eyes of the bastides of Trieste to the tower of Aquileia ... Istria only through the
country of Venice - Voil in Venice, and its port, and its gondolas, and its old Christian mosque,
and its black palaces, and the marble steps where - 27 - lives the trace of the blood of Faliero,
rejuvenated by Byron's verses and by the brushes of Delacroix - In Venice only by Mantua
reminiscent of Virgil; Or by Brescia, who recalls the continence of Bayard (May the sky tell him
more than I do!); Or by Bergamo, who recalls another hero, more modest and more popular, you
will recognize the compatriots with the tail of rabbit who floats elegantly on their white felt -
And if you believe me, we will leave it to Bayard and Virgil in for the sake of Arlequin - In Italy,
finally, by Mont Saint-Bernard and the valley of Chamouny, where I have just retreated, retracing
with marvelous skill into terrible paths, although I had my mind doubly distracted. by the vertigo,
and by some confused memory of the adventures of Gervais and Cæcilia ... - - - But are you as
willing to hear them as me to tell them? I only came for that. - 29 - Dubitation. "I make no
opposition to it," said Don Pic, "provided your Cæcilia is not blind. - "(She is.)" I hate these
unnatural fictions where the name of the main character tells you beforehand the subject and
the purpose of the story, regardless of the illusion that makes it all the charm . "And what
interest do you want me to give to Hippolytus's death, the misfortunes of Oedipus, and the
battles of Diom When I am so well informed that the first one will perish, the victim of his
furious horses, that the swollen feet of the second will have been crossed at a young age by
some bloody belt, and that the third is nominally predestined to triumph over the same gods?
"Do I need history to know that Philip loved horses passionately, and that Alexander subjected
the nations? Is it not a bad joke to call Augustule the last of the emperors? "I have no objection
to Nicias, since it appears that it was because of this name that he was brought to command in
the Sicilian war. "And there is probably no one who imagines that Scævola's name and Coclès's
name was given to them, before the first one became known. Put his wrist in the inferno of
Porsenna, and let the second be bravely burst the eye in defense of a bridge, which is not
however the Pons Emilius or Palatinus, as some crazy antique dealers put it. "But you will find
people who have done good studies enough, and who sincerely believe that the man whose
eloquence was long the strength of the people, was called Demosthenes from the cradle, and
that nature had inscribed the titles of the model of the wise in the baptismal extract, or, if you
will, in the birth certificate of Aristide. "When the monks and clerics of the Middle Ages thought
of passing under the old names the leisure of their obscene and disordered muse, they had to
designate the author of a collection of graceful, playful and tender songs.like the modulations of
the little wood flute that makes young girls dance? they called him Tibullus. Was it a question of
a supple, mignard and biting poet who plays with a sparrow, the name of Catullus presented
himself? Did the volume give rise to the idea of an arsenal in which, under a thousand hostile
forms, were spread the most cruel weapons which, since Archilochus, had offended all the states
and all the m In the society , it was attributed to Martial. "What judicious criticism would be
credulous enough to adopt the individuality of a concise, almost enigmatic writer, whose art is to
conceal many ideas in a few words, and who would be called Tacitus? ..." Or of a elegant,
pompous, sonorous declaimer, with words chosen and grouped in bouquets, with enameled
phrases, and who would be called Florus? ... " - What, you would think! ... - " Inventions of
studious slackers who wisely relaxed from the troubles of office, composing classical la - 31 -
stood for the use of posterity ignorant! - What afflicts me deeply This is because our holy
Church, whose infallibility is so well established, could have been an accomplice to these
fraudulent blunders, by adopting the fable of a second edition Hippolytus, a Hercules
Christophorus or Christ-Bearer. and of a pretended Veronica or True Image, which can not be
named without revealing the impudent awkwardness of a forger - "Oh! if your Cecilia was blind!
(We know she is.) "I would like a hundred times better to call her Sapho or Lucretia, Philis or
Dorimene, Radegunda or Deborah, although I have all these names in execration. " - If it s'called
Eulalie? ... - "You'd think you had to make her talk with that redundant and well-mannered
abundance that is all too familiar to you ..." "I give you my most sacred word of honor ," as the
euphuists of Barras's court said, "that I do not know a word of what she will say - " At the right
time. " - 32 - Narration. I had traveled with a new pleasure this graceful forest of fir trees which
envelops the village of the Woods. I arrived at this little esplanade, day by day, invaded by
glaciers, so majestically dominated by the most beautiful peaks of the Alps, and ending in a slope
almost insensitive to the picturesque spring of the Arveyron. I wanted to see again its portico of
azure crystal which changes every year, and ask some emotions to these great scenes of nature.
My heart tired he needs it. I had not gone thirty paces when I noticed, not without
astonishment, that Puck was not near me - H elas! you would not have decided to get away from
his master, at the price of the fondest macaroon, the most delicate gimblette - he even slowed a
little to get to my call, and I began to worry when he returned, my pretty Puck, with the
embarrassed countenance of fear, and yet with the caressing confidence of friendship, his body
rounded in half-hoop, his look wet and supplicating, his head so low, so low, that his ears
dragged to the ground like those of Zadig's dog ... Puck was also a spaniel. - If you had seen Puck
in this posture, you would not have had the strength to f Acher. I did not get angry, but he left,
then he came back again, and as this game was renewed, I drew nearer to his point of attraction,
at the same time attracted by two perfectly isogenic sympathies, or by two powers quite alike,
he remained motionless like the magnetic flapper between his iron stamps. On the rocky bench
with which Puck separated me so accurately that the infallible compass of La Place could not find
on either side the means of inserting a single geometrical point, sat a a young man of the most
amiable figure, of the most touching countenance, dressed in a blue blouse of sky, in a tunic-like
manner, and the hand armed with a long, high-tipped cytise stick, a singular adjustment which
gave some resemblance to the ancient shepherds of Poussin. Blond, curly hair curled in large
rings around her bare neck and floated on her shoulders.His features were grave without
austerity, sad without depression. His mouth expressed more displeasure than bitterness. Only
his eyes had a character I could not see. They were tall and limpid, but fixed, extinct, and dumb.
No soul moved behind them. The sound of the breezes had covered the sound of my footsteps.
Nothing indicated that I was seen. I thought he was blind. Puck had studied all my impressions,
and at the first feeling of kindness he saw springing from my eyes, he ran to this new friend.
Who will explain to us the training of the most generous being from nature to the most
unfortunate being, from the dog to the blind? O Providence! I am then the only one of your
children whom you have abandoned! The young man passed his fingers through Puck's long
silks, smiling at him with candor. " Where do you know me," said he, "who are not from the
valley? I had a dog so sporty, and perhaps as pretty as you; but he was a kinky wool barbet - he
left me like the others, my last friend, my poor Puck! ... - Chance strange! your dog was called
like mine ... - Ah! sir, "said the young man, raising himself bent over his laburnum ; forgive my
infirmity ... - Sit down, my friend! Are you blind? - Blind since childhood. - You've never seen ? - I
saw, but so little! I have, however, some memory of the sun, and when I lift my eyes to the place
which it is to occupy in the sky, I think I see there roll a globe which reminds me of its color. I also
remember the white of the snow, and the aspect of our mountains. - So it was an accident that
deprived you of light? - An accident that was, h elas! the least of my misfortunes! I was scarcely
two years old when an avalanche descended from the heights of Flégère crushed our little
house. My father, who was a guide in these mountains, had spent the evening at the Priory.
Judge his despair when he found his family engulfed by the horrible water! Seconded by his
comrades, he managed to make a hole in the snow and to enter our cabin whose roof was still
supported on its frail supports. The first object that presented itself to him was my cradle; at first
he sheltered it from a danger which was constantly increasing, for the very work of the miners
had favored the collapse of some new masses, and increased the shock of our fragile abode. He
returned to save my fainting mother, and we saw him for a moment, in the light of the torches
that burned outside, bring her back into his arms - but then everything fell - I was orphaned, the
next day a serene drop had struck my eyes. I was blind. - Poor child! so you stay be alone,
absolutely alone! - An unhappy man is never absolutely alone in our valley . All our good
Chamouniers met to soften my misery. Balmat gave me shelter, Simon Coutet the food, Gabriel
Payot the garment. A good widow, who had lost her children, took care of me and took me away.
It is she who still serves me as a mother, and who brings me to this place every day of the
summer. - And here to all your friends? "I had several," replied the young man, placing a finger
on his lips with a mysterious air, "but they are gone. - Not to come back? - according to all
appearance. I thought for a few days that Puck would come back, and that he It was gone ... but
we do not go away with impunity in our glaciers. I will not feel it bouncing by my side ... I will not
hear it yapping at the approach of the travelers ... "(The blind man wiped a tear.) - 36 - - What's
your name? - Gervais. - Listen, Gervais - Those friends you lost ... - Explain to me ... - (At the
same moment, I made a movement to sit down beside him, but he rushed quickly to the empty
place.) - No here, sir, not here! It is Eulalie's place, and no one has occupied it since his
departure. - Eulalie? I continued, sitting down in the place he had just left; Tell me about this
Eulalie and you. Your story interests me. - I d Victorine says, that she is beginning to interest me
too ... "" And what can I refuse him? " - Definitely, Charm, we will not go today in Bohemia.
Gervais spoke thus: - 37 - Insertion. Or plut but he did not speak, for I interrupted him abruptly,
throwing myself with all the strength of my thought into the editorial office of the best
newspaper of the day, the Infallible, the Impartial, or the Disinterested, distracted by a fixed idea
that my literary modesty forces me to lock in the double turn, under the key of the parenthesis:
(The extremely urgent necessity to assure me of the flow of this history or this novel, this joke or
this poem whose booksellers do not want to.) However, I will confess! I do not leave Gervais
'story without regret ... And I take the sky to witness that I remember Gervais' story as if I had
just heard it, and that I will write it before I arrive at the salon ... theantechamber ... At the porch
... At the landing ... At the grand staircase ... In the vestibule ... At the forecourt ... At the
courtyard ... At the door ... At the avenue ... At the turn-flange of the first of the seven castles of
the King of Bohemia. - 38 - But he is so good and so sure to be aware of oneself for oneself! This
privilege is so common, so comical, so convenient, so commercial, and I have used it so little! You
will deny me, if you dare, an avaricious and financial demon, who presides at the rate of
reputations! - Who are we is it, said Breloque, to read tomorrow, in all the archives of
contemporary fame, these fair lines described to our glory? "The illustrious anonymous ...
(Illustrated because of our magnificent sovereignty of Nihilno-not-night.)" The anonymous
Illustrious will not shun public admiration ... 3 f. 50 c. "The style of a writer who is tender,
eloquent, energetic, harmonious, sublime ... has been recognized in his style. 25 c. "Who has left
far behind him Cyrano de Bergerac, Homer, Byron, Chateaubriand, the Lord of Accords,
Montesquieu and Turlupin ... 9 f. 00 c. "The history of the king of Bohemia and his seven castles
to produce an immense revolution in literature ... " "What nonsense do you say , Charm? - I'm
doing a newspaper article. - Exit this sentence.In veil to a done everything. Go, my friend, buy
some glory, since you prefer that silly smoke to the sweet steam of my cigars of Havana. Buy
fame, Breloque, pay cash and pay without counting: formerly it was more expensive! " " Emp
edocles the acquit at so high a price that only his slippers remained of him. - - His slippers,
Charm, nothing but his slippers! that's what I wanted to tell you. - Slipper! this word vibrates in
my heart one of those painful strings which resound for a long time, and of which the emanation
harmonizes sympathetically with all the melancholy of the soul ... What if I still had, by chance, a
violin of Stradivarius or Amati, and that I could submit it to the scholarly method of Baillot, or
animate it pathetic fingering of Viotti; - Or if I only have enough of Kolophon's turpentine (it is
mentioned in Meursius), to make the hoarse bow of a village Amphion shout less ungracefully ...
- With what an impenetrable sensitivity I would pass in your soul the heartbreaking expression
of my memories! But it's nice to stir up the languid wick! the oil that remains in my lamp will
lead us at most at the end of this soap opera. - 40 - Transcript. LITT ANNOUNCEMENTS ÉRAIRES.
HISTORY OF THE KING OF BOHEMA AND ITS SEVEN CASTLES1. "I can not say of the author of this
work what Tacitus of Otho, Galba, and Vitellius said: nec beneficio, nec injuriâ cognitus. On the
contrary, I would speak of it if my impartiality did not outweigh any other consideration, such as
Corneille de Richelieu: "He did me too much good to say bad things about it; 1 - 41 - "It hurt me
too much to say good. "He was one of those beings accidentally identical to our existence, of
which we are obliged to tolerate the indivisible intimacy during all the life, without conceiving
towards them neither an affection nor a permanent hatred, and of which we receive however in
turn these two impressions, according to the dispositions of our mind, and especially those of
our affairs; swayed hour by hour between the need to liberate ourselves violently from an
uncomfortable tyrant, and that of welcoming all his fantasies, of caressing all his whims, and of
lavishing time, gold, and rattles on him. Fortunately, he dug between us an immense interval in
approaching the perilous and ridiculous career of letters, and selling his mind to the monopolists
and booksellers:Since Alba named him, I do not know him anymore. "Or rather, I know him well
enough to be sure that he expects only a rigorous impartiality from me, of which this article will
probably be the only example in all past, present, and future journals. "Up to this point, the
reputation of the author of whom we speak is due entirely to the momentary vogue of a piece of
eloquence entitled: Praise of a slipper mistress, and which remained unpublished after having
made during three sessions consecutive delights of the Society of Good Letters. It is true that at
the last reading the overwhelmed anagnosis fell asleep so deeply that before he could perceive
it, the manuscript came into immediate communication with the candle flame, and consumed
itself until 'to thealmost imperceptible angle of its lower part which remained mechanically
grasped between the patient's thumb and forefinger, so that today there are only imperfect
vestiges, in which the indefatigable Angelo Maï and the docte Fu - 42 - laughed a lot to find
twenty-two words, and a point of exclamation, of which it would be absolutely impossible to
compose a logical sense, and even a romantic nonsense, as absurd as one might imagine. "We
therefore have to judge him only on those of his works which have been subjected to the test of
publicity (if one can call the existence of a printed book which is not read), it is that is to say, on a
small volume of poetry, composed in college, or at least at the age when one should be in
college, and on a slender novel whose success, unknown to all who take care of literature and
criticism, has been hotly contested for a month at the fashion merchants. We will judge the
merit of the worms by the total forgetfulness where they fell after two days, five hours and a few
minutes,though recommended by a flirtatious poster with a watermark frame, and adorned with
a delightful vignette of Deveria. "As we propose to be fair before all things, we like to
acknowledge that the prose of the pseudonym Theodore is not altogether as bad as his verses;
that she is not even deprived of this fluid luxury of syllables, of that arranged pomp of words, of
that parlance, as Montaigne says, ampullas ac sesquipedalia verba, as Horace says, which seduce
to a certain extent the poorly exercised ears and unwise minds; but this buzzing of sound
phrases, so painstakingly, so laboriously studied on all the keys of human speech, so unfruitfully
subjected to a tuning fork whose vibrationis sensible that for the very small number of dilettanti
of the prosody, this displaced melody is thrown on conceptions so null, so devoid of taste and
reason, so falsely seized and so awkwardly ordered, that we have never heard it sound through
the immense wave of the author's ideas, without shouting, like Fontenelle at the sonata: Prose!
what do you want from me ? - 43 - and without regretting from the bottom of our heart the
inimitable na the glory of Little Red Riding Hood, or the Gothic energy of Robert the Devil. "It
must be confessed, however, that of all the extravagances of which the most obscure thought,
alas! and the most indefatigable arranger of periods (he himself who has found for them the
happy comparison of the stringed instrument which only resounds because it is empty), there is
none as pitiful as the History of the King of Bohemia and its Seven Castles. We truly doubt that
there exists in any language a term of character to characterize the intrepidity of the reckless
scribe who has not feared to counterfeit awkwardly what talent itself can not imitate, the
originality of a writer unique in his species and forever unique in all ages; for if Sterne had been
reserved by the providence of genius,at this reasonable, serious, and powerful time, when all
useful truths can be shown without a mask, he would have thrown Trim's crutch and Tristram's
bells far from him! At the bottom of his ingenious satire, however, was an interest, a family, an
action, a novel. In the insignificant sketch of the copyist, I see only the tedious laziness of a
professional phrasal, which covers the paper of words drawn at random to the inexhaustible
lottery of dictionaries, and launched with a crash through a book like dice trictrac. This
monomania without example can even be explained by a physical accident, such as the action
too vertical sun rays to which theThe author has imprudently expounded in his distant journeys
the bone-box, of which the physiologists make the mysterious scrinium of our rational faculties,
and which have so desiccated, through the frail envelope of his sinciput three times trepanned,
this long nervous rag rolled in a buffer. It is vulgarly called the brain, that that of our author is
reduced, in the opinion of all anatomists, to proportions incomparably inferior in size,
consistency and capacity, to those of the occult organ which takes the place of the common
sensorium at most. small microscopic animalcules, vulgarly known in science as infusoria.It is
vulgarly called the brain, that that of our author is reduced, in the opinion of all anatomists, to
proportions incomparably inferior in size, consistency and capacity, to those of the occult organ
which takes the place of the common sensorium at most. small microscopic animalcules, vulgarly
known in science as infusoria.It is vulgarly called the brain, that that of our author is reduced, in
the opinion of all anatomists, to proportions incomparably inferior in size, consistency and
capacity, to those of the occult organ which takes the place of the common sensorium at most.
small microscopic animalcules, vulgarly known in science as infusoria. - 44 - He will have to the
changes we have made to him for this consideration, and to carry them, with all the kindness we
are capable of, to their superlative expression, we will agree that it is not open to everyone to
display, from the pen, so much pedantic cynicism and so much grotesque erudition. This
misplaced store of science, however, would announce only strong studies poorly made by a man
who cared little for learning and who remembers badly to have learned; but we have excellent
reasons to think that his knowledge is reduced to some address of memory. What we would
rather find in the History of the King of Bohemia and its Seven Castles, and what readers will
look for in vain, are fine glimpses, the criticism of time, the satire of circumstance,and especially
gaiety. The idea of writing a book like this when one has never been noticed by the protruding
spirit, that one has become sad, and one is almost old, is one of those unfortunate
extravagances that have not reported at all times only disgraced spirits. Is it not a singular
ambition to a writer profoundly morose, who seems to ulcerate incurable pains, to play with a
fool? Is not it a crazy disappointment that of a serious man of studies and mIs it not a singular
ambition for a writer who is profoundly morose, to appear to be ulcerating incurable pains, to
play with a fool? Is not it a crazy disappointment that of a serious man of studies and mIs it not a
singular ambition for a writer who is profoundly morose, to appear to be ulcerating incurable
pains, to play with a fool? Is not it a crazy disappointment that of a serious man of studies and m
Ours, who tries to delight the curious at the sound of a grave tambourine and a sentimental
galoubet? What pre- vention do we dare to base on such a company? That, perhaps, of passing,
in a future of a few weeks, for the most jovial melancholy writers, or for the saddest of novelists
jesters! There is, I confess, in this extraordinary combination of the mad irony of an embittered
mind, and of the sombre disillusionment of a deceived heart , something which deserves more
pity than derision; but it is one of those misfortunes of position which the public does not take
into account to the authors who annoy it; and we would be surprised if there was in Europe a
dice exercise takes or a prodigal enough disgusted with money to drop on the bookseller's
counter the smallest fraction of the smallest coinage of the most vile metal, which has been
illustrated with an imperial, royal, or consular effigy. - - 45 - in exchange for these inept sheets,
blackened with printing ink to the shame of civilization. "This text naturally leads us to solicit
from the high wisdom of the chambers a law of repression against the ignorant daubers who
make the benefit of the press a subject of opprobrium for the human race, by degrading the
divine art of the masters of thought. and style. This will be the subject of another article. (The
sequel to the next number.) - 46 - Conversation. DON PIC OF FANFERLUCHIO. How, my lord,
without regard for our high social position !!! Without respect for our basic literature !!! - Oh !
rare and enerous pride of the man of letters worthy of the name !!! - Oh ! that I have always
admired the noble independence of the journalist, whose motto is the VITAM IMPENDERE VERO
of the Genevan philosopher! THEODORE, with a concentrated spite. Rather say the NIL MIRARI
Bolingbroke! - 47 - BRELOQUE, with insurance that is not not in favor of his modesty. Fortunately,
we can cover ourselves as a shield of Marot's motto: DEATH N'Y MORD. DON PIC OF
FANFERLUCHIO a little ironically. Joining that of Montaigne: WHAT DO I KNOW? Or that of La
Motte Le Vayer: DE LAS COSAS MAS SEGURAS, THE MAS SEGURA ES DUDAR THEODORE, a little
disdainfully. They both took it to Rabelais who said: MAYBE. DON PIC OF FANFERLUCHIO, with a
fine air. Moreover, we have for resource the motto of master Abraham Wolfganck: - 48 - QU
ÆRENDO. THEODORE, in a bitter tone. Or that of the gallant Mercury: VIRES ACQUIRIT EUNDO.
DON PIC OF FANFERLUCHIO, darting linearly from all his perpendicularity. Or that of the
president of Espagnet: J'ESPÈRE. BRELOQUE, concentrating with all its convexity. Or that of Faret,
Boissat, Giry, Alary, Father Cottin, and forty others of the same strength: TO IMMORTALITY!
THEODORE, with the marked intention of keeping the conversation away from his first object. If I
took a motto, I would stick to that of Tabourot: TO ALL AGREEMENTS. - 49 - DON PIC OF
FANFERLUCHIO, with the purpose pronounced to transport the issue to a scientific field. I prefer
mine, which seems to me to contain in short all the Encyclopedias, and which I would gladly call
the Epitome, the Elenchus, the Pinax, the Compendium of human wisdom: YES OR NO. CHARM. I
prefer: NI YES NO. And I would engrave that one on my lambrequins if I did not have another
one. THEODORE. How, Charm, do you have a motto? CHARM. Hey! who doubts it, my lord! So
you have not seen my iconic portrait in your gallery of paintings? My right foot is resting on the
pod of an aerostat, and my left foot is on the bow of a diving boat. I hold in one hand a large tuft
of rosebuds, and in the other a dry poppy.A dazzling butterfly caresses my ears and my hair with
its mottled wings. A huge bat beats them from his - 50 - black membranes, all ready to fold
around his hairy body. In my dexter is my shield of arms, half- farther , on azure and sand, with a
phoenix of gold and a drowned dog . And below all this, my motto in ultra-capital letters: - 51 -
Combustion. It is too true that the praise of a slipper mistress that was sealed one day in the
pedestal of my literary statue - I did not give up the others - disappeared in a partial fire and
born but the result of which has made us shudder ... It is since that time that we no longer speak
of the pitiful conflagration of the library of Baruch, which was composed in truth only of the
prophecies of Jeremiah, and which was made a certain Joakin, king of Judah; From the library of
Cnides, which was devoted to the flames by Hippocrates, in punishment of the credulous
confidence of the people in an ignorant medicine, bold enough to heal incongruously and
without license the patients of this great man; From the library of the Ptolemies with which
Omar made a bonfire of four hundred thousand volumes to Islamism, and whose ashes, cooled
for twelve centuries, still brought tears to my venerable friend M. Boulard; From the library of
Julian we call the Apostate, which the devout Jovian burned devoutly in the temple of Trajan,on
the conclusions of his censorship commission; From the library of Byzantium which perishes
under the reign of Basilicus or Basiliscus, in a popular movement. (It's here - 52 - that was the
famous dragon intestine on which all the po The themes of Homer were written in letters of
gold, and we may never see the facsimile because of the great rarity of the dragons); Of a second
Byzantine library which had been formed by Theodosius, and which Leo Isaure, to whom I
pardon more willingly for having been a heretic and a magician than to have been a barbarian,
had mercilessly burnt with hatred against the worship of holy images, to the chagrin of librarians
who burned with; From the Hebrew library of Cremona, which contained twelve thousand
volumes of beautiful commentaries on the commentaries of the Talmud, which is the
commentary of the commentaries of the Pentateuch, which flamed in 1553. What a loss for the
synagogue! From the London Library which disappeared in 1666 in the disaster of this beautiful
capital, but at theunknown to the Pope and his adherents, whatever may be said of the insolent
and calumnious column of Christopher Wren; From the library of the learned astronomer
Hevelius, Dantzick, and that of the prodigious antiquarian Olaüs Rudbeck, of Upsal, of which a
few rare volumes escaped from the destructive scourge still exhale a scorched odor much
esteemed by bibliomaniacs; From the library of this excellent Thomas Bartholin, whom I implore
you to absolve in my favor of some learned and naive gallies, and who cried wisely at the news
of his misfortune: Liberi mei salvi sunt, libri valeant; feeling full of grace and philosophy that can
excuse a play on words;and that of the prodigious antiquarian Olaus Rudbeck, of Upsal, of whom
a few rare volumes escaped from the destructive scourge still exhale an odor of russet highly
esteemed by bibliomaniacs; From the library of this excellent Thomas Bartholin, whom I implore
you to absolve in my favor of some learned and naive gallies, and who cried wisely at the news
of his misfortune: Liberi mei salvi sunt, libri valeant; feeling full of grace and philosophy that can
excuse a play on words;and that of the prodigious antiquarian Olaus Rudbeck, of Upsal, of whom
a few rare volumes escaped from the destructive scourge still exhale an odor of russet highly
esteemed by bibliomaniacs; From the library of this excellent Thomas Bartholin, whom I implore
you to absolve in my favor of some learned and naive gallies, and who cried wisely at the news
of his misfortune: Liberi mei salvi sunt, libri valeant; feeling full of grace and philosophy that can
excuse a play on words;cried wisely at the news of his misery: Liberi mei salvi sunt, libri valeant;
feeling full of grace and philosophy that can excuse a play on words;cried wisely at the news of
his misery: Liberi mei salvi sunt, libri valeant; feeling full of grace and philosophy that can excuse
a play on words; From the library of the wise and modest Valincour, a true philosopher, who had
learned by reading his books to dispense with his books, and who deserved a friend more
sensitive than Boileau; From the master store Pierre Le Petit, our modest Elzevir, and from that
poor Monsieur Trattner of Vienna, whose burning joists I have seen smudge the learned
ruminations of Scopoli. - Great gods! of what depend on the long solicitude of the patience and
genius of which Buffon did the same thing! To what do the expectant enjoyments of the
posterity, represented by no one, hold? of this orphan posterity, a long orb, whose foresight, but
easy attention, would have spared future joys, either by awakening bursts of an auxiliary cough
the tired reader, or by diverting, by a deft gesture, the focus of light those pages that I intended
for immortality! O Gutenberg ... or Geinsfleich! for that is all the same to me; What was the use
of inventing the typography I do not know where, and I do not know when, and when you miss it
in honor to Mainz? Or that you do the same thing, industrious Mentel, in the inclyte city of
Strasbourg? Or yourself, hardworking Coster,a prodigious and creative genius, who was not
consumed by the sullen vapors of the swamps of Harlem, who last year gave me such a stubborn
coriza! "Or anyone other than you who would have had the same idea, even to China! What did
it matter if Nicolas Jenson drew these admirable characters which our archi-graphicographers
never surpass? that Laurent François de Alopa opposed him the marvelous capitals which served
for the beautiful editions of Lascaris? and that the old Alde rivaled with grace and imagination
with them in the slender and graceful size of his brilliant italics? Why did Geoffroy Tory dig his
head to measure the proportion of Attic, Roman, or Roman letters? - Duret, to find the
protography of Adam, the cabalists, the hagiography of Solomon, the Egyptian priests, the
hierography of Horus, the bonzes and the literati, the ideography of Fo-Hi, the travelers and the
missionaries, the anthology of Mexico and Peru; Ingenious antiquaries, to spell out beneath
manuscripts, superimposed on the spicy enigmas of palinpsestography, Jarry, to perfect
calligraphy, Kircher, to discover or renew polygraphy, Legangneur, technography, and, in addition,
riceography; Vigenère and Colletet, pseudography, Du Carlet, cryptography, Du Vignau,
mimography, Ramsay, tachéography, Coulon-Thévenot, tachygraphy, Taylor and Bertin,
stenography, Schott, Hiller and Addy, steganography, Uken, the steganomography, Leibnitz,
preceded by Wilkins,which was preceded by Dalgamo, who was preceded by the Nuremberg
Almanac, pangraphy, Chappe, following Polybius, telegraphy, The poor and modest Fyot, the
arch ooography, B enedictine scholars , palaeography, Firmas, palingraphy, Maimieux,
pasigraphy, Bricaille, panlexigraphy, Susse, the mn émographie, Dublar, multilinégraphie, - 55 -
L'Ath enéée de Marseille, panteugraphy, Boinvilliers, after Joubert, cacographie, Vidal,
notography, Sennefelder, lithography, I do not know what anonymous, autograph, Whence
proceeded in the straight line the silly and unsightly isography ; Baïf, Taillemont, Meigret,
Pelletier, Ramee, Rambaud, Richesource, Cordemoy, Adanson, Rétif de la Bretonne, and other
powerful grammarians of this caliber, phonography, And Tohu-Bohu, neography? I ask it! ...
Useless efforts, unsuccessful work! since of the only essential book of our time, of the only
purely human writing that a man of a righteous sense and a healthy intelligence had today some
interest in preserving, it remains to me exactly speaking only twenty-two small fragments
burned by the edges, that you would grasp all too easily with theindex and the thumb, and
between which there does not exist, as you were told just now, a weak point of moral contact, a
slight philosophical analogy, a vague possibility of oratory association or grammatical kinship, of
which the most subtle commentator can draw the most fleeting induction for the eventual
happiness of modern societies! ... And yet, I do not know what fear of leaving abandoned to the
malicious interpretations of hate and hypocrisy, these debris of my thought written,the most
fleeting induction for the eventual happiness of modern societies! And yet, I know not what fear
of leaving abandoned to the malicious interpretations of hatred and hypocrisy, these fragments
of my written thought,the most fleeting induction for the eventual happiness of modern
societies! And yet, I know not what fear of leaving abandoned to the malicious interpretations of
hatred and hypocrisy, these fragments of my written thought, - I do not know what irresistible
awareness of a vague clarity, of an unnoticed reason that still animates them ... - I do not know
what need to get rid of you , O my friends, on these follicules almost ferè-sibyllines, the a sparse
and disjointed imprint of my last feelings, - - 56 - The need above all to please my printer by
offering you here the specimen of a cast that will make the shadow of Sanlecque and Garamond
shudder: - All this to me d ecides lay before your eyes, in the order they fall under my hand,
these few words escaped the flames and criticism, combusti membra p œtœ ... ...! - 57 -
Exhibition - 58 - Explanation. PANTOUFLE! What does that word mean ? What is its usual
meaning? O Where does one find its logical definition? From what ancient or modern language
is its etymology derived? Is it indigenous or exotic? Is he native or second-class? Is it radical or
derivative? Does it represent a material fact, or does it hide an emblem? Does the author use it
literally or figuratively? And if the modest and pious censor to which this book will necessarily be
submitted, before entering seminary and high school, would suppose ... Never! this odious
interpretation is of a time foreign to our hearts. It can not be to show the slightest appearance of
truth to this grave and modest generation, who smiles only by blushing at the cynical buffoonery
of Rabelais, and who for a long time has forgotten in the mud the brazen tricks of Diderot,
Duclos, and Crebillon. The slipper in question here is simply that of my gracious master
Popocambou-the-gap-toothed, 42,663e autocrat of Timbuktu, whose reign was ele- - 59 - v ed
that famous pyramid Philo of Byzantium n ' It was not counted among the wonders of the world,
because in the time of Philo of Byzantium we went very rarely to Timbuktu. It is eighteen times
higher than the tower of Babylon, which surpassed the pyramid of Cheops, and it is built on the
point ... Either prejudice of education, or inveterate prevention of thehabit - Be it political or
religious fanaticism - either instinct or experience of what the world's worth - Popocambou,
since had come to power, had seen nothing that seemed to him better than this slipper. He
thought about it during the day. He thought about it at night. He thought about it at night. He
thought about it in the morning. He turned to the left side. He turned on the right side. He lay on
his stomach. He lay on his back. He dreamed only of this slipper. It is true that this slipper was
not to be disdained. We would have come a long way without meeting such a slipper. It was a
slipper stuffed, It was a wadded slipper, It was a satin slipper, It was a slipper refined, It was a
slipper perfected, It was a slipper of winter, it was a slipper 'summer ; - 60 - C ' was an elegant
slipper, a slender slipper, a good-looking slipper, a distinguished slipper; It was a well-
conditioned slipper, a slipper that was neither too wide nor too narrow, a solid slipper, an elastic
slipper, a fluffy slipper, a comfortable slipper, an essential slipper; It was a slipper that did not
make the smallest crease; It was a naïve slipper, a natural slipper, a slipper without any manners
or pretensions, a slipper which gave itself neither the stale airs of the boots, nor the
advantageous airs of the coronet, and which you would have recognized fifty paces for an honest
slipper. It was not a backward slipper, a gourmet slipper, a slipper with fourteen quarters, a
loyalist slipper, an ultramontane slipper,an absolutist slipper; It was not a reasoning slipper, a
liberal slipper, an industrial slipper, a legal slipper, an electoral slipper, an opposition slipper; It
was not an antique slipper, a systematic slipper, an Aristotelian slipper, an economic slipper, an
encyclopedic slipper, an academic slipper, a classic slipper; It was not a gothic slipper, a mystical
slipper, an eclectic slipper, a romantic slipper, a German slipper, a frantic slipper; It was an
excellent little slipper; It was one of those slippers we would never take off.an electoral slipper,
an opposition slipper; It was not an antique slipper, a systematic slipper, an Aristotelian slipper,
an economic slipper, an encyclopedic slipper, an academic slipper, a classic slipper; It was not a
gothic slipper, a mystical slipper, an eclectic slipper, a romantic slipper, a German slipper, a frantic
slipper; It was an excellent little slipper; It was one of those slippers we would never take off.an
electoral slipper, an opposition slipper; It was not an antique slipper, a systematic slipper, an
Aristotelian slipper, an economic slipper, an encyclopedic slipper, an academic slipper, a classic
slipper; It was not a gothic slipper, a mystical slipper, an eclectic slipper, a romantic slipper, a
German slipper, a frantic slipper; It was an excellent little slipper; It was one of those slippers we
would never take off.was not a gothic slipper, a mystic slipper, an eclectic slipper, a romantic
slipper, a German slipper, a frantic slipper; It was an excellent little slipper; It was one of those
slippers we would never take off.was not a gothic slipper, a mystic slipper, an eclectic slipper, a
romantic slipper, a German slipper, a frantic slipper; It was an excellent little slipper; It was one
of those slippers we would never take off. - 61 - She was the queen of slippers! - 62 - Annotation.
His etymology, do you say? I have not concealed from myself that it would have been remarkably
useful, in a work destined to become classical, to dedicate at least one additional chapter to the
important subject which Baudouin so superficially touched on in his treatise on Pantoufflis
veterum; but this work would have required such prodigious research that the volume would
have risked not appearing before the good edition of the Dictionary of the Academy, and in fact
of novelty pungent can not be avoided too much competition. And then you would be afraid of
the poverty of ancient and modern notions about the only etymological value of the word
slipper! Παν is a Greek monosyllable that everyone knows It is the sense, says Schrevelius; or of
which everyone is free to seek meaning, page 723 of my Dictionary, says Mr. Planche. Under the
sixteenth letter of the alphabet, says Scapula. Henri Étienne, who has so much to complain
about Scapula, does not say the opposite. For all that, I give a half-foot of my nose if I know
where it comes from, says Turnèbe, who really had a nose long enough to afford this projection.
- 63 - "He might come, said Don peak smile, Syriac Tophel, or German Stiffel, which is the same
as the Italian stivale. - "But it is probable that the name of the slipper is produced from the
Greek πατειν and Greek φολλεος, which signify in composition a hollow thing that is used to
walk. - (Which is, by parenth ose, an excellent definition of slippers.) "Unless you like as much as
it is made of πατειν and τοφος, because the slipper is a shoe suitable to tread of friable and light
earth: and I would not advise you not to use it on the angular pavements of Vire, on the pedicels
of Fécamp, and on the rolling gravel of the Lido of Venice. "I would perhaps even stop at this
explanation if I did not suddenly feel the profound conviction that the completive element for
which we have just lost our way too long is none other than φελλος, the Greek name of li ege
which is usually made the sole slippers, quod is probandum. " Eh! who doubts me? I exclaimed,
pushing an old stool of broken straw that did not need this last failure. What does it matter to
me, the origin and the meaning of slipper, "I added, snatching myself from the chaise longue I
bought at Matanasius's auction house, and throwing myself toward the door for to escape the
demon who crucified me relentlessly to his foolish etymology. I would be really crazy, "I said,
bringing the two shutters to me," to make a bad blood of me to know which of τοφος or φελλος
is elementarily involved in the construction of the name of a slipper! "And if it pleases me to be
bored tonight," I thought, crossing the square, "is not this day Bouffes and sitting at the
Athenee? Moreover,I resumed Besides, the sole of Popocambou was not cork. She was cabron.
What does sir say? asked the doorkeeper, opening his skylight, or was there a glass of glass
obscured by the smoke, and passing his grotesque head illuminated with October rubies. - I say
she was cabron. - 65 - Observation. ... ... On which I must point out once and for all - these
chapters asking for an explanation which should have preceded them: - But this observation is
useless for the readers who will begin the book by the end. ... That the word slipper is taken in
this example to the singular number, because the said number represents its intrinsic and virtual
value, and not because of the figure named metonymy, by means of which we take the part for
the whole -or the figure named synecdoche, which has exactly the same property; which leads
me to believe that there is at least one of these figures too much. "And it would be as much of
Popocambou's slippers if this great prince had had more than one slipper... Not that I should
conclude from Orus Apollo that Popocambou was a monopod like the gaisers of Hermes; Or with
gentlemen of the Celtic Academy, that one of his feet was bare, flat, membranous, and webbed,
like that of Queen Peddauque; - 66 - Or, what would be more likely, that he had a wooden leg
like Ag esilas, or a clubfoot like Don Sebastian. The fact is that the constitutive laws of Timbuktu
compel the ruler of that country to stand on one foot every time and during all the time he goes
to the exercise of one of his royal functions - this which would not imply, therefore, that a king of
Timbuktu should have his whole foot shod and his other naked. - But the reign of Popocambu
was so fertile in colossal undertakings - The construction of the great pyramid dyed so many
arms from the exploitation of the common mechanical states - The raw materials necessary for
the making ofa well-established slipper became so rare - so parsimonious economic theories -
Politics so arithmetic, and arithmetic so popular - Majorities so shady and so annoying, mainly in
slippers, that there is no example that the budget committee has spent more than a slipper to
the king of Timbuktu. Fortunately, said the king, it is a very beautiful slipper. - 67 - Prerdition. If
you preferred, however - and which author can guess your taste of tomorrow? - A Greek
schooling ... A Roman atellane ... A gallic joke ... A Scandinavian parade ... A Celtic or Gothic
buffoonery ... A Germanic shine ... An italic masquerade ... A sayn Iberian ète ... An ilyrique pismé
... A rabbinical chronicle ... A talmudesque fable ... A bésithiaque story ... An apocalyptic novel ...
You only have to speak, ladies! the bag of Charm is richer in this kind than that of
Sammonokhodom. Charm makes the fig, with its bag, to the Edda as to the Koran, to the Voluspa
as to the Vedam, to Lamaastam-bam as to the Landnamabock, to the Catechism of Volney as to
the Almanac of Matthieu Laensberg. - 68 - You may ask me where Charm has found his bag? He
inherited Jean des Vignes. - 69 - Damnation. In my last trip to Africa, if the id What I have
preserved is something other than a dream, it has occurred to me, I know not what strange
adventure of which I wish to undertake to fix the memory. Overcome by the heat of the day, I
abandoned myself to the slow march of my horse, on the banks of a river that I will not name,
because he never had a name, when all of a sudden Through the curtain of aloe with golden
girandoles, baobabs with enormous leaves, and giant reeds that veiled its shores, appeared to
me a small skiff mounted by a single man who carelessly followed the course of the waters,
without to take care of neither the oar nor the rudder; and at the same instant I saw an
enormous crocodile seizing the stern with its scaly hands, and beating the waves of its tail like a
plague. - 70 - I screamed, but all had disappeared, the boat, the monster and the traveler. I'm
going I was terrified, and with difficulty contained my horse, the horror of which was not less
than mine. What was my astonishment when I saw the wave blush with blood, and the
unknown, indifferent to his wounds, to approach peacefully beside me, while walking on the
surface of the river, as if she had been surprised in a moment by a Boreal jelly. I had barely had
time to look at him that his features were indelibly engraved in my memory, because those who
saw him must never forget him. His waist was straight and lofty, his movements supple but
sudden, his abrupt and hasty march, not like that of fear, but like that of impatience. The details
of his face were not wanting in regularity or grace, and yet their whole was sad and
threatening.Her long mouth, her narrow lips that made you see trembling white teeth close
together, her beard thick and black, her complexion tanned and tanned, her cheeks hollow, less
tanned than livid, her eyes deeply sunken from which gleamed glances of fire, like the lightning
from the depths of a dark cloud, the inexplicable contrast of the most powerful forms of vigor,
with the infallible vestiges of age and time, made of this physiognomy a enigma that human
reason can not solve. The first feeling that this man inspired, after that of terror, was the idea of
this perenniality that artists lend to their gods. As his physical appearance belonged to all eras of
life, the strange costume thathe had adopted belonged to all countries. The red band that
covered his forehead seemed itself the sign of initiation of some monastic order. He wore the
turban of the East, the doliman of the Albanian, the trousers of the Basque, the plaid of the
Scotsman, the espadrilles of the Spaniard. His ecru leather belt contained the cangiar of the
Esclavon, the zagai of the More, and the stylet of the Venetian; but it was easy to see the
brilliants with which they glittered, that these parry weapons were the caprice of luxury, and not
the precaution of useless prudence.Spanish. His ecru leather belt contained the cangiar of the
Esclavon, the zagai of the More, and the stylet of the Venetian; but it was easy to see the
brilliants with which they glittered, that these parry weapons were the caprice of luxury, and not
the precaution of useless prudence.Spanish. His ecru leather belt contained the cangiar of the
Esclavon, the zagai of the More, and the stylet of the Venetian; but it was easy to see the
brilliants with which they glittered, that these parry weapons were the caprice of luxury, and not
the precaution of useless prudence. - 71 - As he had eyes turning Towards me, and he covered
me with a look that froze my blood, I was drawn from this kind of fascination by the neighing of a
horse that was not mine. I made a movement, and I saw the steed of this man leap by my side. It
was one of those little Siberian horses whose hair looks like a frizzy wool, and which at first sight
offers something fantastic, like the imaginary animals that amaze us in dreams. He leaped with
unbelievable levity, but which announced fear rather than joy. His ardent eyes, filled with a kind
of human intelligence, testified that he was brought to this place by the power of a foreign will,
and that all his supernatural agility could not remove him from the call of his cavalier.There was
something more mysterious about him than about the incomprehensible unknown. His bit
seemed pure gold, and ended in ruby bumps. The net that fastened his head had the flexibility of
silk and the shine of metal. His horsehair braided with silver thread fell long waves, and swayed n
crystals and precious stones, by fire-colored ribbons; his harness was entirely of that polished
and perfumed leather which the Levantines tanned with incense, and his foot struck the sand
with a diamond-studded gold-iron. The traveler fell on the purple cover, and he was going away
for ever, when he seemed to be restrained by one of my thoughts, for I doubt that I had the
strength to express it in a voice. intelligible. He remained motionless in front of me on his
motionless horse, and everything remained motionless around us, until the fiery vapor which
held us place of atmosphere, until the cloud of red sand which veiled on our head the sun with
its zenith to the very sun whose disc, stopped in space as well as in Joshua's day, gaped on this
lake of fire like a bloody mouth.One would have thought the whole nature surprised by death, if
one had not heard the distant moaning and lamentable moaning of the long moan of the jackal
crying like a woman being slaughtered. - 72 - - "You know me, he said, penetrating the depths of
my soul a sharp look; and I consent to satisfy your curiosity, for I know, to see you, that we are
following the same road ... "And while he was uttering these words, he had seized the bridle of
my horse, and he carried me into the race. of his with a speed of which none of the memories of
our earthly life can give the idea, but which was strange that I did not even feel the movement,
and that I wondered for a moment if it were not not the desert, the river and the sky, which fled.
" You want it," he continued! I'll tell you a story like never before I have been told of such a story
that I would not tell, neither for the present I hate, nor for the future I abhor; neither for the
glory whose name falls from my mouth with disgust, nor for the fortune which I so easily delight
the so-called happy of the earth, if the judgment of my condemnation had not filled me with
treasures like pains ... nor for love, the only one of those stupid illusions that leaves a regret after
centuries. I will not tell it to you to free myself from the greatest crime that has weighed on the
head of man, because this crime has remained all my pride and all my joy. I will tell it to you to
obey, unfortunate that I am, at the will of this eternal tyrant of the human heart which is called
hell in the other world,and in this one consciousness. "You wish it," continued he, "but will the
mere revelation of my name leave you the strength or the will to hear me? Mortal man! - and
how much I envy you this privilege! "Indiscreet and curious man, bind yourself with a firm hand
to the hair of my horse! I am that vagabond, an eternal scum of the world, who must, more
unfortunate than ever, become its master. I am the JEWISHER. I will be ANTECHRIST! At this
horrible revelation, I felt an icy sweat dripping from my hair, and, with the eye fixed On the
accursed, I waited for each of his words with the terror which seizes the patient under the heavy
and cold iron of the executioner; but I gradually became accustomed to it as a feverish man on
returning from his access, like the exhausted victim at times of torture. It is not these prestiges
of the soul that I can try to share with the rest of men, for there is nothing capable of rendering
them in this uncertain expression of our ideas that a breath causes in the soul. air, that the
march of a little insect erases on the sand, that the trace of a feather destroys on the paper. A
dream alone can communicate them to solitary thought in all their grandeur, and nothing less is
needed to translate them than a faculty of which Providence is stingy. - What ? said Victorine. -
The g the legendary Saint Gengulph, or the historian of Fortunatus. "Then," she went on, "I
would prefer the other! - 74 - Commemoration. "I told you, sir, that my life had not lacked some
gentleness, for heaven has placed a sweet compensation for misfortune in the pity of good
souls. " I recognize that voice," she said, letting her head fall gracefully against my shoulder. - it
must be that of Gervais. "Another time, my sweet friend, I will only write for you alone; but a
solidly scientific work, and nourished by a healthy and useful instruction, like the History of the
King of Bohemia and its seven castles, alone can lead me to the emulating society of
Castelnaudary. - And what soul, however, was never more inaccessible than mine to the vain
prestige of ambition and glory? - "I enjoyed the blissful ignorance of the evils continued Gervais,
when the presence of a new host in the village of Les Bois came to occupy all the conversations
in the valley. He was known only under the name of Sir Robert, but it was, according to general
opinion, a great foreign lord whom irreparable losses and deep pains had decided to conceal his
last years in a solitude unknown to all men. . He had lost a good distance, it was said, a wife who
was almost all his happiness, since he had nothing left of their union but a subject of eternal
sorrow, a blind-born girl. However, it was touted as equal to the virtues of his father themind,
the good - 75 - te, the graces of Eulalie. My eyes could not judge of its beauty, but what
perfection would have added in me to the charm of his memory! I see her in my mind more
charming than my mother! " She's dead? m ' I cried. - "Dead? He resumed with an accent that
mingled the expression of terror with that of some inconceivable joy. "Dead? Who told you
that ? " Forgive me, Gervais, I do not know her; I was trying to explain to you the motive of your
separation. - " She's alive ! He said, smiling bitterly. And he kept silence for a moment. "I do not
know if I told you," he added in a low voice, "that her name was Eulalie. It was Eulalie, and here
is her place. He broke off again. "Eulalie! Repeated Gervais, bending his hand on the rock as if to
look for it beside him. Puck licked his fingers, and, taking a step back, he looked at him with a
softened air. I would not have given Puck for a million. - Put yourself in, Gervais! Forgive me
again for shaking your heart so hard and so painful a fiber. I guess almost everything else in your
story. The Strange conformity of Eulalie's misfortune and yours, struck the father of this young
girl. The interest you inspire so well, poor Gervais, could not fail to make itself felt on a soul
exercised by such impressions. Do you become another child for him? - "Another child said
Gervais, and our Eulalie was for me a s SPOTLIGHT. My good adoptive mother and I went to live
in this new house called the castle. The masters of Eulalie were mine. We learned together - 76 -
these divine arts of harmony that delight the soul to a celestial life. We read with our fingers, on
pages printed in relief, the sublime thoughts of the philosophers, and the charming inventions of
the poets. I tried to imitate them, and to paint like them what I did not see; because the nature
of the poet is a second creation whose elements are implemented by his Enemy, and with my
feeble reminiscences, I sometimes succeeded in remaking myself a world. Eulalie loved my
verses, and what did I need more? When she sang, one would have thought that an angel had
come down from the top of the terrible mountains to charm the valley. Every day during the fine
season we were brought to this rock, which is called here the rock of the blind, and where the
best of fathers followed us with all the care of friendship. Then there were tufts of
rhododendron around us, carpets of violets and daisies, and when our hand had recognized one
of these last flowers with its short stem, its velvety disk, and its silky rays, we amused ourselves
with by stripping the petals, repeating a hundred times this game which serves as interpreter to
the first confessions of love: - If the lying flower refused to the expression of my only thought, I
knew how to conceal it from Eulalie by an innocent deception. She might have done as much on
his side. And today, however, I have none of this left. Speaking thus, Gervais had become
increasingly dark. His pure forehead darkens with a cloud of anger; he kept a gloomy silence,
stamped his foot at random, and went to break a rose of the Alps, long dried up on his stem; I
collected it without his noticing it, and I placed it on my heart. Some time passed without my
daring to speak to Gervais, without seeming to be busy pursuing his story. Suddenly he passed
his hand over his eyes, as if to chase away an unpleasant vision, and turning on my side,with a
laugh full of grace: " "Ah, ah!" He continued, "take pity , sir, on the weakness of a child who has
not been able to control the involuntary troubles of his heart so far. A vien- day - 77 - dra may be
where wisdom go down in my mind, but I'm still so young ... " - I'm afraid, my friend, I said,
pressing his hand, that this conversation you tired. Do not ask your memory for memories that
torment her. I would never forgive myself for having troubled one of your hours with a regret
that you feel so deeply! " - It's not you who reminds me, r answered Gervais. He has not left me
for a moment, and I would rather have my soul annihilate than lose it. My whole being, sir, is my
pain. My pain is my last friendship. We were no longer her and me. We had to get used to living
together; and I find it easier to bear, when a little benevolence lightens, listening to me, the
weight so sadly solitary. Ah! ah! "He continued, laughing again," the blind are talkers, and they
hear me so seldom! I had not left Gervais' hand. He understood that I heard him. " Besides," he
said, "all is not bitterness in my memories. Sometimes they make me the past: I imagine that my
present misfortune is only a dream, and that there is no truth in my life but the happiness I have
lost. I dream that she is sitting in this place, a little more distant from me than usual, and that
she is silent, because she is immersed in a meditation to which our love is no stranger. O! if the
eternity which God reserves for benevolent souls is only the infinite prolongation of the sweetest
feeling which has moved them, what happiness to be surprised by death in this thought and to
fall asleep thus! "One day we were seated on this rock, as we do every day, and we enjoyed, in
such a gentle ecstasy, the serenity of the air, the perfume of our violets, the singing of our
birds,and especially that of our warbler of the Alps, because all - 78 - the birds of the woods
were known, and they often flew to our voices - we listened with so much charm to the sound of
the ice detached by the heat, which whistles along the needles, and the swaying waters of the
Arveyron which They came to die almost at our feet, and I do not know what vague
presentiment of the rapidity and uncertainty of happiness at the same time fills us with anxiety
and fright. We hurriedly pressed against each other, we weaved our arms as if we had wanted to
separate, and we cried together: Always! always ! I felt that Eulalie was scarcely breathing , and
that she needed to be reassured by all the strength that my character and my manly courage
gave me: - Always, Eulalie, always! - Can the world, who believes us so unhappy, judge of the f
elicity which I have tasted in your tenderness, which you have found in mine? What does it
matter to us the ridiculous movement of this turbulent society where so many interests will
come up against us which will always be foreign to us, for nature has done for us a thousand
times more than would have been the long learning of reason! We are imperfect beings for
them, and that is very simple; they have not yet managed to learn that the perfection of life
consisted in loving, in being loved. They dare to complain, because they do not know we're
complaining. This dangerous fascination that the passions exert through the gaze will at least
never act on us. Time itself has lost its dominion over two blind people who love each other. We
will never change for each other, sinceno alteration can discourage us, no comparison distract
us. The feeling which unites us is immovable like the rustling of our Arveyron, like the song of
our favorite birds, like the eternal enclosure of these rocks exposed at the south, at the foot of
which we are sometimes led in the uncertain days of the month of May. It is not the prestige of
the transient beauty of a woman that has reduced me in you, it is something that can not be
expressed when we feel it, or forget it when we do it. felt. It is a beauty that belongs to you
alone, and that I listen in your voice, that I toucheternal enclosure of these rocks exposed to the
south, at the foot of which we are sometimes led in the uncertain days of the month of May. It is
not the prestige of the transient beauty of a woman that has reduced me in you, it is something
that can not be expressed when we feel it, or forget it when we do it. felt. It is a beauty that
belongs to you alone, and that I listen in your voice, that I toucheternal enclosure of these rocks
exposed to the south, at the foot of which we are sometimes led in the uncertain days of the
month of May. It is not the prestige of the transient beauty of a woman that has reduced me in
you, it is something that can not be expressed when we feel it, or forget it when we do it. felt. It
is a beauty that belongs to you alone, and that I listen in your voice, that I touch - 79 - in your
hands, in your arms, in your hair, that I breathe in your breath, that I adore in your soul! I have
studied their loves in the books we have read, or on which my fingers have been able to search
for thoughts; and I protest that their advantages over us consist of things of little value. The sun
that I saw before was it in your eyes, I would not touch my lips with more voluptuous long
eyelashes that shade them, and on which my mouth has collected two or three tears, when you
were more small, and that one refused, against the use, to satisfy one of your caprices. I do not
know if your neck is as white as the snows of the big mountain, but I would not like it any more -
and yet here at all - O! if I enjoyed sight, I would implore the Lord to put out my eyes in their
sockets, so as not to see the rest of the women; in order to remember only you, and to leave no
passage to my heart except to those features that I would have seen coming out of yours! To see
a world, to browse it, to embrace it, to conquer it, to possess it with a ray of glance - a strange
wonder! - But why? ... for stun my soul with useless impressions, to mislead it out of you, away
from you, in frivolous admiration, through what they call the miracles of nature and art! and
what would I have to look for, if not an impression that made me something of you? She is much
better and much more complete here! Inconceivable misery of the vanities of man! of those arts
of which they make so much noise, of those prodigies of genius which dazzle them, we know
what the great number appreciates the most, the music, the poetry. - We agree that we have
organs for the go to taste, a soul to feel them; and do you think, however, that the divine songs
of Lamartine have sounded as delightful in my ear as the cry of appeal that you send me from
afar, when they bring you here last? If Rossini or Weber seize me with a more powerful prestige,
it is because you are singing them. The arts, it is you who embellish them, and you embellish
thus the creation of which they are only the ornate expression; but I can do without these
superfluous riches, I who possess the treasure from which they derive the most value; for, at
last, your heart is mine, or you are not happy! "I'm happy," answered Eulalie, the happiest of
girls! - O my children, "said Mr. Robert, joining our shaking hands," I hope you will always be
happy, for my will will never separate you! Accustomed to follow us everywhere with the care of
that attentive tenderness which nothing reassures us enough, he had approached us without
being heard, and had heard us without listening to us. I did not believe myself guilty, and yet I
was dismayed. - Eulalie was shaking. - Mr. Robert pla is this - the in - between us, because we
were a little distant from each other ... - Why not, says Robert, wrapping us in his arms and
pressing us both of them with more tenderness than usual: - Why not, in reality! - am I not rich
enough to buy you servants - and friends? You will have children who will replace your old age,
for your infirmity is not hereditary. Kiss me, Gervais; embrace me, Eulalie; thank God, and dream
of tomorrow, for the day that will light tomorrow will be beautiful, even for the blind! "Eulalie
passed from her father's arms to mine. For the first time, my lips found hers. This happiness was
too complete to be happiness. I thought my breast was going to break. I wished to die. H elas! I
did not die! "I do not know, sir, how is the happiness of others. Mine lacked calm and even hope.
I could not get sleep, or rather I did not look for it, because it seemed to me that I would not
have enough of an eternity to taste the congratulations that were promised to me, and the more
I sought to enjoy it, the more they escaped all my thoughts under a host of confused
appearances. I almost regretted this past without drunkenness, but without fear, where I feared
nothing because I had not counted on anything. I would have liked to recapture those pure
sensual pleasures of the soul that happen for the future in a child's heart; o In the future, at
least, it does not go further than the next day. At last I heard the usual noise of the house; I got
up, I dressed without waiting for my mother, I prayed to God, and I went to the window
overlooking the Arve to refresh my hot head with the vapors of morning mists. My door opened.
I recognized a man's step. It was not Monsieur Robert. A hand grasps mine. Monsieur de
Maunoir! I cried. It had been several years since he had come, but the sound of his gait, the
touch of his hand, I know not what of the frank, the well-off and the tender, which is not judged
in particular by any sense, but who felt himself by all, had remained of him in my memory. It's
him, "he said, speaking to someone with a rather altered tone of voice," it's my poor Gervais.You
know what I tell you in time! - After that he put his fingers on my eyelids and held them for some
time high. - Ah! he said, God's will be done! At least, do you find yourself happy? "Very happy," I
replied. Mr. Robert says that I took advantage of his kindness. I can read like a seer, and I am
loved by Eulalie. "She will love you more if she sees you one day," said M. de Maunoir. "If she
sees me, do you say? - I thought of this eternal stay where the eye of the blind opens to a clarity
that has no more night. - I did not understand. - 82 - "My mother brought me here according to
custom, but Eulalie was very late. I was trying to explain why. My poor Puck went to meet him,
and then he came back, and then he always returned; and when he was very far, far away, he
barked impatiently, and when he was near me, he cried. At last he began to bark with such noisy
bursts, and to jump on the bench with so much petulance that I recognized that she must be
near us, although I can not hear her yet; I leaned toward the side from which I was waiting, and
my extended arms found hers. M. Robert had not this time accompanied his servants, and I felt
at once the reason, which must also be that of the unusual delay of Eulalie: I had forgotten
thatthere were strangers at the castle. "What is very strange, sir, is that his arrival, so much
desired, fills me with some unknown anxiety which I did not yet know. I was no longer at ease
with Eulalie as the day before. Since we had all of one to another, I dared not ask anything. It
seemed to me that his father, in giving me a new right, had imposed upon me a thousand
privations. I was afraid to exercise the power of a word, the seductions of a caress. I felt much
better that she was mine, and I dreaded much more to touch her. I would have been afraid of
profaning her, listening to her breath, touching her dress, grabbing one of her flowing hair from
my mouth. She might have the same feeling,for our conversation was for some time that of two
persons who were little known. It could not last long. The illusions of the last day were not yet
old. Puck was careful to remind us of them by jumping from one to the other, as if he had
suffered from seeing us so far away and so cold. I moved closer to Eulalie, and my lips searched
for her eyes, the only place in her face that they had touched until the day before that day. They
touched a blindfold.I moved closer to Eulalie, and my lips searched for her eyes, the only place in
her face that they had touched until the day before that day. They touched a blindfold.I moved
closer to Eulalie, and my lips searched for her eyes, the only place in her face that they had
touched until the day before that day. They touched a blindfold. "You are wounded , Eulalie!" "A
little hurt ," she replied, "but very lightly, since I spend the day with you as usual, and there is
nothing between your mouth and my eyes but a green ribbon more. " - - 83 - Scholarship. "
There is more sense than you think in Gervais' question and in the modest your Eulalie,
"exclaimed Don Pic. These poor young people to whom I begin to attach myself, and who have
probably received some good principles of verbal philology (a feature which you have a bad idea
omitted in your account), these kind children, I say, understand at the same moment that the
word ribbon, coming essentially from the word rubens, gallicè, red, reddish or blushing, green
ribbon is one of those frightful cacologies, one of those reckless tropes which put the grammar
to the torture and which fright logic; so that the exclamation of Gervais is equivalent to this one:
"O! dear Eulalie! how do you allow this barbarous catachresis? ... - And that the r Eulalie's
evasive answer implicitly means: "I agree with you, my friend, that I allowed myself a barbarous
catachresis, but I am so far from wanting to justify it that I am ready to speak of something else.
"Me too," said Charm. - " - Besides, if Charm wants to follow me for a moment, said Don Pico,
that is to say the time needed to draft my monograph tape verd ... - I like to drink better, says
Charm. - - 84 - " - I will consider three things in the green ribbon: Primum, materia. "Id est, de
animalibus, and præcipue de insectis setigenis in genere; item of bombycibus and bombylis;
item of erucis, spectris, larvis, aureliis, chrysalidibus, papilionibus, imaginibus. - And millionibus
diabolibus that can take you in infernibus, says Charm. - Secund um, color. " I will have the
optics, the dioptric, the catoptric; "Aposcopy, catascopy, metoposcopy, helioscopy, physioscopy,
microscopy, megascopy, polyscopy, periscopy, kaleidoscopy; "The panorama, the diorama, the
neorama, the georama, the cosmorama, the pantostereorama; "The prism, the magic lantern,
and the opera glasses. "We'll give a fang in the leg to Newton, a nazarde to Father Mersenne,
and a big kick in the belly at Algarotti ... - I'd gladly give them back! said Charm. - - 85 - Terti ùm, -
( Charm put on his nightcap) " - If we consider the green ribbon in its relationship with the
history of the arts, industry, commerce and civilization, since the origin of the plastic ideas on
which have been molded all the typical forms of thought, in its indefatigable and persistent
creation. "We will probably arrive at the eldest," said Breloque? " " "I was getting there. The first
green ribbon that was never discussed, though Astruc was not mistaken in his curious
conjectures on the materials that served Moses for the composition of Genesis ... Listening,
Charm, the first of all the ribbons Verds ... - I wish he e ût used to tighten your neck, told charm.
- « - ... This is evidently that which the dove of the ark brought back in its beak; but the deep
Samuel Bochart thinks that this so-called dove was a seagull, and it is not really probable that
Noah, who did not lack sense when he was not drunk, entrusted such a mission to a terrestrial
bird. who had such a beautiful aviary of amphibious birds on board. Also, regardless of the dove
and raven of the Vulgate, Jean Le Pelletier believes to see a bittern. - 86 - - Three bitters, neither
more nor less, Jean Le Pelletier, Bochart, and you, said Breloque ... - « - The ribbon that this
anonymous bird, pseudonym, or plutt A polyonym, offered to the new leader of the human race,
and whose color has since become that of hope, doubtless presented to the eyes the smiling
aspect of the verdure which was going to parry the reconquered earth. It was a green ribbon,
Charm (that is to say, a green cloth that we call improperly ribbon by a deplorable abuse of
catachresis), and not a branch, as claimed by some damned Talmudists, infatuated with the
foolishness of the Massore, reveries of Mishnism, the routine of the traditionalists, and the ten
Sephirots of the cabal. "They are the ones who dropped my last elodrama," said Breloque. - " - It
is true that Leusden read twig against the authority Of Gabriel Sionite who read ribbon, but as
they both died, Jews, apostates, marians, reprobates, and who is more lepers and insolvables,
subjudice lis is, or else, res agitur in lite. "Let's go to bed," said Charm. - " - We have luckily on
this question the omnipotential authority , do you hear, Charm? of our friend Herbinius, who
testifies that the immense trees and branches with which the waters of the eluges were loaded
before their retreat, having been able easily to furnish the traveling bird with this equivocal
guarantee ... "" Oh! that these huge trees and branches had potentially provided beautiful m
Potenciform heads and beautiful potencial forks to suspend you archipotentially by the throat,
says Charm. - " - And these branches and foliage that abounded everywhere, and that the
ambassador garlic It was so easy to collect, giving no miraculous character to its mission, it was
less possible and consequently more meritorious to believe that it had brought back a ribbon, in
a time when one did not manufacture ribbons and where the use of silk was unknown. This
reasoning is perhaps what will remain more authentic in the systematic, problematic,
emblematic, hypothetical and sophistic genre of criticism and ascetic, mystical, parenetic,
ethical, enclitic, eclectic, gnostic, dogmatic and scholastic hypercriticism. , per omnia sæcula
sæculorum. " AMEN," said Breloque. - - 88 - Aberration. " Where the hell did we get from the
green ribbon monograph when I fell asleep," said Breloque? " - It is my opinion, replied Don Pic,
whom I left you at the house of the Marquise de Chiappapomposa, at the moment when seizing
the green ribbon of her bell with a very Roman dignity: - she came down from chaste Lucretius,
by the men - "In truth, I do not you do not recognize, Theodore! but finish, finish, in the name of
heaven, or I'll ring Spinette. "And Monseigneur, who knew no more, a reverence guarded,
imagined that the Marquise de Chiappapomposa would ring. - 89 - "But when the Marquise de
Chiappapomposa sounded, it would have been necessary to see that Spinette was thinking of
coming! "You would have ravaged all the advanced posts, eighteen leagues round - Burnt the
tent and the pavilions, the fascines and the gabions, the drawbridges and the palisades, the city
and the suburbs - Market, the hand-lit torch, through the attics, the arsenals and the powder
magazines - "The fire would have begun to run from the mine to the contremine, from the wick
to the arquebuse, from the battery to the thunder - "And the Marquise de Chiappapomposa
would have rang all the bells and bells, the sings, the tocsins and the bells, the bells and
rattlesnakes, the sistrums and the tabales, the triangles and the atabales, the eardrums and the
tympanons, the tympanioles and tymbals, cymbals, cymbals and cymbals, burbelins, curbelins
and crembalins, cri-cries and horse-hair, bombardes and tarabats, castanets and drums of
basque, drums tams and the rattles, The belfries and the chimes, The clarum tintinnabulum de
Catullus, and the clocqua titubans of Merlin Coccaïe; The campana de Vililla, which announced,
according to the good man Quinonez, the advent of a pope, and that of St. Mary of Carabaça,
who happily fidgeted and happily chanted to the guards of theAssumption - - 90 - The bell of
Saint-Roch and Saint-Eustache, the Bourdon, Georges d'Amboise and the Samaritaine - All the
bells finally of all the dimensions which were clochatairement arranged according to their
chromatic order at the last council of the bells , where the canonization of Janotus of Bragmardo
was spiked altogether - that Spinette would not have come! "No, mordieu! she would not have
come! " - 91 - Transition. "A hay of pedantry and pedants," continued Breloque. This damn
barbacole here is so meagrabolized the brain of its scientific nomenclatures that I almost forgot
to speak Christian. " - It only takes as much to arrive to all, replied Don Pic. Do you want me to
open the door of the universities? - When the magnificent rector has successively awarded you
baccam lauri and togam doctoris, how will you answer him? "Monseigneur and gentlemen, I
have never been bored like today, since the last session of Asian society. " That's it, and it's not
that. Listen, Charm: "Gentlemen, I can not defend myself, listening to you, from a somnolent
disposition, accompanied by spasms, hiatus, and grinning, which results more and more in each
of your speeches, to the last degree of prostration, torpor and cephalalgia. - C ephalalgia! I am
dead ! " - No, Charm, you're bored. "Me too," said Victorine! - 92 - Mystification. - Is that just
that, said Breloque, and is it enough to sit masterfully in curi and in præsidio, to comment on the
thesis of this great silly prince of Mirandola, of an omnibus rebus scibilibus or other bibus, and to
argue in baroco in the patois of the schoolboy Limousin? Here I am. Favete Linguist: "Paracelsus
had led us into the Caupone insignia of his daily architecture, where Dioscorides, Archimedes,
Abelard, Boethius and the Abbot de Latteignant meet from time to time. "Farinacius first
observed that the ambient air contained infinitely little heat, and the absence of this vehicle had
so exulcerated the dermis that you could not distinguish whether to see ambustion or erythema
pernionculoid, which is a scary thing to think. "But Flavius Josephus had already furnished
himself with four woody prisms, the length of three good palms of Italy,carved roughly in the
patula fagus of the first line of the Bucoliques, and he hastened to place them on a rather
ingenious scaffolding which ended on the side of the spectators by cynocephalic masks. Budea
then seized a small parallelogram of sharp-edged iron, and suddenly struck it with a fragment of
semi-diaphanous flint. - 93 - cussion e A few molecules in the state of flagrancy or scintillary
flutter were detached from the metal, and they repetitively oxidized a dried agaricus which was
held by Sulpice Severus. "Covarruvias having placed this agaricus (I always thought it was a
bolitus, as the peremptory advance perennially Triptolemus in his scholies on the juvenilia of St.
Babolin), Covarruvias, I say, having placed under the prisms which I have spoken above, made to
play adpropecircumextraforaneivagoflabralimodulatément, by means of a species of hircin skin
alternately compressed and dilated between two ebony trapezes, armed with spatuliform
manipulators and tubularly terminated by a hollow cylinder, such a large quantity of nitrogen
and oxygen in the required proportion of 79 to 21, that two"The first, which was explained by
Apuleius, is that this mixture lost part of its oxygen, which was absorbed by carbon in favor of
combustion; "The second, which was demonstrated by Nicolas Bourbon the former (he was from
Vand is that caloric In the meantime, it should progressively stimulate a voluptuous dilatation of
the cellular tissue of Farinacius; but Farinacius cared little about it. He had blown in his fingers.
"As for the cibic part of the fleas, which consisted mainly of esques properly inhaled and
methodically unassisted, Ocellus Lucanus secretly confessed to me that it would have been very
difficult to give them a perfectly isochronous degree of cocaine without an invention which
makes too much honor to the human spirit for me to pass over it in silence. It is a machine
whose combinations are of a frightening complication, which has large wheels and small wheels,
tenons, mortises, screws, dowels, keys, nails, nuts, notches, racks, chains, links, chains, ropes,
weights,levers, pulleys, springs, pendulums, boxes, consoles, feet, supports, - 94 - foothills, and
that makes it turn with great cutting a pointed iron axis. "What is surprising is that there is no
question of this machine in Diophantus. "There is no mention of it in the comments of Bachet de
Méziriac. "There is no question in the description of Grollier de Serviere's cabinet. "There is no
question of it in the Mathematici veteres, which have been so beautifully printed in the Louvre.
"It is no more a question in the little manuals than in the Almanac of Liege, the most learned and
the most complete of all the collections that have been printed this year. "There is no more in
Papin and Parmentier than in Pliny and Apicius. "She escaped the industrial investigations of M.
Charles Dupin, as well as the really economic lucubrations of this illustrious M.from Rumford
who made us eat such bad soups in the Temple. "It is only surmised that it is in spite of not
having invented it that Empedocles rushed head first into a crater on Mount Etna, at the edge of
which Lord Hamilton found his slippers. " - 95 - Verification. "How stupid I am ," said my
bookseller wisely, throwing his slipper against an old bust of Popocambou. It's a rotisserie! - The
author pulls the page, said the printer malignantly, letting a small hand sink a pinch of shells on
the movable heel of his composter. It's a rotisserie! "Good for the joke," said the pressman,
throwing his miter of paper over the occiput, and folding his frame proudly, without pointing at
the sheet; but it's a rotisserie! "I do not want to know either A or B," said the prote, "the carp
and the mascot, widely imposed on the two breaks of the capital A and B, if it is not a rotisserie!
- They have id now that it is really to lose its head, "said the stitcher, transposing with incredible
intrepidity the two most ontologically chained leaves I have ever written; but, tell me, Elodie,
does not that make you feel like a rotisserie? "Except for some reserved allusions ," said the
censor, putting down his pen with a beak soaked in carmine, "it is difficult for the procureur du
roi to see anything but a rotisserie! - 96 - - The idea is not fine and the expression is not happy,
said the journalist, both hands in the pockets of his pants, and pacing with his other two feet the
compartments of his floor, but I do not find any inconvenience in the current state of things to
assume that itis a kind of rotisserie. "I consent to never handle the brush or the glue pot," said
the display, boldly spreading his cupboard in the wrong direction, if it is not a rotisserie. - To hell
with ignorant ignorant ignorant who missed his thesis! exclaimed Don Pic in dismay, dropping his
encyclopedic head with all his weight on the scraped back of my old black armchair. He forgot
the leccarda, mio Teodoro, id is, go adipis exceptorium, vulgò dictum a dripping pan! - But the
council of the university There was no mischief in him, and although he was no more acquainted
with the question than you were, after the reading of the anti-faded fanfrelches of our master
Alcofribas, a Pindaric homily at St. Thomas Aquinas, or a lesson in theology in the Sorbonne,
there would have been so little a doctor who, in the affirmative, did not open a hat; - And Charm
passed happily inter eximios. - 97 - Num eration. Breloque was no longer wanting to be invested
with the rights, privileges, immunities and exemption from science which are attached to the
doctorate that the Approbatur of the famous doctor Abopacataxo, great logarithmier of the
impenetrable Consistory of Brouillamini. The great logarithmic sat in front of a parallelogram of
slate, on the tablet of which, on one side, was a long fragment of a white matter, matt, friable,
brittle, Cretaceous, cut into an acute cone; on the other, a kind of soft madrepore, irregular,
voluminous, light, porous, compressible, elastic, whose name is not found in Varro because it
was obscene in Latin. He held open a roll of printed paper, laden with astral figures, genealogical
calculi, sidereal emblems, and conspicuous signs.that Breloque took first for the grimoire; but in
the end, after looking at it more closely, he made sure that it was only the lame Messenger. At
the sight of Breloque's thesis, the great logarithmier armed himself with his compass, then
proceeded to measure it masterfully in all its dimensions. Then, and after I do not know what an
invocation deaf, he began to draw and erase alternately on the magic table horizontal lines of
Arabic characters he named one after the other, as many evocative formulas, posing or retaining
aloud, those ofthen proceeded to measure it masterfully in all its dimensions. Then, and after I
do not know what an invocation deaf, he began to draw and erase alternately on the magic table
horizontal lines of Arabic characters he named one after the other, as many evocative formulas,
posing or retaining aloud, those ofthen proceeded to measure it masterfully in all its dimensions.
Then, and after I do not know what an invocation deaf, he began to draw and erase alternately
on the magic table horizontal lines of Arabic characters he named one after the other, as many
evocative formulas, posing or retaining aloud, those of These diabolical hieroglyphs suited his
execrable operation. The wizard sweated with ahan, and Charm trembled from all its members.
After that, Dr. Abopacataxo drew a large Latin cross, between the crosses of which (profanation!)
He hurriedly waved his hand, carrying, with the fury of a demonic, his sacrilegious symbols to
the four cardinal points of the horizon, as if to stagger the entire army of Satan around the thesis
of poor Breloque! Charm's teeth clashed and snapped, like those of the cursed of the Gospel.
That's not all. Charm saw him distinctly gathering some of these cabalistic rebus on the last line
of the talisman table, separating them spelled out formally. - 99 - dykes and portitic
mimographisms of the Tironians, in the manner of Abraxas, or other amuletic slang; such as
Minority dashes - Double dashes æqualitative = Copulative superimposed points: Double
comparative superimposed points:: Cross of multiplicative St. Andrew × And finishing all with the
letter X, which is sacred, profane and abominable, lethal and Stygian, in the eyes of God and
men, as it is written, " And when the devil should take me away, Cried Dr. Abopacataxo, "I will
release this damned unknown! At this horrible and blasphemous imprecation, Breloque thought
to see Proserpine appear herself, and her hair bristled on her forehead! (Imagine that I had
never been able to make him understand the mechanism of the simplest addition, without
excluding that of Diocles of Smyrna.) "Sage Breloque," says finally the great logarithmier of the
impenetrable consistory of Brouillamini, "You can rest assured that your dissertation is about as
it appears from six pages of printing, the character, format, and justification of the history of the
King of Bohemia and its seven castles, and these pages being formed, more or less, of twenty-
four widely spaced lines, ad exiguitatem voluminis vitandam,each of which contains thirty-eight
letters, or is hardly lacking, it must contain, by approximation, unless I am mistaken, and without
commas, points, whites, minuses, spaces, reticences and parentheses , quadrats and quadratins,
a total sum of types of printing that can be estimated at five thousand four hundred and
seventy-two, if Bareme failed. And as the proportion of consonants to vowels in the vernacular
which you have used, is commonly fifty-five out of a hundred,it can be estimated at five
thousand four hundred and sixty-two, if Bareme has failed. And as the proportion of consonants
to vowels in the vernacular which you have used, is commonly fifty-five out of a hundred,it can
be estimated at five thousand four hundred and sixty-two, if Bareme has failed. And as the
proportion of consonants to vowels in the vernacular which you have used, is commonly fifty-
five out of a hundred, - 100 - the bail of Court of Gouelin and the president of Brosses, which
results, as you know, from the over-paragogy of the fictitious letters of our nominal and verbal
plurals, you give back to the university five percent vowels, in exchange of as many valid
consonants, well conditioned, and delivered without damage and without waste, the consonants
and the vowels being currently at par in the higher studies, which was not seen, and will not be
seen perhaps fifty scholastic generations. " Oh! Oh ! how beautiful is he to whom! exclaimed
reassured Breloque; but my thesis? " - You would have experienced another kind of
disadvantage in Italian, where the proportion of vowels to consonants is instead of sixty-two
hundredths or, if you prefer, sixty-two hundred ... " - That to me is perfectly equal "said Breloque,
scratching himself with his dexterous ear, which is a sign of immoderate impatience; but my
thesis, my thesis! ... " - Eh! what party would you have taken, "continued the doctor, without
perceiving that he had been interrupted; "What would you have said, wise Breloque, if you had
been dealing with the Icelandic language or the Chéroquoise language, in which the relative
mass of consonants is exactly like that of a regiment in the corps of officers and non-
commissioned officers? There is only one vowel per squad. " "Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr," said
Breloque, with as much perspicacity as if there had been behind him a regiment of consonants -
but the poet laureate had hired them all. - - Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, made Charm! Will you talk to
me about my thesis? " You can stand for sure , wise Charm, that your thesis is roughly
composed, as it appears ..." - 101 - - Hey! I know it better , "murmured Breloque, p ange of
anger. " But, my thesis, my thesis! he continued in a meteoric voice. Have I done doctoral thesis
for numerical solution? Do you see in my quintessential thesis any combination other than that
of consonant and vocaliform articulations, other consequence than figures? " "No," replied the
great logarithmic: "Science, Morality, Philosophy, Religion, Literature, Politics, I care about it as a
zero all alone. Number is everywhere, everything is by number, by number is everything. It was
the feeling of Pythagoras, great logarithm of the Crotoniates. My business is to count without
more, and digitizing, numerically numerically, baremically philosophical, philosophically baremic,
logarithmising pindarially, logarithmically pindarizing, drinking all the more, and all happily. " By
the virtue of God, if I break the thirty-two teeth that garnish your two mandibles with one blow
of the hand here," said Breloque, pointing to him with a clenched fist , "would you tell me how
much there is fingers in there? " - Five, r replied the great logarithmic, without discomfort, which
are composed of fourteen phalanxes. " You have lied to it," said Breloque, raising his index finger
and thrusting it into his eye. I have lost the last phalanx of that one at the seat of Konigsgratz,
which is, so that you may know, the strongest of the seven castles of the King of Bohemia! - H
elas! we will have a hard time getting there from this campaign! - 102 - Interlocution. "You have
seen," I exclaimed, "you will see! ... unfortunate that I am! ..." - But it is not Dr. Abopacataxo who
says that. Dr. Abopacataxo is back to his figures, and poor Gervais to his story. Here he is
speaking beside me, just as Don Pic de Fanferluchio so foolishly interrupted him. - "You'll see! ...
the mirror, which was only a cold and polished surface for you, will show you your living image.
His conversation, silent but lively, will repeat to you every day that you are beautiful, and when
you return to the unfortunate blind, he will inspire you more than a feeling. You will pity him to
be blind, because you will conceive that the greatest misfortune is not to see you. What did I
say ! you will not come back! why will come back? what is the beautiful girl who would like a
poor blind man? " woe on me! I am blind ! - "In saying this I fell to the earth, but she followed
me, pressing me with her hands, tying her fingers in my hair, touching my neck with her lips,
groaning like a child. - No, never, never I will only love Gervais. - Yesterday, you were indignant at
being blind so that our love would never be altered! I will be blind if necessary to not let worry -
103 - to your c SPOTLIGHT. Do you want me to tear this camera? ... Do you want me to break my
eyes? ... - "Horrible memory! I had thought of it! "" Stop, "I said to him, seizing the rock violently
in order to exert on him the excess of strength which tormented me. - We speak an insensitive
language because we are sick; you, your happiness, and me, my despair. - Listen: - "I took my
place, she hers. How my heart beat! "Listen," I continued, "it is very good that you see, because
now you are perfect. - It is indifferent erent way that I do not and I die - abandoned ed - because
that is the fate that God made me! - but swear never to see me, never to seek to see me! If you
see me, you will be forced in spite of yourself to compare me to others, to those who have their
minds and souls in their eyes, to those who speak of the look, and who make women dream
with one of the traits that spring from their eyeball, or one of the movements that raises their
eyebrows. I do not want you to be able to compare me! I want to stay for you in the vague
thought of a blind little girl, like a dream, like a mystery. I want you to swear I only come back
here with this green banner - to come back every week - or at least every month, every year
once! ... to come back again! Ah! swear to come back to it once more, and not to see me! " " I
swear to love you always, "said Eulalie, crying. - "All my senses had fainted. I had fallen back to
his feet. M. Robert lifted me up, gave me some caresses, and put me back in my mother's hands.
Eulalie was no longer there. "She returned the next day, two days later, several days in a row;
and my lips had not ceased to find that green band which maintained my illusion. I imagined that
I - 104 - would be the m even for her as long as she would not have seen me. I thought I
appreciated in my reminiscences the impressions of a meaning of which I scarcely enjoyed, and
it seemed to me that they would not suffice to distract her from the delicious prestige in which
we had spent our childhood. I said to myself with a senseless satisfaction: she remained blind to
me, my Eulalie! she will not see me! she will always love me! "And I covered her ribbon with
kisses, for I no longer loved her eyes. "It happened one day, after many days, and if it were to
begin again I would count them - it happened, I do not know how to tell you, that his hand was
united with mine with a more lively embrace, than our intertwined fingers moistened with
warmer sweat,that his heart was throbbing here, to stir my mouth, and that my mouth, by
wandering around, found long lashes of silk under its green band. " - Great God! m ' I cried,' is
this a mistake on my memory Me-? No no ! I remember that when I was a child, I saw flickering
lights on the eyelashes of my eyes, that they carried rays, rounded fires, wandering spots, colors,
and that it was by the day was slipping with a thousand sharp sparks to come to awaken me in
my cradle. if you went to see me! " I saw you," said she, laughing, "and what would it have been
like to see if I had not seen you? Proud! who prescribe limits to the curiosity of a woman whose
eyes have just opened to the light of day! " - That is not possible, Eulalie ... - You swore to me ! ...
" - I have not sworn anything , my friend, and when you asked me this oath I already saw you. As
far as the esplanade allowed Julie to discover you ... do you see him, I told him? - Yes Miss ; he
looks very sad. - I understood that; I came so late! - Zest, the ribbon was gone. I had been told
that it would expose me to lose my sight forever, but after seeing you I did not need to see. I only
put on my green banner when I sat down next to you. " - You had seen me, and you continued to
come. This is good. Who did you see first? - Mr. de Maunoir, my father, Julie - and then this
immense world, the trees, the mountains, the sky, the sun, the creation of which I was the
center, and which seemed on all sides ready to rush upon me in the depths of I know not what
abyme where I thought I was diving. " And since you saw me? " Gabriel Payot, old Balmat, the
good Terraz, Cachat the giant, Marguerite." "And no one else? " "Nobody. " How fresh the air is
tonight!" Lower your headband: you could go blind again. " What does it matter! I tell you I have
only seen, to see you, to see you, to love you with one more meaning. You were in my soul as
you are in my eyes. I only have a new reason to exist only for you. This faculty which they have
given me is a new ring which attaches me to your heart, and that is why it is so dear to me ! O! I
would like to have as much sense as the beautiful nights have stars to occupy them all with our
love! I think that's where angels are happy among all creatures. - "Those were his words,
because I can not forget them. The conquest of light had once again exalted this lively
imagination, and his heart was animated by all the fires that his eyes had just drawn from the
sun. - 106 - "My days had found some charm. One accustoms oneself so easily to hope! man is
so weak as to resist the seduction of an error which flatters him! Our existence had, moreover,
taken on a new character, I know not what mobile and agitated variety which Eulalie forced me
to prefer to the profound calm in which we had lived until then. This rocky bench on which you
are seated was for us only a rendezvous and a station, where we came to relax in gentle
conversations the gentle exercise of the walk. The rest of the time was spent in the valley, where
Eulalie alone served me as a guide, enchanting my ear with the impressions she gathered at the
sight of all those marvelous pictures that sight sees in thought.It sometimes seemed to me that
her imagination, like a powerful fairy, was beginning to free my soul from the darkness of the
body, and to delight her, illuminated by a thousand lights, in the spaces of the sky, by lavishing
upon her graceful images like perfumes, bright and penetrating colors like the sounds of an
instrument; but soon my organs refused this misleading perception, and I fell sadly into the
gloomy contemplation of an eternal night. This fatal return to myself seldom escaped the
solicitude of her affection, and then she spared nothing to distract me. Sometimes, it was songs
that brought me back to mind when we were both blind, and where she so charmed our
solitude; more often,the reading which had become for us a new and singular acquisition,
although we had possessed the secret in other forms and by other means; the library of the
blind is extremely limited, and the sensations of sight must be much more lively and much more
rapid than those of tact, for since Eulalie had learned to read otherwise than with her fingers,
the ideas were developing before his eyes came to me suddenly and fruitfully, like those of an
animated conversation. My attention driven in the rise of his word lost its actionand it is
necessary that the sensations of the sight are much more alive and much more rapid than those
of the tact, because since Eulalie had learned to read otherwise than with her fingers, the ideas
which developed under her eyes reached me suddenly and fertile, like those of an animated
conversation. My attention driven in the rise of his word lost its actionand it is necessary that the
sensations of the sight are much more alive and much more rapid than those of the tact,
because since Eulalie had learned to read otherwise than with her fingers, the ideas which
developed under her eyes reached me suddenly and fertile, like those of an animated
conversation. My attention driven in the rise of his word lost its action - 107 - about myself , and
I thought I was living in a new life that I had not yet guessed nor understood; in a life of
imagination and feeling, in which I do not know what beings of invention, less strangers than
myself, came to surprise and deceive all the faculties of my heart. What a vast region of
magnificent thoughts and touching meditation opens to the favored being who has received
from the heavens organs to read, and an intelligence to understand! Sometimes it was a passage
from the Bible, like the speech of the Lord to Job, which confused me with admiration and
respect; or like the story of Joseph and his brothers, who plunged my heart into a tender
emotion of pity; sometimes they were the miracles of the epic, with the almost divine naivete of
Homer, or with the religious solemnity of Milton. We also read novels, among which a very
vague and confused instinct, which I never tried to explain to myself, made me love Werther.
Eulalie first preferred those whose subject appropriated to our situation. A passion deeply
expressed, a separation painfully felt, the pure joys of a chaste union, the simplicity of a rustic
household, sheltered from interested curiosity and the false affection of men, was what
disturbed his voice. which moistened her eyelids; and although we spoke less often from our
marriage, when the order of the evening reading brought something of the sort, she told
mekissed again in front of his father. "After a while, I thought I noticed that there had been some
change in the taste of his reading. She liked more the painting of the scenes of the world; she
insisted without perceiving it on the vain description of a festival; she liked to come back to the
details of a woman's toilet or the apparatus of a show! I did not suppose at first that she had
completely forgotten that I was blind, and these distractions bruised my heart.she liked to come
back to the details of a woman's toilet or the apparatus of a show! I did not suppose at first that
she had completely forgotten that I was blind, and these distractions bruised my heart.she liked
to come back to the details of a woman's toilet or the apparatus of a show! I did not suppose at
first that she had completely forgotten that I was blind, and these distractions bruised my heart.
without breaking it. I attributed this slight caprice to the extraordinary movement which was felt
in the chateau, since M. de Maunoir had renewed its aspect by one of the miracles of his art. Mr.
Robert, happier, no doubt! more disposed to enjoy the favors of fortune and the graces of life, -
108 - of the moment o his daughter had been restored to him with all the perfection of his
organization and all the splendor of his beauty, loved to gather those numerous travelers whom
the short summer season brings back every year to our mountains. The castle, it may be said,
had become one of those hospitable mansions of another age, whose master never thought he
had done enough to embellish the stay of his guests. Eulalie shone in this ever new circle, always
composed of rich foreigners, illustrious scientists, and coquettish and spiritual travelers; she
shone among all women, and that attraction of speech, which is, for us unfortunate, the
physiognomy of the soul, and a thousand other attractions that I did not know. What an
incredible mixture of pride and pain was lifting my chest upto make her burst out, when the fire
of her eyes was boasting near me, or when a young man, stupidly cruel, complimented us on the
color of her hair! "Those who had come to see the valley, gladly prolonged their stay there. to
see Eulalie. I understood that. I did not have to regret her affection, which seemed never to be
altered, and yet I felt that she lived more and more out of me, from us, from this intimacy of
misfortune that we do not dare not to claim, and which costs happiness when one loses it. I
wished the winter more impatiently than I had ever wished the warm breath and the little
showers of spring. The desired winter arrived, and M. Robert informed me, not without some
precautions, not without assuring me thatthey separated from me for a few days at most, and
they would only call me the time necessary to make a convenient establishment in Geneva; he
told me that he was leaving with her, that they would spend the winter in Geneva, - winter so
quickly passed ! ... winter passed so close! ... "You hear well: - so fast! ... a winter in the Alps! - so
near ! ... in Geneva, at the end of the accursed mountains! - a road that chamois would not dare
to try in winter; - and I was blind! - 109 - "I was dumb with amazement. Eulalie's arms wrapped
around my neck. I found them almost cold, almost heavy. She spoke to me a few words, tender
and moved, if my memory does not deceive me, but this noise passed like a dream. I did not
return completely to myself until a few hours later. My mother said to me: They are gone,
Gervais, but we will stay at the castle! - "Damnation! I cried,our cabin has disappeared under
another avalanche! "No, Gervais, the cabin is here , and the benefits of M. Robert have allowed
me to embellish it. - Well ! him r I replied, throwing myself in tears in his arms, "enjoy the
benefits of M. Robert! I do not have the right to refuse them for you ... but, in the name of
heaven, let's go! "I had time to think about our position. I knew she would not marry a blind
man, and I would have refused to marry her myself since she had ceased to be blind without
ceasing to be rich. It was misfortune that made us equal; and from the moment that sympathy
had broken, I lost all the rights that misfortune gave me. Who could fill the immense gap that
God has thrown between the marvel of creation, an angel or a woman, and the last of his
rejects, a blind orphan? But may Heaven forgive me this judgment if it is rash! I thought she did
notwould abandon - 110 - not everything indeed, and that she would reserve for me, near her,
the happiness of hearing, in a place where she would sometimes pass, or float her prom dress,
or shout the satin of her shoes, or fall from her mouth these words sweeter than an eternal
farewell: Good evening, Gervais! "Since that time, I have nothing to say, almost nothing. "In the
month of October she sent me a ribbon, printed in relief, and which bore: THIS RIBBON IS THE
VERY RIBBON THAT I HAVE ON MY EYES. - I did not leave him . Here it is. "In November the
weather was still pretty good. One of the people from the house brought me some presents
from his father. I did not know. "In December the snow started again. God ! that this winter was
long! January, February, March, April, centuries of disasters and storms! and in the month of
May the avalanches that fell everywhere, except me! "When two or three rays of the sun had
softened the air and enlivened the country, I made myself take the road to Les Bossons, to meet
the muleteers; but they did not come yet. "I supposed that the Arve was overflowing, that
another mountain was threatening the valley of Servoz, that the Black Nant had never been so
wide and so terrible, that the bridge of Saint- que TouMartin had broken, that all the rocks of
Maglan covered the groves of their ruins suspended for so many centuries, that the formidable
enclosure of Cluse was finally closed forever, for I had heard of these perils by travelers and by
poets.However, a muleteer arrived, and two arrived. When the third came I did not wait for
anything. I thought you my destiny was accomplished. Eight days later I was read - 111 - letter
from Eulalie. She had spent the winter in Geneva. She was going to spend the summer in Milan!
"My mother was trembling for me. I laugh. I had expected it, and it is a great satisfaction to know
how far you can bear the pain. "Now, sir, you know all my life. That's it. I thought myself loved by
a woman, and I was loved by a dog. Poor Puck! Puck darted on the blind man. - "It's not you, 'he
said, but I love you because you love me. " Dear child," I exclaimed, "there will come one too
who will not be her, and whom you will love because you will be loved! " Do you know a blind
and incurable girl? "Said Gervais. - Why not a woman who will see you and who will love you? "
Have you been told that Eulalie will come back? "I hope she will come back; but you like Puck
because he loves you. You will love a woman who will tell you that she loves you. " It's
something else. Puck did not betray me. Puck would not have left me . Puck is dead. " - Listen,
Gervais, I must be going. I 'll go to Milan - I'll see her - I'll talk to her, I swear - and then I'll come
back - but I also have distressing pains , healing wounds - you would not believe it, and yet this is
true ! to exchange for your c "Whoever suffers, my heart with all its anguish, I wish I could give
you my eyes!" Gervais looked for my hand and pressed it strongly. The sympathies of misfortune
are so rapid! "At least," I continued, "you do not miss anything that contributes to ease. The care
of your protector have made your little property grow. The good Chamouniers regard your
prosperity as their sweetest wealth. Your beauty will make you a mistress; your heart will make
you a friend! " And a dog! " Said Gervais. - Ah! I would not give mine for your valley and your
mountains, if he had not loved you! - I give you my dog ... « - Your dog! he exclaimed, your dog! -
No ! no! ... sir, that does not happen! " See how Puck had heard me! he came to fill me with
sweet caresses, mingled with love, and with regret, and with joy. It was the most lively
tenderness, but a tenderness of farewell; and when, by a sign he was expecting, I showed him
the blind man, he darted forward proudly on his knees, and with one paw leaning on Gervais's
arm, looked at me with the assured air of a freedman . - Goodbye, Gervais! "I did not name Puck;
he would have followed me. When I was at the edge of the esplanade, I saw him, ashamed, on
the edge of the forest. I approached slowly, he took a step back, and then spread a humiliated
head on both feet.I ran my hand over the floating waves of her long silk, and with a squeeze of
but, in a voice without ceremony, I said to him, "Go!" He went off like a line, turned once more
to look at me, and rejoined Gervais. At least he will not be alone anymore. - Insurrection. I
promised it to Gervais. Eight days later I was in Milan. Don Pic de Fanferluchio went alone to the
Ambrosian library. Charm and I would have given all the editions of this famous Lavagnia,
reviewed by this learned Boninus Montbritius, for a representation of the heroic events and
tragic adventures of Punchinello - and something shouted at me: "Here is the hour, here is the
moment. Come in, gentlemen; come in, ladies! there is a good and numerous company, and you
only pay when you leave. It is here that one shows the only and true Polichinelle. He is present,
he is alive! You will see how he moves his eyes; you will see how he shows the teeth; you will see
how he grins when he eats his hot macaroni! ... "O POLICHINELLE !!! I exclaimed! O
POLICHINELLE, original fetish and capricious children! O POLICHINELLE, Grotesque Achilles of the
people! O POLICHINELLE, Modest and powerful Roscius of crossroads! - 114 - O POLICHINELLE,
Inappreciable Falstaff of unfortunate ages who have not known Shakespeare! O
POLICHINELLE !!! I said ! O POLICHINELLE, animated Simulacrum of the natural man, abandoned
to his naive and ingenious instincts! O POLICHINELLA, eternal type of truth whose sluggish ages
have taken too long to grasp the misshapen, but witty and pleasing form! O POLICHINELLE,
whose original theme often enchanted Bayle's leisure, and revived the lazy sloth of La Fontaine
more than once! O POLICHINELLE !!! I repeat ! O POLICHINELLE, inexhaustible orator,
imperturbable philosopher, intrepid and vigorous logician! O POLICHINELLE, Grand practical
moralist, infallible theologian, clever and sure politics! O POLICHINELLE, Only legitimate
arbitrator (we must agree once in the face of nations),the only competent and irrefutable judge
of the Codes and Institutes, Digests and Pandects, Novels and Authentique, Constitutions and
Charters, Extravagantes and Canons! O POLICHINELLE, whose wooden head contains in its
compact and inorganic mass all the knowledge and common sense of the moderns! O
POLICHINELLE !!! finally ! - 115 - I was there with this magnificent invocation (I would not give it
for that of Lucretius, especially in the translation you know), when a long rumor, dark and stormy
like the stridor procell of Properce, or the The sound of Virgil's, came to extinguish itself in my
ear, after having traversed all the degrees of the frightening chromatism of the hurricanes, from
the place of the Dome to the Pozzo: Live Polichinelle and Brioché! some shouted; curse on
Girolamo! Live Polichinelle and Girolamo! shouted the others; curse on Brioché! Eternal curse on
you, profane and stupid vulgar! Since you agree with Polichinelle, you, enterprising Girolamists,
and you, obstinate Briochists, no matter - 116 - which hand will make him play, and in what
mouth will be placed the sharp and loud practice that will lend him a voice! As for me, having
come back a little late from the foolish prejudices of parties, I have anchored my resolutions on
an invariable thought. I will only wish for Punchinello. - 117 - Dissertation. Everyone knows, or
everyone should know, that th the puppet theater, which is now our delight, was instituted by
the immortal Brioché, preceptor of Croque-Mitaine, and that since the death of this great man (I
speak Brioche, because the glory of Croque-Mitaine no never dazzled me), nothing has changed
the profiles of his proscenium, the decorations of his cella, the costumes of his companions, the
conduct of his scenarium, the triple unity of his poem. The slightest infraction of this species of
latria, which the professors profess immemorially for Brioche, was admonished by the
universities, tarnished by the parlements, questioned by the Capitulars, tainted by the edicts,
and fulminated by the bulls; not that Brioche was a very orthodox person, nor that he would
have given great guarantees of his know-how in the science of education.to report to Plutarch
and Quinte-Curce; but because there was something really scary in his intellectual encyclism. In
politics he is indebted to those dice which produce at will all possible chances in the arduous
science of governments, provided that kings use them with dexterity, and that the people
scarcely regard them. - In morality, he taught the unoccupied sages the art of innocently passing
time by bursting baguenaudes between their fingers. - - 118 - In static, he had arrived
(something difficult to believe, and never renewed since then) to weigh infallibly the shadow of a
happelourde. In optics, he had determined, with some difference, which becomes quite
insensitive to the common use, the average range of the visual ray of a blind spiral. - He was the
only man of his time who was isocolically cleft a hair in four, and who peripatetically played
Stagyrian goblets. - But he died of regret for not having been able to explain the inconstant and
versicolored shade of the waters of Robec which pass to Rouen, because he had persisted in
following their course, instead of going up to the door of the dyer. Brioche's successors were
therefore in a consecrated possession to make Polichinelle speak, when Girolamo appeared. It is
true to say that Girolamo did not invent anything, because we have never invented anything
since we invented Polichinelle. But Brioché's theater was so ridiculously narrow (Polichinelle
strode past it !) - Brioch's planks were clad in worn-out shreds, barely rejuvenated from century
to century, like the ravishing vessel of Aeneas, by shreds so disparate, and so screaming. -
Brioch's puppets were so tired, if truncated, if practiced, if criticized, if attacked, if anted, if
gothic, if chewed, if involved , if complicated, if dislocated, if moved, if dislocated, if silly, if
emberelucoked , If nested, If intricate, If cramped, If crumpled, If defrosted, If defrosted, If
cranked, If patrolled, If pelted, If treble, If hairy, If wacky, If polluted, If solute, If dissolve, If
ground, If worm-eaten! - The story of Polichinelle was so monotonous - The game of
Polichinelle's dungeon was so well known - - 120 - The great machine of the devil that carries all
the characters, when we no longer need it, was so out of fashion - Brioch Besides, it was so
dead, and Girolamo so powerfully alive! But I promised not to decide anything between
Girolamo and Brioche. What is certain is that the theater of Girolamo is brand new; It is that the
estimate is nine; It is built new; It is because it has been painted new, Brushed to new, varnished
to new, decorated to new, upholstered to new, waxed to new, rubbed to new, engineered to
new. It is very deep, very large, very high; It is because it brings together all the conditions that
you would like to find together in your property, if by chance you had one; It is because
Polichinelle is never exposed to rush into the blower's hole, or break his head against Harlequin's
coat. - Polichinelle y para It is from head to foot, that is to say twice as large as in the
parallelogram of Brioché. - 121 - (And note elogrammatic parallel , picturesque adjective that
says more than it is long: I only regret having the construction of this geometric figure at the
classic Despréaux.) Without Girolamo, we would not know that Polichinelle has hooves; and
Polichinelle's hooves are one of the most special, the most intimate, the most complete
characters of Polichinelle's original physiognomy - Brioch's Polichinelle is at most a bust - The
Polichinelle of Girolamo is almost a man - - 122 - The abb d'Aubignac opines, indeed, that all
would be lost in literature if the span of the compass which embraces the two extreme points of
the diameter of the box of Polichinelle was enlarged by one line: But Dr. Schlegel answers him,
with his usual assurance, that the size of the box of Polichinelle does not do the least thing to
the question, and that he sees no inconvenience in making him dance in the great hall of the
palace, provided the rope is long enough. The Zeroniente's Academy of Eterni, on the report of
its commission of the Sempiterni, abruptly decided the difficulty. She had both ears cut to
Schlegel and both legs to Polichinelle. That day, Girolamo showed REASON. - 123 - M éditation.
By Popocambou (it was the curse of Confucius), by Popocambou, I exclaimed, dropping the
Cruyshanck Punch on my somno, My glasses in their case, My mechanical extinguisher on my
candle, My eyelids on my eyes My dear on my head, My head on my hand, My hand on my
pillow And the studious ball of Aristotle in a soundless cup where it no longer resounded. "By
Popocambo," I said in a loud voice, "and I do not fear that she has awakened anyone on the floor
where my hostess lodged me - By Po ... po ... cam ... bou ...... He It seems to me that this
question would have been considered healthier at the Institute of Timbuktu. - 124 - Navigation.
Timbuktu, which may be called Tombut, or Tumbut, or Tumbuctu,is I do not What city, in what
country do I know, under what degree of latitude do I know? so, if you believe these old cy, the
perpendicular antipode of the capital of Sapience, which is common sense; and receive from it a
notorious and quidditative certainty, perforaminant of it our tellurian capsule, not less than the
practicquez, you struggling with the transfiguration unions indicques and small pearl seeds; what
you do without and without circumnavigation, you will not fail to drink in Tumbuctie. Of the
Tumbuctians, nothing will be told to you at this moment in this magnificent and seignorial
history, which can not be traced to the books of navigaige. However, do not believe this fool
ravasseur Claude Ptolémée geographer, because he despises Tumbuctu only goffes, bourdes,
trupheries,lucianicque gaberies, and phantasies abhorrent to nature, such as cacomorphic and
silenian men with the tail of six guns. Mercy of God, what do you have of such a supple
amplitude, you have other flat-footed partridges, especially since it is chouse moult beautiful to
see and to big prouffict of mesnaige, as it can be well cognoistre to sheep of Tartary. But I assure
you by Golfarin, who was nephew of Carmentran (by my share of paradise, I dare not go: I am so
hypercritical or circled!), Only to transgression to icelle joyous and caudipoChouse is very
beautiful to see and to a great deal of snow, just as it is possible to know the sheep of Tartary.
But I assure you by Golfarin, who was nephew of Carmentran (by my share of paradise, I dare
not go: I am so hypercritical or circled!), Only to transgression to icelle joyous and
caudipoChouse is very beautiful to see and to a great deal of snow, just as it is possible to know
the sheep of Tartary. But I assure you by Golfarin, who was nephew of Carmentran (by my share
of paradise, I dare not go: I am so hypercritical or circled!), Only to transgression to icelle joyous
and caudipo It is advisable to march on Tumbuctu, the port of thirteen blowguns, and the length
of this bastonnet. Tumbuctians are people snuff between all humans, frisks, guallants, coquarts;
if they are good in their maintenance, much better in their noses; suitable for all pleasant games,
good meetings and honest quotes; the refiners and breeders of quail, and wished more than a
hundred thousand masses to say that a voyrre of wine drank, at the end of the day, noble
subjects, handsome tax-payers, and were also good Christians, as well as those who were uncle;
but the handsome little fathers encucullion of the last council, you fulminate them and you
excommunicate them like pruners, because they were counted down, by barbetting their
orations and minor suffrages, to the number of the hairs of the order of monseigneur saint
Pacosme . May God be praised everywhere! Breviary matter. - 126 - Appearance. I do not know if
you noticed How the mysterious phenomenon of dreams is accomplished. Artemidore and
Apomazar never suspected it. At the moment when these insignificant words, the institute of
Timbuktu, were slowly dying with the last of my ideas, in the ever-increasing silence of sleep, I
do not know what vibratile and sonorous organ still prolonged the reverberation through echoes
almost dumb with my dormant intelligence, and what unknown strokes made them bounce in
my ear, like the confused notes in a distant voice. What is an institute? ... Does this exist? ... Has
anyone spoken of it? ... Is there another institute than that of Timbuktu? ... What is done? of an
institute in Timbuktu? ...Are the inhabitants of Timbuktu wild? ... What are the urgent
circumstances and the invincible necessities that have reduced them to invent the institute? ... ...
The Institute of Timbuktu? ... - 127 - L at almost the end of the first operation of the mind in the
man who falls asleep, you see that it is still sufficiently conformable to the order of the dialectic;
but the last act of reflection of reasoning thought is scarcely finished, that the perception which
escapes it falls into the domain of another sense, which is ordinarily that of sight. Your
conversation with yourself is complete, but it has only changed shape. The subject of the
discussion became active and subject. The judge of the discussion became passive and witness.
Deceived meditation has given way to a show. An animated picture develops in the eyes of your
imagination. You see pressing on benches, or squaring on armchairs, bored figures who
contemplate boring figures, dominated by a few feet ofother scary figures of importance and
desolating nullity. Two twin ideas suddenly arise from your brain: - the INSTITUTE and
TOMBOUCTOU. Here are the known localities, the established characters, the costumes
determined as in a German drama; but I do not know how to make you understand the
organization of the Institute of Timbuktu, if I do not tell you its history; And we will not look for it
very far, because I hold it. - 128 - Exploration. "There was once a king who loved his people ..." "
It starts like a fairy tale ," said Jalamir. " - It's one too, r answered the druid. But I do not know
why I would steal this magnificent start at Rousseau. Would you like Tacitus better? "It was a
long time since Timbuktu was ruled by kings ..." Or do you want us to go into matters with
Suetonius? "Popcamboo-the-Hairy hardly reached his sixteenth year ..." What is certain is that of
all the rulers of the universe (there is no mention here of Caesar or Galba, nor Charles the Bald),
the most richly furnished hair that has ever existed is Popcamboo-the-Hairy. And this favorable
chance had inspired him so sympathetic a taste so pronounced for loose hair, and for wigs
academic, scientific, philosophical, sophistic, doctoral, medical, theological, judicial and
university, that hewas formed a collection of wigs, unique - 129 - in all nations, and which is
essentially lacking at our royal museum. Except for this innocent mania ...... (Dionysius, tyrant of
Syracuse, known as Breloque, was to meter verses, and to debit them inhumanely to all comers,
that of Nero, to baller and mime on the trestles with mimes and baladins that of Commodus
Hercules, of boxing in the arena with the gladiators, that of Henry V of England, of raising the
time with the help of jugs in the taverns of the City, with the wheel-bentemps and merry
companions; of Henry VIII, of controversy in schools with the preachers, and he was raging to
argue;) Besides this passionate but harmless taste, Popocambu-le-Chevelu was a kind of sage;
and it is, according to Marc Aurele, the greatest eulogium that can be made of a man, especially
when that man is king, and that he is king of Timbuktu.Popocambou, weary of flatterers, the
worst trouble of royalty; Weary of his delights and glories, he had shut himself up in his favorite
museum, as in a seraglio. He lived there as a contemplative philosopher, in the midst of his wigs;
he was rejoicing in his wigs as Solomon in his he used to edit his wigs, he consulted his wigs, and
he sometimes left them with that feeling of sweet satisfaction which comes from an acquired
truth, and which he had very rarely taken away from his council of state. During this time the
government was marching, and the people had never been so happy to be influenced by wigs as
ever since there were no more heads in them. - 130 - As the thought , the word and the press
were free in Timbuktu, Popocambu-the-Hairy, who did not see anybody any more, but who read
all, understood that it was not far from arriving at the form the most perfect of government
possible. " And yet," said he, "if I put a fool under this scholarly wig! "A cruel and insidious man
under this judicial wig ..." An artificial and greedy man under this administrative wig ... "A
coward or irresolute man under this martial wig ..." A perverse hypocrite under this chaste and
modest wig that calls for trust and respect ... "Ah! my God ! exclaimed Popocambou, bending his
long hair over his eyes, which it is difficult to govern! " - And after degree in a moment of
reflection, he invented the wig heads. - 131 - Procr éation. Timbuktu then possessed one of
those great men whom the people ordinarily appreciate only when they have lost them. He was
a philosopher, and perhaps a necromancer, who was called Mistigri, whether he had received by
chance the patronymic name, which is, in truth, a name like any other, or that he had was given
by allusion to some fortuitous resemblance with the valet de treffle. This powerful genius, for a
long time flattered by the two religious factions which shared the empire, and who sought his
support in every way, had at last been repulsed by both, because he had refused to pronounce
himself in the dangerous question that divided them. He preferred condemning himself to exile
rather than deciding whether the sacred chafer that founded the sea-islands, as no onein doubt,
was male or female. Popocambo-the-Hairy, that his excellent education and the solemn direction
that had recently taken his studies The king, as I have said, was much above the vulgar, was
entirely in your opinion, and mine, on this scandalous controversy. He knew perfectly well that
the big cockchafer is hermaphroditic, but he did not say it. Popocambo the Hairy had therefore
royally abandoned Mistigri to his enemies, reserving himself to remember him when he needed
them urgently. - In the occasion we are talking about, he gave him a Huge order of wig heads.
The wig-head business brought Mistigri back to court. Preceded by the fame of his wig-heads, he
entered as if he had never come out of it. The question of the sex of the great cockchafer stirred
well in some recalcitrant and backward gazettes over the century; but the positive men, who are
still in the majority in business, stopped at the wig-heads, and Mistigri was made minister of
state. " That's what is surprising," said the king. "But it's because I recognize them! One would
think they posed . (Mistigri smiles.) " Finally I will have," continued Popocambou-le-Chevelu,
"ministers. in perpetuity, an immovable council, and, if possible, an immortal academy. In truth,
they lack only the word! " My wig will speak when your majesty orders it," replied Mistigri,
bowing with respectful dignity. " When I order it! " exclaimed the king," I would like to hear one
just now, even if it cost me the most beautiful of my wigs! " Your majesty ," said Mistigri, "has
only to lift the wig from that of those heads which it will please most to hear, and to strike with
its finger one of the protuberances which 'she will notice, and which are more or less
pronounced according to the degree of mechanical intelligence that Ihave found about giving to
my wig heads. - Popcamboo-the-Hairy had not waited for the end of the sentence. - "But there is
not the slightest bump, my dear Mistigri. I would not give a copeck to exchange for this head of
wood that of my great seraskier. She is as smooth as an egg! " It is true," said Mistigri, "but the
wisdom of your Majesty will find it easy to use. You will make him a great lord at breakfast, a
dignitary by birth, a special adviser, an academician of fortune, a transitional minister, an official
journalist. - Pass. - " - Here is one whose t been charged is small protubé- rancid to infinity? " -
superficial Spirit touches to everything, which is not fit for anything; what fools call a universal
man. " What does this unique protuberance mean ? "A sharp and absolute spirit who has
concentrated all his faculties on an idea, failing to be able to unite two; what the fools call a
philosopher. " How do you name this insolent protrusion in this one ? " - Pride. It is a challenge. "
And this other so remarkable in that ? " - Greediness . He is a philanthropist. " And this
monstrous hump? " - Ambition. He is an independent . " - It makes me want to talk one of my t
Wig, "said Popocambou, impressing his thumb on a protuberance worn out from having served.
SIRE, THAT'S A GREAT, BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR US, "said the wig-head ... " "" Ah! divine
Popocambou! s' cried Mistigri, release the spring. I know that head. She always says the same
thing, and she does not know what she says. We have no idea of the joy of Popocambou-
leChevelu at this test session. He could finally reconcile his tender esteem for wigs with his old
love for society, and find, whenever he wished, the docile conversation and obsequious
ceremonial of his palace among his courtiers of wood. " - Sublime man! he said to Mistigri with
deep expansion, how can I reward your genius? " " Asking me for the truth when you need it,"
said Mistigri. " And would you say to me if the sacred chafer is not hermaphrodite? exclaimed
Popocambou. " I have never seen nor held nor known the sacred chafer ," said Mistigri. " Well,"
replied Popocambou, "do not fear my royal head, and tell me with certainty what my dominant
protuberances mean. " - 135 - Mistigri explained his astrolabe, d he seared his Sibylline books,
questioned his cards and tarots, summoned Eteilla, Decremps, and Spurzheim; Apollonius of
Thiane, Cabanis and Simon the magician; Agrippa, Pinetti and Lavater; Count, Gall and
Cagliostro. He threw his fateful dice. He threw his talares and ossicles. He had the toton spun, he
caused the rhombus to burst, and his hand on the vast frontal protuberances of the good king of
Timbuctoo: "They signify," says Mistigri, "that the first princess who was honored with the good
graces of your majesty loved a lot of dancing. " - H elas! sighed Popcamboo-the-Hairy ... "(We
know that I have always tried to place in my most serious writings some sentimental line.)" Alas!
he continued sobbing, she could not dance! his slipper was too narrow. " - 136 - Distinction. "
Are you decidedly a sorcerer? replied Popocambou-le-Chevelu. " No, sire," replied Mistigri; I am
a cranologist. " Then," said the King, "it is very different. " - 137 - R enumeration. However, the
good Popocambou, jealous of rewarding Mistigri magnificently, for he was naturally more
generous and more grateful than usual for being inclined to be a good autocrat, granted him the
right to emblazon his coat of arms. waving of a wig-head, which was held and reserved in the
heraldic constitutions of Timbuktu for hyperbolic and royal favor: And, besides, free, exclusive
and privileged hunting throughout the whole extent of its empire, of any species of farfallesque
and culiciform birds, carrying mouths, teeth, forceps, hooks, jaws, mandibles, pumps, horns,
suckers, rostrums, proboscids, spines, tongues, ligules, palps, lips, turns, or other intus-
susceptible instruments,which critters are commonly referred to as butterflies by day or by night,
and by urban, rural, paludive or silvatic flies, namely: Sphynx, Moths, Nocthae, Noctuans,
Bombyces, Pyrales, Zygenes, Alucites, - Episodes, moths, Pterophores, whose wings are minutely
feathered, like wings of birds, and cut into tiny branches, in the manner of the fan of our
bachelors; Dragonflies, Demoiselles, Ascalaphes, Hémérobes, Myrmiléons, Éphémères: you
could see some in the Hypanis river; Semblides, Phryganes, Pearls, Panorpes, Tenthredons,
Ichneumons with bifid and trifid tails, which are vampires of caterpillars, larvae, nymphs, pupae
and aurelies; Evanes, Typhies, Scolies, Wasps, Chrysides, Leucospes, Andrens, Avettes, or honey
bees, Hornets, Crabrons, Bumblebees, Cynipes, Diploleps, Uroceres, Dolères, Cryptes, Allantes,
Nemates, - 139 - Pt Erones, Headache, Orysses, Trachetes, Sirèces, Trémèces, Aulaques, Fénnes,
Stéphanes, Anomalons, Bracons, Anteons, Cérphrons, Pompiles, Ceropales, Sphèces, Misques,
Ampulèces, Psènes, Stigmas, Apies, Larres, Dimorphes, Pleies, Taques, Sapygues, Myrmoses,
Bembecs, Stizes, Thynnes, Masarides, Simbléphiles, Mellins, Arpacts, Alysons, Nyssons, - 140 -
Philantes , Cerceres, Gonies, Miscophes, Dinetes, Cemones, Helios, Oxybêles, Prosopes, Nomads,
Pasites, Swords, Ceratins, Belytes, Lasies, Crocises, Trigones, Trachuses, Xylocopes: in your days
you did not find hard work in the old stumps; Doriles, Labides, Figites, Chelones, Cleptes Omales,
Codres, Cinetes, Chalcids, Psiles, Myrmes, Winged ants, Terms, Termites, Mutilles, Brêmes, -
Attes, Manicles, Tipulas, Bibions, Rhagions, Syrphes, Asiles, Conopes, Stratyomes, Stomoxes,
which sting outrageously in stormy weather; The mosquitoes, Cousins: it was one of those who
steamed time and again in my Uncle Tobie's bedroom, when he opened the window and said,
"Go, poor animal," he said to him, "the world is enough. great for both of us. Mosquitos: I never
saw them so much as from Tarascon to the Pont du Gard, but Mistigri had not passed;
Ceroplates, Ctenophores, Chironomes, Hipses, Scatopses, Lertes, Mydes, Siques, Sciarres,
Hermetias, Xylophages, Atherices, Nemotelae, Pangonies, Heptatomes, Heptatopotes,
Chrysopes: O what benoit and laughing color they have the pupil! hard clam, - 142 - Volucelles,
Anthraces, Bombyles, Ploades, Empides, Tachydromies, Hybotes, Damalides, Dioctres, Laphries,
Dasypogons, Cries, Myopes, Mulions, Milesies, Merodons, Bacques, Diopses, Loxocera,
Scatophages: fi, villains! Psares, Lalsanies, Oscines, Thereudes, Rhingies, Otres, Tabans: of this
race was the gnat, which so vehemently crushed the lion of Aesop; Eristals, Achiades, Scaeves,
Sargues, Vappers, Calobates, Neries, Dolichopes, - Daques, Tachines, Ocypt eras, Tephrites,
Dictyes, Acroceres, Hénopes, Scenopins, Trineures, Hippobosques, and other innumerable
unnamed animalcules that you can see dancing on a beautiful autumn evening, singing, hissing,
chirping, murmuring, whispering, sounding, thundering, baritone, buzzing and humming, in a
sunbeam. But the nobility of the country, seriously ill-fated and in a state of disquiet that a mere
clerk could gibernate joyously in the best part of his appanages, took advantage of a new who
came shortly afterwards, and licenses of the happy advent, to harass Monsignor of the great-
huntsman, and have him hoisted up well at the corner of the platform of the great pyramid
looking towards Villers-Cotterets, where the unfortunate Mistigri was by those flies miserably
devoured. And this happened, if the chronicles do not distract me, a certain day of a certain
week of a certain moon of a certain month of a certain year of a certain Olympiad of a certain
luster of some indiction of a certain century of a certain hegira or of a certain era which had
been in existence for a long time before the first use of wooden watches. So I can not tell you the
time. But that is what they are reduced to, although they have scribbled these damned liars
ofHellenes in their poetic papers, the creation of men by the Titans and the punishment of
Prometheus. Always hear that, I beg you, the invention - 144 - t are organic wigs, and the
deplorable end of Mistigri delivered to flies. And that's how the biggest difficulties are simplified
when you wear a little philosophy in the story. - 145 - Caution. And I must add that in this state - I
mean the state of the sleeping man - (would not it be you?) - There is no gu It is a time of
acquired ideas that a few salient and characteristic aspects suffice to name them, but whose
true expression soon vanishes under a host of capricious forms. These slight surfaces of the real
being, lost in the vagueness of the imagination, cross, mingle, mingle, varying in color and
brilliancy according to the bizarre play of the dazzling prism of dreams. Sleep, a blind tyrant of
thought, amuses us by deceiving our most familiar impressions, and by disconcerting them, like
a clever charlatan, by opposite impressions. Hardly his fingers made a harmonious and fantastic
string vibrate, and here he is already embroidering on the majestic notes a crude bacchanal or a
saucy vaudeville.The changing decoration which obeys her has scarcely afforded to your eyes the
venerable pulpit of the learned, that it reveals the grotesque trestles of Mondor and Gratelard;
for it is of the nature of that irrational soul that watches over us when we sleep, not to let a
sublime perception escape without tainting it with some imprint of ridicule; and this is what
made a wise man say that dreams were the parody of life.This is what made a wise man say that
dreams were a travesty of life.This is what made a wise man say that dreams were a travesty of
life. "Go on, come on, my dear Breloque, the true science is too indulgent to offend you with the
attacks of your dizzy treachery. She knows that discoveries that recede her limits sometimes
have a pleasant side, and she forgives sleep, because sleep is buffoon. - 147 - Installation. Since
the death of Popocambou-le-Chevelu, his wigs had been long forgotten at the furniture-storage.
They were only shown on a few extraordinary occasions, such as Charles-le-Téméraire's nippes at
the great jubilee of Berne, and the spring of the protuberances had rusted irreparably in the best
heads. It is painful to admit that three quarters of the Institute of Timbuktu were used only for
tapestry; but it always came back, because there was really something marvelous about the
mechanics industry , and that Timbuktu is, by the way, of all the cities of the world that o where
we have the most time to lose. Mistigri had been so happy in the expression of his figures, that
there was not one who did not appear to occupy himself with an object or engage in a study, as
if it had been organized in the manner of reasonable creatures, and that's what we'd never seen
before at the Timbuktu Institute. There were some who very methodically screened the words of
the language in a large academic airlock. There were some who belated them sophisticatedly,
and who benefited a great deal by selling the cut to I do not know what malotrus loafers to make
a few lippées. There were some who were peeling pronouns, sorting conjunctions, vane
particles, and shelling adverbs.There were some who passed two or three ideas of the great
writers through a traditional die, and who reeled cleanly on an endless reel. There were some
who laid them on a rolling mill or crushed them under a cylinder, until they reached the most
perfect degree of possible flatness. I saw one who grammatically crammed Latin etymologies
into a handsome mortar. - God ! what a rich operation! I saw another who had managed to make
a spinel ruby more than half the size of the carob amber block from which the colossal statue of
Popocambou was drawn, without using any other ingredient than carefully prepared pim-
crevign seed. ; but I have found it since selling rosaries to live, and crying corona, corona, in front
of St. Anthony of Padua. The most skilful of all came to propose to me a magnificent enterprise;
that of a suspension bridge that was to end in Timbuktu at the Rue Folie-Mericourt, under the
entresol of Victorine, and that of a tunnel no less ingenious, which opened through a few billion
millimeters in the middle of Fanny's bedroom; but he could never raise his first sieges to more
than two English feet above the ground, because of the great winds of Tramontana which ran in
that country. The doors were opened to a venerable scholar, well known for the meritorious
patience with which he had been trying for fifty years to weigh matter and spirit, in two
spiderweb basins that had not once stood the test of time. 'experience. He entered proudly with
his empty scales, but he did not lose much at the event. - He had not left to drop an idea on the
way. I noticed among them a dozen young men, who, with a good air, mingled paper sheets of
kings, ladies, and valets, and who distributed them very elegantly in five parcels, as in the game
of brelan. - I was assured that they thought they were doing tragedies édies. The session was
opened, according to custom, by a piece of ceremonial which had been requested from the most
oratorily organized head of the Institute of Timbuktu. It began by arranging before the orator
how many vials industriously prepared by the great abstractor of verbal and grammatical
quintessences, and on which were read: verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, particles, substantives,
adjectives. This was the most fulfilled, and, to put it in passing, the one with the best face. He
mingled all this gently in a measuring glass, and then sprinkled his mixtion with an immense
amount of vowels, tropes and exclamation points. Then striking his wooden head with a wooden
hand, and throwing it backwards so as to describe on the foot of the machine an angle - 150 -
obtuse of one hundred and thirty-five degrees In the meantime, he poured out the sonic potion,
and gurgled eloquently for a good hour, according to the formula, to the repeated applause of
the audience. It is true to say that it was the most harmonious borborygm that it was possible to
imagine, and that you would have taken great pleasure, except that the son of the enchantress
Craca, who heard the language of animals as his own, would not seize, in all the succession of
ages, the smallest portion of meaning, which made that several ladies of the assembly swooned
by too strong restraint of spirit. Someone assured me that most of these heads only lived in
public garages three or four times a year. So can I swear to you, on Popocambou's slipper,
thatthey were ethical, anemic and chlorotic, neither more nor less than the cured patients of Dr.
Sanguisorba. - 151 - Teething. A curtain was then drawn behind which were seated at two
thériacales and orvietanesque tables two persons, whose attitude reminded me of the Catholic
merchants whom we saw in 1593 in the states of the league. The table of the first was covered
with high, big, big, long, wide and deep jars where floated, in a limpid liquor, a multitude of
animals that I had never met in the country of tapestry, such as - Lycisques l Eporogens,
Corniferous Squirrels, Plumed Connils, Unarmed Hedgehogs, Lepidopteran Slugs, Quadruman
Eels, Inoculated Lamprey, Grasshoppers, Saddle and Stretcher, Moorish Capered Bullfinches,
Acrobatic Turtles, Vertebrate Oysters, and other rare wonders. "Gentlemen," said the young
professor, "..." ... "..." ... - 152 - "... - "What I have just reminded you of our academic theories,"
he resumed after a moment's rest, "will excuse me from insisting on the motives which have
determined me in the classification of Anomalates, or animals with jaws improperly called
monstrous. . You know that after having recognized the sublime action of nature in these extra-
normal creations, which do him no less honor than that of the most regular jaws, we have
divided our Anomalates into three great families, namely: "1 ° POLYDONTES, or jaws with rows of
multiple teeth. This magnificent jaw, which I have the honor to submit to you, is the jaw of
Hercules the elder, which must not be confounded with that crowd of Hercules of new
manufactures which you find in Mythographs.This one is well recognizable by his three rows of
teeth which are very curiously described in Apollodorus. This peculiarity has only been renewed
since that of a good man of Cleves whose mandibles were obligingly communicated to us by the
learned Mentzelius. "2. MONODONTES, or jaws with a single tooth. This genus provides us with
two very remarkable specimens. Here, gentlemen, in my right hand, the jaw of Pyrrhus, king of
Epirus, and, in my left hand, that of Prusias, son of the king of Bithynia, who were born
monodontes, of the super jaw, as it is written in Plutarch. The jaw of Pyrrhus is all the more
interesting as it was found under a pottery shard that apparently comes from the sandstone
pitcher with which he was killed by an old woman on the day of the capture of Argos."3 °
ANISODONTES, or defective jaws by excess or default, which could not fit into these first two
divisions, including toothbreaking. " - 153 - (I listened with all my ears!) "What is most
extraordinary in this genre, and perhaps in all that we know and in all that we can conjecture
about the past jaws, present and future is the jaw of Popocambou-the-Toothbreach. (I
breathed.) "Popocambou-le-Breche-dent, of which we are speaking here, is, as you all know,
gentlemen, the three thousandth king of the illustrious dynasty of the Popocambides, according
to the calculation of one of our most illustrious chronologists, unless he is only the thirteenth, as
another thinks; but the choice is rather indifferent, since these two scholars have shared the
price of history this year. (Deep and sustained attention - Some voices of the amphith theatrical:
Listen! listen /) "The jaw of Popocambu-the-Toothbreach," he continued, respectfully opening a
reliquary of gold, inlaid with silver like the necklaces of the Sulamite, of which he exhibited
something mandibuliform, who no longer has a name in any language, to speak like Tertullian,
the jaw of Popocambou-the-Toothbreach, gentlemen, that is it. "(Applause burst.) - 154 -
"Everyone can notice the absence of a high incisor teeth, and as this feature is often found in
vulgar jaws, as a result of certain diseases or percussion, please observe that it is not accidental
in Popocambou-le-Brèchedent. It results from the conformation of the maxillary bones of this
great prince, that is to say from the defect of alveolus to that part of his august jaw, where you
would search unnecessarily until the verrucosity dentiform oviparous quadrupeds and up to the
streak strikes birds. (Movement.) "If ever there was something sweet and honorable in our
research, gentlemen," said the speaker, ending, with the expression of a modest satisfaction, "it
is especially ofto have been able to observe that the beloved monarch of whom Timbuctoo so
preciously preserves the memory belonged, by his jaw, to the third kind of our class of
anomalies. (Here the enthusiasm reached the last degree.) ... And I turned in my bed. - 155 -
Exhumation. I had just turned to the side of the second table, which was occupied by an old little
antique dealer, dry, pale, shriveled, rough, rubbed, stuffed, rusty, trimmed, worn, filed down,
deformed, which had been found, between two amphorae, in an ante-diluvian crypt, excavating
the foundations of the great pyramid, which owed to its mummy eternity the privilege of
appearing in perpetuity as a power of attorney for all the mummies that can meet on the globe
from narrow Guanche cases to the deep basement of the Egyptians. His office - 156 - was
flanked by four mummies proud, erect, the point on the hip, into the wind, the eye émérillonné,
straight leg and alert, princely and royal mummies - There was before him another mummy, so
graceful, so slender and so cute! So much candor shone on his forehead ingenu! So many loves
were playing on her half-naked breast! - That voluptuous arm should gently kiss the body of a
lover! - That he must falter with abandonment on the arm of a lover, this supple and delicate
body! "I know not what invincible power led me to this mummy! I was flying there, if respect
had stopped me. "Gentlemen," said the antiquary, "the young person you see is Popocambou's
grandmother. " - 157 - Op eration. "Gentle and touching model of all virtues," continued the
antiquary, addressing the mummy - "Must you have been delighted, in the bloom of your spring,
with a great nation of which you were the ornament and the hope!" "Foolish and
incomprehensible destiny, which shows to the earth the rarest perfections that to teach him that
nothing is lasting here below, and that these divine types of the most perfect human
organization are those which fade away the quickest! ... "Let us be allowed at least, chaste and
glorious rod of our masters, to shed unending tears upon your lot, and to sow every year new
flowers on your tomb! Daughter and grandmother of kings, may the earth be light to you! "After
this pathetic address, he armed himself with a freshly-made knife, inserted it deeply into the
queen-mother's throat, between the two clavicles, and theopened longitudinally to the
umbilicus. The purpose of this operation, which froze us with a holy horror, Breloque and I, was
to verify whether the subject of the demonstration was, as it had been supposed, this young and
beautiful princess, the Isis, the Astarte, the Venus of Timbuktu, the Alma Popocamba of I do not
know what guiriot ouolof And no one is ignorant of the fact that an old law of the land obliges
people of high quality to carry their mortuary extract in the stomach, for the convenience of
scientific research. "It is she," said the antiquary, presenting with the fingertips to the expectant
assembly a cute roll of vellum, knotted with a white favor, gilded on a slice, and so much so, so
much frisque, and so much so - And so white, so gallant, so kind, so subtle, so pretty, so polite,
so rosé , so curly, so sadin, so playful, so darling, so much flowers, so plain, so much burnt, so
combed, so neat , So much bound, so much folded, so much smoothed, so much wrinkled, so
much embroidered, so much edged, so much guarded, so much made up, so much laughing, so
much - 159 - so brilliant, so valiant, so pleasant, so shining, so gallant, so cute, so vermeil in the
sun, so much so , so much waxed, so amber, so much moiré, so well crafted, so honored, so
much decorated, so much colorful, so much so, so much beaded, so variegated, so much
illustrated, so figured, so miniaturized, so much painted, that you would have sworn, that he had
drawn it from his sleeve. " It's her ! He repeated ecstatically, with some indescribable mixture of
astonishing joy and astonished joy. But it would be necessary to have seen, to judge, a guinea
fowl who returned in his manger a bracelet of ruby, or one of our hens which has just found a
knife with handle of mother-of-pearl. "You can make sure of that," he went on, unraveling with
me the rebus here, and for the explanation of which the - 160 - The royal company of the
patented hieroglyphic finders will give you a big bonus payable at your choice on a zodiac or on
an obelisk, on a sphynx or on a pyramid, merchandise rising. (Ah, how I looked at it!) But I want
the devil to take me away if I see anything other than Onocrotales of Syria, Mysterized lotus
flowers, Slanted oranges, Statipedes storks, Globus squirrels, Camardes tettonnières à la croup of
a lioness, Magots squatting in the face of a dog, and other isiacal and osiriaque nonsense, which
our antiquary deciphered as fluently as you would have made your pitiful pater written in block
letters. Unfortunately it was so low - And note that I had sworn forget my acoustic horn every
time I see a reading! The assimilation of the ideas of the orator was, moreover, so compact,
Their filiation so abrupt, Their consanguinity so intimate, Their concatenation so tight, Their
collusion so adherent, Their isology so indestructible - Their conciseness so laconic, that whoever
would have lost it ... I do not say a period! But a sentence - I do not say a sentence! But an incise
- I do not say an incision! But a full, significant and complex fraction, like the substantive and the
attribute, or as the pronoun and the verb - I do not say a fraction of sense! But a word - I do not
say one of those essential words that stand up! But a simple verbal root - I do not say a verb
root! But a syllable as nil as one can suppose - I do not say a syllable! But a letter character eristic
- I do not say a letter character eristic! But a euphonic letter, An etymological letter, A
mimological letter, A phraseological letter, A letter of struggle, An anagogic letter, A diagetic
letter, A paragagic letter - I do not say any of these parasitic letters! But a c a tilde, an umlaut, a
closing parenthesis, an apostrophe, an accent, - 162 - a comma, a sigh, a spirit, an ephir, a vowel
point - whoever, I say, would have lost in this reading the most infinitely small division of human
thought that it is possible to submit to BACON, LEIBNITZ, and ME, would not know more about
the grandmother of Popocambou than the good Mistigri knew never on the equivocal sex of the
great chafer. "And see what science is for! - Poor Mistigri! - I will agree that, torment Of a curious
anxiety, of the studious need to stimulate this intelligent organ which contains the soul, and
which, however, sleeps like the body when it is tired, I resorted to my tobacco of Spain. - But I
was preoccupied by such a powerful attention - The springs of my intelligence were strained with
such unusual vigor - My faculties , absorbed by the contemplation of this mummy and by the
development of its mystical history, were so incapable of ubiquism - my intellectual self and my
material self had made a divorce so abrupt and so complete - - 163 - And it naturally resulted
that the spontaneity of my physical movements was so badly regulated by the operations of my
mind Let it happen at last what has probably happened to you sometimes on such occasions:
After having slipped ten times under my fingers these light tips of polished laburnum, the
imperceptible hinges of which are so imperceptible in the village. cursed where the English took
Wallace ... (This episode would take me very far, and I think it is, moreover, supremely useless.)
What is certain is that I open my box upside down, and that the caustic powder spread in this
learned atmosphere with a frightful suddenness. - A few thousand of you are in a wig, surprised
by its dizzying steam, pirouettèrent on their pivots; and the four big mummies on the table of
sneers sneered so loudly that everyone woke up. - 164 - Position. And I found myself in the
middle of my room, one leg shod and one naked. - 165 - Distraction. - 166 - R ECEPTION. You may
accuse me of having lost a great deal of time before discharging Gervais' commission; for since I
have been in Milan, we have had a break at the Girolamo Theater, a trip to Timbuktu, a kind of
excursion to Egypt, and a session of the Institute. It is very long. Fortunately, I can answer you in
all security of conscience, and my Breguet watch in hand, that I arrived in Milan at sunset, that I
have not slept more than twenty-seven minutes, and that I am ready for the evening of the
Marquise de Chiappapomposa, the idol of those child days where a coquette frightened the love
by showing him the cord of a bell. As I entered the parlor, my eyes fell on the bell. - I'm blushing.-
Eighteen years ago that I did not was found in Milan. I approached the Marquise with a feeling of
compunction, which was more shame than regret, and I only looked up at her trembling -I hardly
recognized her . "Not so bad," said Charm. - O young reader, whoever you are ... (but how old
are you, please?) Put twenty-three years old on New Year's Eve, take it or leave it, and I think I
treat you O young reader, if you are condemned to grow old! ... if your laughing brow is to be
covered with one day of borrowed hair - and I sympathize with your misfortune, if they were
adjusted with more art than the person - 167 - gallant street ofan academician from Timbuktu -
if any memory of the young age still finds room then in your chilled brain ... dream, dream often
to your first mistress - there is no sweeter hobby - But be sure to see her again! Everyone knows
what a night is of Milan. Embarrassment when one enters, curiosity when one has entered,
shyness when one is known, embarrassment when one is not; young girls who watch with
anxiety; young men who look at themselves with fearlessness; some somewhat ripe women, all
variegated, all paved, all illuminated, who come to assault each other with unofficial lies, and
each on their side with clandestine discords; they are tired of their life of representation, and
who think themselves obliged, however, to display every evening in a new circle the magnificent
ennui; the fashionable poet, at last, debiting, his brow raised as a sign of inspiration, the flaccid
and cold verses which inspiration has betrayed, listening to them without rivals, and proud to
hear them echoing beneath the vaults of the palace,thanks to an echo they will find neither in
the public nor in posterity. But what especially never fails in a circle, which you will infallibly find
in Inverness as in Ragusa, in Cadiz as in Tobolsk, in Odessa as in Cairo; what you might find today
in Timbuktu is a brilliant and bold young man, with a fashionable tie, hair in a gust of wind, a
round slap lined with cherry satin, a Mandarin vest from Valencia, pearl-gray stockings
embroidered with up-to-date wedges, with the scrutinizing eye-glass, the imperturbable
assurance, the high voice, which you once met at Tortoni's, or near whom you have yawned one
evening at Favart, and who, without inquire whether you are traveling under the pleasure of M.
de Metternich, throws you from one end of the salon to the other.another a familiar hello ... -
168 - "But it's him, it's Theodore, the most amiable prince of the confederation ... Hey! Dear
friend ! let me kiss you! ... " " Maugrebleu of you, "said Breloque! - "What a happy event," he
continues by linking you to a familiar arm, resting her hand on your shoulder, making you
cavalierly pirouette before the whole assembly, so that it remains in doubt no one on the
intimacy of this sudden and inevitable friendship! "But," he resumed in a lower voice, "is that
you are here a newcomer! it's that you need Cicerone, and since I've been in Milan for five days ,
you could not have been better off to tell you about the gallant chronicle of the country ... " -
And he had not stopped to speak; but while her sentences were dying in my ear, like the
confused buzzing of an importunate insect, my eyes had stopped on a young woman of the
rarest beauty and the most brilliant adornment, who was there, alone, dreamy, melancholy,
leaning against one of the attics of the colonnade. - "Ah! I understand, he said to me; that's
where you want to start, but it's not bad! I recognize this exquisite taste which distinguishes you
among all amateurs; it's a business to try. In his position, one is at first come, and a man who
arrives with your advantages! ... I had thought about it, but I was taken higher. " In reality," I said,
measuring him. It's possible ! - "Come on!The heart is busy é! You care only for her! Do you
agree that it would be unfortunate if these beautiful black eyes were never open to the light? " "
What do you mean! - "What do I want to tell you? She is born blind. She was the daughter of a
wealthy merchant from Antwerp who had only had the child of a woman he lost young. It seems
that at the same time I did not know what violent grief. " Do you believe? - "It must be so, since
he left his house that was said to be stronger than ever, and walked away leaving Antwerp
magnificent presents to its employees and pensions to his servants. " - And then what did he
become? I resumed with the impatience of a curiosity whichwas increasing by degrees? - - 170 -
" Oh ! It's a novel ... that would bother you ... " - Charm said willingly: You do not bother me
anymore. I say: You do not bother me. - "Well, what do I know? This good man went where we
all go, to say that we went there; in that cold valley of Chamouny, the sad wonders of which I
never understood, and, surprisingly, he settled there for a few years. Have you not heard of him?
A bourgeois name ... Mr. Robert ... That's it. " - How do you call yourself? - "Stunned, you forgot
it! My name is Roberville. "It's like me," said Breloque to my ear. My name is Breloqueville, a
descendant of the obscure family of Breloque. - Finally ? I resumed ... - "At last," he went on, "an
oculist gave the sight to this little girl. Her father took her to Geneva ... and in Geneva she
became in love with an adventurer who kidnapped him, because his father refused him as a son-
in-law. " His father had judged this wretch. - "He had tried all the better that just arrived in Milan
adventurer disappeared with all the gold and all the diamonds he had managed to escape. It is
said that this gallant man was already married at Naples, and that he had incurred a capital
punishment in Padua. Justice demanded it. " And Mr. Robert? - "Robert died of grief, but this
event made no great impression. He was a kind of visionary, a man with strange ideas, who,
among other extravagances,had - 171 - con for his daughter the most ridiculous institution.
Would you believe that he wanted to marry her to a blind man? " The unhappy girl! - "Not so
unhappy, my dear! Little considered to the truth; it is the necessary consequence of a fault in
these poor creatures: but the consideration only serves the poor. " Is it true! - "As I tell you. Look
rather! Ah! my friend ! We have privileges with two hundred thousand francs a year, and eyes
like that! " - Eyes! eyes ! badly on his eyes! it was they who gave it to Hell! - - 172 -
Reimbursement. There is in my heart a horrible leaven of cruelty ed. I would like those who
made others suffer to suffer once all that they have made suffer ... I would like this impression to
be heartbreaking, and profound, and atrocious, and irresistible; I would like her to seize the soul
like a hot iron; I would like her to penetrate the marrow of the bones like a melted lead; I want
her to envelop all the organs of life like the devouring robe of the Centaur. I wish, however, that
it would not last long, and that it would end with a dream. I had fixed on Eulalie one of those
fixed looks that hurt women when they do not flatter them - I do not know where I had learned
it. She got up from the base she was kissing so sadly, and stood before me, motionless and
almost frightened . I amapproached slowly: - And Gervais! I said to him ... - "Who? " - Gervais! - -
173 - "Ah! Gervais! She said, pressing her hand over her eyes. This scene had something strange
that would astonish the most assured soul. I appeared there as an unknown mediator, penance,
or remorse. - Gervais! I resumed vehemently, seizing her by the arm, "what did you do with it? -
She fell. I do not know if she was dead. - 174 - Horseback riding. As long as this muliebra species
exists, as long as it dances, as long as it turns, as it jiggles, as long as it strives, as long as it jumps,
as it wriggles, you'll see them all to finish with a mad desire for deceit, or out of vanity,said
Charm. "That's what lost Patricia, Patricia herself , a mare so rich in neck and so beautiful a coat,
a purebred mare, a mare of a castle, a titled mare, a very noble mare; the mare of the fools in
title of office and the Prince of fools. Oh ! that it was, my faith, a tall, beautiful, energetic and
vigorous mare. That's what had won her litter in the battles! Is that you would not have read a
booklet of that time when there was no mention of Patricia! H ìc, Fredegarius; Illìc, Gregorius
Turonensis; What Ariosto; Quà, Tasso; Ci, Mézeray; That, Daniel; And, Shakespeare himself. And
God knows, said M. de Voltaire, if she did wonders to Fontenoy! - Did you know Patricia, Charm?
- I think so! I almost climbed it ... And why should not I have climbed it ? Triboulet was mounting
it. Caillette was climbing her. Brusquet was mounting it. Thoni was climbing her. Sibilot was
mounting it. Angoulevent was mounting it. Molinet was mounting it. Taupin was riding it. Patz
was riding her. Jouan was riding it. Drumoinet mounted it. Mistanguet was riding it. Tabarin was
climbing her. Monsieur Guillaume mounted it. Bluet of Arb Eras, Count of Permission, mounted
her. Polyte mounted it, Polyte, the wisest of lunatics, who gave so much to the abbe de
Bourgueil. Pope-Thenu mounted it, which had the honor of being during his lifetime buffoon of
the Emperor Charles the Quint. Maretz mounted it; Maretz, who flattered himself with having
made this sad Louis XIII smile, and who for a moment disputed the royal favor with the brilliant
Cinq-Mars, and with the little Barradas. Langeli mounted it; the unfortunate Langeli whom
Boileau so unjustly reduced to the level of Alexander. Hey! that I would have mounted it well if I
had wanted it! When I saw her, though a little decrepit, she still felt her mare of good place. She
still neighed with impatience and courage, she solicited the fray, she called the fighters. She was
rocking the earth,she was slitting her teeth, ut dicitur ubiquaque. She was a proud mare. But
Patricia finishes aging. - And Patricia, I must say, had never been noticed by her mind. The habit
of the court finally lost her, and since she was allowed to replace with morocco heels her hot and
powdery irons, she became what you saw her. eagle, bigot, precious, pecque, pimpe and
pimpesonée, like a mare's beast. She began to use her time in passes, squads, masquerades, and
fanfares; To run the circus to promote his graces; To brown her curbs, to ring her bells, to admire
her bows; To continue, the opposite of the sun, stupid stupid! the shadow of his large plumes.
She ran, she trotted, she galloped, she flew, she frivoled, she pranced, and it's happiness if she
did not break the neck at Triboulet. One day, Malotru, the groom of the house, came to tell us,
turning with his large hands his big, fat, gray, fat, ugly cap: "With all due respect, gentlemen, it is
hardly worth the trouble to sort Patricia's straw on the shutter,to sift his oats with a silk sieve, to
brush it only with fine reddish crests, and to spend ten times more money on the embroidery of
his cover than would be necessary to maintain all the stables of our people in arms. Patricia
butte. Patricia is one-eyed. - 178 - Patricia is lame. Patricia is exhausted. Patricia is slow. Patricia
is a toothbrush like Popocambou. Patricia is no longer useful. Patricia has had her day. Patricia
lived. " Did you see Patricia die, Charm? - Pretty much. - "How painful it is," she said to me,
turning her worn velvet curtains with a languid gesture, "that it is cruel to see oneself
abandoned by the world and Triboulet, when one descends from the horse of Job and the mare
of Gargantua, or some illustrious persons of the same species! You will see this in my genealogy!
"Madame," I replied, kissing her hoof respectfully, everything ends in this transient world.
Triboulet, of which you do me the honor to speak, has for a long time gone himself, to join his
ancestors, who had thought themselves immortal; and the lodge of the prince of fools (the last
was called Nicolas Joubert) is closed for more than two hundred years at the Hotel de
Bourgogne, in spite of the judgment of the Parliament, which confirmed its possession on
February 19, 1608, on the plea of master Julian Peleus,to what Don Pic de Fanferluchio told me.
"What does it matter to me? she replied impatiently; I am none the less, by virtue of orders and
letters patent, the young, handsome and frisky mare of the Prince of Fools. - "So young, so
beautiful, so dashing, you would have given a hundred like her to the donkey milk! And that's
the vanity of women and mares! - 179 - Taxation. What I had in mind to know - for I was quite
sure that the mare of Triboulet was to die neither more nor less than that of Charlemagne's
nephew - What I had in mind to know - but it was not is not saying enough! - What obsesses me
day and night, which devoured in my life weeks, months and years, which has transformed into
cruel suffering the joyful forgetfulness of my flourishing youth. - And what the hell did I to
unravel, I ask you, with the mare Triboulet? It was the invincible need, it was the determined
determination to check whether this unfortunate squire would succeed in resuscitating his mare
or riding on another. - "It is true," said Charm, more moved than he is for his character, "it is
true, sir, that when you have long mounted a good mare," You are not made to his; "You are
done at his entrance; "You are done to his amble; "You are done to his aubin; "You are at his trot;
"You are done at a gallop. - 180 - "You lay it down, you support it, you hold it back, you remove it
on the spot; "You make it spin, paw, dance, jump, cabriolate, pirouette, twirl, with a gymnastic
kiss or cavalier popism. "But what do you want us to do with a dead mare? " Do you think," said
I, interrupting Breloque, with a concentrated tenderness , "that he has never been able to find
such a mare?" - "He found many," said Breloque. I recently saw him riding a big mare from
England, who is a cousin of the mare of John Bull, who is a cousin of Triboulet. It was, in my faith,
a leisurely and temperate mare, vivacious and terrifying, broad-rumped, withers, garrot, strong
neck, supple hips, solid of pastern, good to go up and down like Bucéphal du King Francis, and
which everyone would accommodate, although it is a little restive to his rider, but that we will
not go up neither you nor me. " And why should not I ride the banal mare of this madman to the
countless you call the Prince of fools? - "If your highness found it good, dare I ask him first of all
how much it pays for a personal, landed, movable, direct and indirect contribution, over the
whole extent of its principality? " The right sum to which the infamous Judas Iscariot, of memory
patibular, dared to tax the life of the Man-God - thirty deniers of m cal of bell, except my
instance in relief - But what does that done to the case? - "It's all there, and it is precisely the
enclouure. All this kindness would not be sufficient to discount your license as a gentleman, or
your license as a prince, if they were not already ratified at Timbuktu, for the nobility is too
expensive, and also the mares. No onestep over a caval c if he does not pay at least fifty fine
pieces of gold, heavy, gleaming, shimmering, and we would not go up this year a political mare
at a cheaper price. we would come fresh out of the Hippodrome. So much is the tax, so much is
the rider. I was suffocating with indignation! - What! m ' I cried, he would say that I spent the
days of robust teenager trotting along the platform, pressing bareback flanks recalcitrant mares
from Andalusia, overwork Barbary mares n had never felt the brake, to put to one of the most
up-to-date teachers of horse riding and hippiatrics, and thatI would be challenged to mount the
mare of Triboulet like any other! - "It is too true," replied Breloque, resolutely: "You would
gather in yourself alone" Grison, "Fiaschi," Vargas, "La Broue," Malateste, "Pluvinel," Tapia de
Salcedo, "Menou," Cavendish , "Imbotti," Winter, "Ridinger," Eisenberg, "Ruzé," Laguérinière,
"Saunier," Garsault, "Solleyzel, - " Drumond de Melfort, "Dupaty de Clam," Montfaucon de
Rogles, "Mottin de la Blame, "Astley," Pembroke, "Thiroux," Mazuchelli, "Gambado," Vitet,
"Amoreux," Bourgelat, "Tap," Cabero, "Lafosse," Flandrin, "Huzard," Chabert, "And Franconi ..." I
Say more! you would do the jump of the ribbon and the hoop with Don Quixote's Rocinante or
the Japhet Donkey's Picket of Armenia, which you would never have received at the carousel
where she is working quadruple the financial mount of the Prince of fools, if you can not, by
some rich inheritance that you hardly expect, or by some rare industry that I do not know you, to
exhibit one day at the door the slip of a good eligibilizing contribution. " I would rather, Charm, I
swear by the most beautiful of the steeds of the sun, who was called Phl egon! - I would rather
ride my whole life an old broken horse, tired, stooped, curled, er er, crochu, bleymu, fat-melted,
Spurred, crowned, crowned, butt, blunt, short-jointed, arched, brewed, Cornard , panard,
pansard, pines, whistler, wicker, rampin, fortresses, dusty and varicose, - 183 - All rong fics, silks,
mules, shapes, combs, nails, rasps, rockets, anceaux, suros, javarts, ossicles, knobs, malandres,
solandres, cherries, crevasses, capelets, crapaudines, boils, anthracies, phlegmons, hedgehogs,
coals, buboes, bladrons, and savages , that this capricious and interested mare! ... - "Alas My
lord, she is not much better than the time it is! "Said Charm, with a long sigh, and wiping his
eyes from the sleeve of his doublet. " "Alas! my lord, "he went on," if you knew how her grooms
have worked her! "" As they bickered her! "" As they pulled her! "" As they have scuffed him! ...
"As they They have fought it! ... "How they have wrought it! ..." How they have scrapped it! ...
"As they harassed her! ..." As they teased her! ... "As they ransacked her! ... "How ragged they
were! ..." As they scavenged her! ... "As they have paired her! ..." As they dressed! ... "As they
have flirted! ..." As they 'have gone crazy! ...' 'As they swabbed it! ...' 'How they have squandered
it!' 'As they scraped it!' 'As they nibbled at it! ...' 'As they dotted it! "How they squirmed!... "As
they heaped on her! ..." As they ragged her! ... "As they stripped her! ... - 184 - "How they
confused her! ... How they smeared her! ..." As they smeared her! ... "As they preached her! ..."
As they tainted her, searched her, and rummaged ! "" As they have munched on it! ... "As they
have pretintaillée! ..." As they have fretinfretaillée! ... " - In reality, Charm? ... - " Not to recognize
figure of Mare from the forelock to the sole! ... " - The poor animal! - - 185 - Staffing. "Hey! my
God, "said Breloque," with such a slip of contribution, what do you propose, monseigneur, to
constitute our endowment? On what will you base this noble Theodorian majesty, which is, to
say it between us, and without it happening to us, the most solid hope of future aristocracies? " -
What? Charm! - Did you see the spider wandering at the end of her thread and driven by the
air? Ask where are you going to tie her? To a tree that the winds have planted; at the corner of a
wall ruined by time, which unfortunate shepherds had built to shelter from the storm; on the
back of a pit dug for the first comer! Is it nothing for a being organic and sensitive that the
destination of the spider! is it nothing for a dead being but a six-foot pit? To the giants, whom
you have been shown at the fair, almost all men would be at ease. Ah! Charm, if all the creatures
that have crawled on this heap or on this piece of mud (because this variant of Telemachus is still
in question): .. if some Gracchus of the dead came to claim in their name a proportional share of
the surface of the land, an agrarian distribution of the common cemetery, to sleep there forever,
the pit of an ant, dear Breloque, would become at a higher price, on the rate of burials, than are
today the funerals of an Emperor! - 186 - And you want a prince who has fallen, too happy a
hundred times to have a pit for hope ... - He is doubtful, at least, at the point o where the things
are, that the Holy Alliance has the leisure to deal with my principality, although my principality is,
in consciousness, just as real, just as essential, just as substantial, just as plenipotential, as many
of the principalities that the Holy Alliance has recognized eight or ten moons ago - And besides,
the kings of the earth have been so chick, for some time, of their land appanages, that I do not
see, to tell the truth, a corner of the political map of Europe where I can now be given for
indemnity of my lost principality, what space would be needed for a poor little boy from
Barcelonnette, or the valley of Argeles, to dance on a Pierre de Provence and the beautiful
Maguelonne mint fir tablet: - 187 - Pierre, with his Spanish hat raised from a glass box, his ruffle
of grated red hair, laced with false gold, and his equivocal equivocal boots of sheepskin, beaten
with a floating acorn; Magdeleine with her little black felt hat, the rooster feather in her ear, the
old satin green camisole, and the futain skirt ... - So I only have to dispose of what I have left, and
I do you, Charm, my executor. - "Oh! exclaimed Breloque, "jewels! " - 188 - Donation. "But, if I
proceed, Breloque, to the inventory of my furniture-keeper, will not suppose, in your stupefied
confidence, that it is to fight once of magnificence with Jacques C Bourges, or the rich Ango of
Dieppe, or the Fourques d'Augsburg, or Nicolas Flamel, of the parish of Saint-Jacques-Boucherie,
or that whimsical honesty who has collected so many billions in Cayenne diamonds. The foolish
pride of fortune has never seduced me. I only want to leave to those I have loved a more lasting
pledge, alas! that this existence which escaped me, of the unquenchable tenderness which
inflamed my heart, before death in e Had a cold ashes: At Victorine, the only strand of hair that
spared my despair, in the tribulations that his coquetry and his caprices made me suffer. Oh !
that the least of the wigs of this good Trichioman prince would come to me now! At Diocles of
Smyrna, a very exact proportional average between the judgment of an ideologue and the
imagination of a commentator - To Henri Dodwell, a beautiful map of my lods, fiefs and allies, to
be attached to the next edition of Little geographers - To Dr. Abopacataxo, the bottom of my
bottle in ink - - 189 - To the Marquise de Chiappapomposa, a cracked doorbell that has no
beating - To Patricia, a bit of flange used in the middle, and incomplete of her two bosses,
against which I had the stupidity to exchange, on the quay of the Scrap metal, the pipe of an old
pipe that I had smoked to Wagram - To the sublime Mistigri, a little good Godenot man in elder
wood, two inches three lines long, with his green paper coat, to make it a kind of academician -
In Popocambou, the best of my two slippers: but who the devil will give him the sole? - You will
distribute the rest at your option, my dear Breloque: scilicet, or if licet, or sic licet: (What a lively
ecstasy would not have procured these beautiful variants to my old and great friend, Joseph
Scaliger!) The dry rose that I detached from its stem stamping her foot in a movement of
romantic sentimentality near the Rock of the Blind; - Item, some feathers from the last moult of
this famous red and green Lori who knew four pages, and a half-dozen rubrics. If he had not died
unexpectedly for his glory and mine, he would have long overshadowed all the fame of the bar; -
Item, the skewer which I had used to raise the surprising blackbird of Jeannette, who said: I love
you, like Jeannette, and who forgot it less quickly than she; - - 190 - Item, three seeds of the
réséda that Lubin had given to Lubine, and that she watered with her tears, our sweet Lubine,
while looking from her garret of the street Saint-Martin-blue-d'yeux, s he did not come back
from Flanders, the friend who had died at Walcheren! " " Item, the feast which was to round the
nest of my swallow, but she no longer cared for her nest. The storm that broke our last window,
Breloque, had killed his little ones! ... " " Item, a pike of the pear bitten by my dear Thérèse, a
moment before expiring, telling me: Theodore ... I am still thirsty - Item, the pin that Justine
pricked to write with her blood that she would always love me; (her pin injury was not closed
that shehad cheated three times). - Item, a cropped denier she had left me as a pledge of
engagement ... - Item, the film of onion of a drunken mirliton on which I prelude at sixteen: As
soon as our heart loves ... And that I have used for a long time to play: Past Felicity ..., etc. Item,
this, Charm, deserve attention! the numerator pen of the great logarithmier, and all his works on
the market! "Item, at last-" "Sincerely," said Charm, " so much treasure will come back to your
faithful steward. - I was coming, Charm. I give you, listen well! I give you my library first. - Good!
said Breloque, a thin book which has neither beginning, nor end, nor middle, and that the rats
have eaten by the edges! - I do not remember what it contains. - Pages without continuation, in
which one discovers hardly, under large molds, some heterogeneous phrases: - Philosopher, is to
learn how to die. - Earth on the head , and here it is forever. - Where are you going, wedding
people? - Wait, wait, my lord! What is it to? That the chitterlings are not to be misunderstood
between humans! - Vertudieu! the beautiful word! - Enough, Charm. You have the inside all the
truths essential to the moral conduct of life. Do not try to penetrate deeper into the secrets of
our crippled and miserable nature. It is not, however, to this gift that my benefits are confined. -
At the right time! said Charm. "I give you, Charm, all my rights, immunities, and privileges, over
the principality of Nihil-no-not-nigth. - Thank you !! said Charm. - Plus, the net proceeds of the
second edition of our History of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles. - Thank you !!! said
Charm. - Plus, Charm, my four patents of the order of Lis, of the order of Saint-S epulchre, of the
order of Phenix, and the order of the Spur of gold. - Thank you !!!! said Charm. - - And !!!!!
added Charm forbidden. - - And !!!!!! r he épéta a reluctant tone. - - Because finally !!!!!!! he
grumbled between his teeth. - - And recapitulating all this on his fingers !!!!!!!! - And then,
something more precious. - Ah! Ah! said Breloque, breathing. "I give you my car, Charm, my
pretty traveling car, the one that brought us back from Timbuktu, and which will perhaps lead us
one day to Bohemia. "Dare I ask my lord where we put his car? replied Sincerely. - Everywhere,
Charm, and veil to what makes it convenient. With the probe of an artesian well, I will bring it
down to the bowels of the earth. Do you know, Breloque, the layers of the six creations? Have
you discovered in the quarries of Montmartre the vegetable skeleton of a juncaceae which was
higher than the Peak of Teneriffe? Have you ever dreamed of those saurians with huge wings
that would have swallowed armies of elephants and hippopotamuses with a single inspiration?
What would you say about an insect whose weight had collapsed on its immortal base the
inverse pyramid of Timbuktu? It's nothing but that. My car can lead you into abysses where the
miner's hazardous bucket will never plunge, and where we will leave far behind us the futile
hypotheses of the Vulcanists and Neptunians. I'll hang you up, Charm,at this central point of the
earth's diameter, where the isosthenic power of the ambient atmosphere equilibrates so
absolutely with that of gravitation, that the heaviest and most imponderable body of which you
can conceive, a discourse - 193 - inauguration, an epistle of circumstance, a lesson in
metaphysics, would remain there, something difficult to believe, eternally immobile between its
eternal poles. "I do not want to go," said Charm. "Have you seen, sometimes, on the stream of
our village, a valve of dry nuts, which flees like a pirogue, carried away by the current;
sometimes pirouetting on a small stream that swirls, sometimes stranded on a reef, between
two feet of flame or two sheets of nymph œa; d like an old ship's carcass after a drought, put to
the water by a downpour, and sailing without a mast, without oars and without flag, according
to the rain and the wind? It is the nautical car with which I travel the immense folds of the belt
of the globe! I go down the rivers, through shores enriched by a pompous vegetation, I see the
cities repeat their magnificent panoramas in the huge crystal that I plow my keel insured. I arrive
at the seas, on my tillac moistened by the silver scum of a favorable tide, or by the drops of
water which fall in pearls from the quivering wings of the cormorant. Soon the birds disappear. I
can scarcely see any flying fish close up its membranous fins, dried by a ray of sunshine,and
falling from high into the sea; or to jump some misplaced bonite. The ocean is open to me with
its islands and its worlds ... Do you want, Charm, to direct you towards the North passage of
America, or will we disturb, on the enchanted banks of O-Tahiti, the sleep of a young queen? ...
"Devil," said Charm! - If, however, you liked it better, do you see the kisses carry away the wing of
a dead butterfly - or the impalpable down that it drove out of a newly abandoned nest - or the
whirling leaflet of the seed of linden - or the silvery egret of a flosculous girl who climbs swaying
like an aerostat, and flees, to throw on the back of the mountain her light anchors of silk - or
better still, these flakes of a naughty white that a virgin of the planets has dropped from her hair,
and that the slightest emanation of your breath returns to the sky from which they
descended ...? This is my aerial car,the one with whom I visit the Suns ... And if you wanted to
travel in the nearest gutter ...? - My faith, no! "I will have at your service the invisible crew of the
rotifer, and we will visit with him a microcosm incomparably larger than the universe which has
been given to science by the Herschell telescope. "Go for your car," said Charm, jumping. Always
go rolling, and at the end of the ditch the tumble; but if Dr. Abopacataxo were here, he would
show you, by arithmetic reason, my lord, that all your capital is not worth six whites. "It is,
however, my dear Breloque, all that remains in this old fir hut that our hostess has lent us. - 195 -
Supputation. If I go all the way to Bohemia, I say in the morning when I wake up - calculation is
not difficult!My adventures at the amphitheater of Verona require at least one volume; My
romantic and romantic walks on Lake Como, a volume; The escapade which Breloque had made
to this frisky nun of the Torre dei Conzizzi, a volume, unless I keep it for my confessions; but the
public is so in a hurry! I can not in conscience meditate in less than a volume on the ruins of
Venice. I know a bookseller who would make six. By employing only thirty-two volumes in the
conscientious description of the whole country, from the low lagoons to the counterscarp of
Konigsgratz - when I leave only Tresse and the fish market, - I would have to well - thirty-six
preliminary volumes. I must declare that it is not included in the account. Now, if I give a minute
a day to sensation, One minute a day to perception, - One minute a day to apprehension, One
minute a day to understanding, One minute a day to reflection, A minute a day to the discussion,
One minute a day to intuition, One minute a day to meditation, One minute a day to invention,
One minute a day available, One minute a day to distribution, A minute to day at the execution,
and fourteen hundred and twenty-eight minutes to distraction and sleep (it is really the least
measure of relaxation and rest which can be dispensed to a life occupied with labors so vast and
so serious ); - This is fourteen hundred and forty minutes of which I would depart daily for the
History of the King of Bohemia and its seven castles. But the composition of the first volume
having cost me thirty years, three weeks and a few hours, - we will only count thirty years to
avoid the calculation of the fractions, - I could not give my last delivery before the month of
March of th twenty-nine hundred and nine. And from here to the year twenty-nine hundred and
nine? - My faith! I'll see Gervais again before. "From Milan to Chamouni, you have but one walk,
especially crossing the sea of ice by the country of Aosta, like Lady Very-Mad, and Miss
Frolicsome. - And you are at least sure not to find either the tax-slaves of the tax office, or the
clergy of the alliance. - 197 - Desolation. It was time - it was the place - and it was the rock. Only
Gervais was not there. The sun was full, and all the daisies were full of flowers, and all the violets
perfumed the air. There was not even the rose of the Alps that had not grown back. But Gervais
was not there. I went to his bench. He had forgotten his long curved laburnum, tied with a green
ribbon and printed characters in relief. This circumstance worried me. I called Gervais. - A voice r
Epa: Gervais. I thought it was the echo. I turned on this side, and I saw Marguerite coming, who
was leading a dog. They stopped. I recognized Puck, and Puck barely recognized me. He was
tormented by another idea, an indefinable idea. He had his nose in the air, his ears raised, his
paws still, but tense, to prepare for the race. " Helle, monsieur," said Marguerite, "have you seen
Gervais? - Gervais? r I épondis. Where is he ? Puck turned to look at me, because he had heard
me. He approached me the whole length of his lesson. I flattered him with his hand, and he
licked it - and then he resumed his station. "Sir," she said to me, "I am putting you right now. C
'did you give him that spaniel he loves so much, to console him for the loss of his barbet, which
he had loved so much. The poor animal has not been eight days in the valley that he has been
struck by a serene drop like his master. He is blind. - I lifted the bristles of Puck's forehead. He
was blind. Puck shook his head, licked my hand again, and then screamed. "That's why,"
continued Marguerite, "that Gervais did not bring her yesterday. - Yesterday, Marguerite! he has
not come back since yesterday! - Ah! Sir! it is a thing incomprehensible , and which astonishes
everyone. - Imagine that we are On Sunday we had a great storm, and when a lord came to us, I
swore it was an English mylord, who was coming down from the Buet with a straw hat, and a
glacier stick, stuffed with horn of buff, but wet, wet, wet! ... - What does that matter! While I was
going to get some fagots to dry him, M. de Robertville remained alone with Gervais. "Monsieur
de Robertville!" "That's his name; - and I do not know what he says to her. But yesterday, Gervais
was so sad! However, he seemed more eager than ever to come to the esplanade, so anxious
that I had scarcely time to throw his blue mantle on his shoulders, because he had been very
pleased the day before, as I told you, and that the weather was still cold and wet. "Mother," said
he when we went out, "I beg you to hold Puck and take care of it. His petulance makes me a little
uncomfortable, and you know that if the lesson escaped me, we could not find each other again.
I brought him here, and when I came to look for him, I did not find him. "Gervais," I exclaimed!
my good Gervais! - Oh Gervais! my son Gervais! my little Gervais! said this poor woman. - And
Puck! He was biting his load, and he was jumping around us.If you "Puck," said I, "he might find
Gervais again? I do not know if I had thought of this means; but the ball was cut off. I barely had
time to notice it. Puck took a leap, made four leaps, and I heard a noise, like that of a falling
body, in the abyss of the Arveyron. Puck! Puck! .. When I was there, the little dog had
disappeared, and I saw nothing but a blue mantle on the gulf swirling. - 200 - Humiliation. Since
Don Pic de Fanferluchio's was advised that all the questions of verbal criticism which my
narration could raise were reduced to the famous catachresis of the green ribbon, he had rested
his head on the file, and he slept a little agitated sleep, because he dreamed to three
etymologies on which his opinion is not yet fixed, that of Baccara, that of Farandole, and that of
Calembredaine. I looked for eyes Charm that alone formed all my audience (Victorine was in the
bath, or elsewhere); and I noticed with pleasure that he probably was not sleeping. He was
standing up: I was going to ask him about the impression that the story of the loves of Gervais
and Eulalie had produced in him, but I surprised him in one of those characteristic attitudes
which would save the expenses ofa question to the bailiff interviewing the Ingenu. His right arm
was turned quarter-circle at the height of his head, his hand extended and extended; his mouth
was rising convulsively in the opposite direction, that is to say, from right to left, as if to stifle a
yawn under a grimace; and his sinister shoulder, which is naturally quite misshapen, approached
his ear spontaneously, so as to express almost as distinctly as the word an idea which you would
thus translate into a vulgar tongue:who is naturally quite deformed, approached his ear
spontaneously, so as to express almost as distinctly as the word an idea which you would thus
translate into a vulgar language:who is naturally quite deformed, approached his ear
spontaneously, so as to express almost as distinctly as the word an idea which you would thus
translate into a vulgar language: - 201 - WHAT PITI É! I do not know if you know anything about
physiognomic symptoms, but when you see a man in the same position, you can bet boldly that
he is bored to death. I will gladly be half in your stake. I said that the sentence I was preparing
was a kind of interrogation, and you know that there are affirmative interrogations which show
an imperturbable self-consciousness, and which can not be answered negatively without
offense. "Great God, do I have wit, my dear Charm? do not you find this story admirably told? It
was in this mold that I had thrown my question. When I saw Charm, I threw my mold into the
garden of an excellent Toulouse poet of my acquaintance, who has often used it since.The
second of the mussels between which I had to choose was this dubious mold, where one
pretends to cast an uncertain thought, to be answered what one desires: "Between us, is it good
or bad? Tell me, my dear Charm, if you're a little happy with this story? ". But these concessions
were repugnant to my dignity. The arrangements of Breloque were so manifest, and the mold of
the ironic question suits so well the spite of a wounded author! "It seems that Mr. Breloque is
not extremely satisfied? I said bitterly. Charm jerked his Basque beret topped with a stork
feather (that was his ceremonial costume that day), widened his legs, brought his arms close to
his body, and opened his hands on both sides. a plane exactly horizontal, and the voice of a
singer sang the following verses: - Of the two lovers of Aigueperse, Learn the pitiful case. They
are born of great distress Blind with both eyes ... - I understand you, Charm; you mean that the
subject is not new, and I would like it to be even less so. The productions of the spirit live only by
form. Would you dare to compare a bad village song ... - Why not, said Charm? a bad village song
that says what it has to say is well worth a romance . - Mani ered! - That's the word. From
affectation to grace, from sentimentality to tenderness, from declamation to eloquence, from
common to naive. "Charm!" "I tell you the truth, my lord. I am not the madman of your highness
for nothing. If you are not happy, wake up Don Pic, and talk to him about catachreses. "I have
never seen you in that mood! What, my pretty dog himself ?" "That spaniel with long ears? His
hair is fuzzy, as if he were all glazed and glazed by a painting by Watteau. Ah! that he is far from
Brisquet's dog! "And what, in the name of God, is the dog of Brisquet? - 203 - - The Brisquet's
dog? "said Breloque," he is only a dog; but it is a dog, a real dog, whose history contains neither
useless descriptions, nor speech in sound periods, nor dramatic combinations, nor word
artifices. His story is simply the story of Brisquet's dog. "And this story?" "Here it is," said
Breloque. "Opposition." History of Brisquet's dog. MONSEIGNEUR, In our fortress and from
Lions, towards the hamlet of La Goupilliere, near a large well-fountain belonging to the chapel of
Saint-Mathurin, there was a good man, a woodcutter of his condition, whose name was Brisquet,
or else he was splitter with a good ax, and who lived poorly on the produce of his fagots, with his
wife named Brisquette. The good Lord had given them two pretty little children, a seven-year-old
boy who was brown, and whose name was Biscotin, and a six-year-old blonde named Biscotine.
Besides that, they had a bastard dog with curly hair, black all over his body except on the muzzle
that he had the color of fire; and he was the best dog in the country, for his attachment to his
masters. - 205 - It was called the Bichonne, because it Maybe she was a dog. You remember how
long there were so many wolves in the forest of Lions. It was in the year of great snows that the
poor people had so great difficulty in living. It was a terrible desolation in the country. Brisquet,
who always went to his work, and who did not fear the wolves, because of his good ax, said one
morning to Brisquette: "Woman, I beg you not to let Biscotin or Biscotine run, as long as
Monsieur le Grand Bouvier will not come. There would be danger for them. They have enough to
walk between the mound and the pond, since I planted stakes along the pond to preserve them
from accident. I beg you also, Brisquette, not to let out the Bichonne, who only wants to trot.
Brisquet said every morning the m Same thing in Brisquette. One evening he did not arrive at the
usual hour. Brisquette came on the doorstep, came in, came out again, and said, crossing his
hands, "My God, that he is delayed!" And then she went out again, shouting: "Eh! Brisquet! And
the Bichonne jumped to his shoulders, as if to say to him: "Will not I go? " Peace ! said
Brisquette. - Listen, Biscotine, go up to the hill to see if your father does not come back. - And
you, Biscotin, follow the path along the pond, taking good care if there are no stakes missing -
And screams loudly, Brisquet! Brisquet! ... " " Peace ! the Bichonne! The children went, went,
and when they met at the spot where the path of the pond comes to cut that of the hillock:
"Mordienne," said Biscotin, "I will find our poor father, where the wolves will eat me there. .
"Pardienne," said Biscotine, "they will eat me too. During this time Brisquet had returned by the
great road of Puchay, passing at the donkey's cross on the abbey of Mortemer, because he had a
heap of cotrets to supply Jean Paquier. - "Have you seen our children? Brisquette told him. "Our
children? said Brisquet. Our children? my God ! did they go out? "I sent them to meet you to the
mound and the pond, but you took another path. Brisquet did not put down his good ax.He
started running towards the hill. - 207 - "If you were leading the pampered? cried Brisquette.
The Bichonne was already far away. It was so far that Brisquet soon lost sight of it. And he
shouted, "Biscotin, Biscotine! We did not answer him. Then he began to cry, because he
imagined that his children were lost. After having run for a long time, he seemed to recognize
the voice of La Bichonne. He walked right into the thicket, where he had heard it, and he
entered, his good ax lifted. The Bichonne had arrived there, at the moment when Biscotin and
Biscotine were going to be devoured by a big wolf. She had thrown herself in front of him,
barking, so that her abhorrence warned Brisquet. - Brisquet at one stroke of his good ax knocked
down the dead wolf, but he was too late for the Bichonne. She did not live anymore. Brisquet,
Biscotin, and Biscotine joined Brisquette. It was a great joy, and yet everyone cried. There was
not a look that did not look for the Bichonne. Brisquet buried the Bichonne in the depths of his
little chapel under a large stone, on which the schoolmaster wrote in Latin: "HERE IS THE
BICHONNE, THE POOR DOG OF BRISQUET." And it is since that time that we say in common
proverb: Unfortunate as the dog to Brisquet, who only went once to the wood, and that the wolf
eats. - 209 - Argumentation. Charm did not feel obliged like me to the embarrassed
circumlocutions of a shy author who tries his first composition in front of an imposing audience.
He stood there, clutching his hock, his wrist on his hip, his forehead high and his eye secure , like
a tragic actor of the First Theater who seems to utter the Plaudite, Cives! His sufficiency
interceded so much that I looked in my pocket for my Lumloch snuffbox to give me a
countenance; but I had rejected her with indignation, the bad day when she made me lose, as
you know, the interesting lesson of the demonstrator of mummies. - What does my lord think?
he said. - - Can you, Charm ... I continued blushing. - That's good for a nanny story. - What is
missing, in your opinion ? (I would gladly go back to Don Pic de Fanferluchio if he did not sleep,
and the good man has not done anything since you took him to the institute.) The subject is
simple, but interesting. The episodes are easily attached to it, or rather make an essential body
with it. The event is striking and natural, the denouement pathetic and unexpected; and there
comes out, as in the ancient fable, a kind of adage which is deeply engraved in memory. Shall we
speak of characters? they are drawn so skilfully that the smallness of the frame does not detract
from their development, and that it is nobody, having heard the story of Brisquet's dog , who
does not know so perfectly Brisquet, his wife, his children and his dog, thatafter three months of
r residence at La Goupillière. You would not go to the door of a lumberjack hut in the Lions
forest, in front of which barks a black dog with a flaming beard, without shouting at you:
"Charm, we are not lost! here is Brisquet's house! What will I say about the localities? You do not
need any compass, no guides, no maps, no itinerary, no statistics, no almanac, to direct you to
the country, and if it comes out of the hut I come from to speak a good woman, still fresh, with a
benevolent physiognomy, with a rather anxious look, but very gentle, who says to you: Since
Monsieur goes to the side of Mortemer, he will have the shortest distance between the hill and
the pond, but the way is not safe - you'll r would answer almost without thinking: A thousand
graces, madam; it is my intention to take Puchay's great road, passing by the Croix aux Ânes.
Alas! If Homer had printed a character of truth so naive to his beautiful epic topography, which I
am far from challenging the merit, we would know better the campaign of Troyes than the plain
Saint-Denis. As to style, I am obliged to admit that it is neither picturesque, nor romantic, nor
poetic, nor oratory; but it is what it must be, clear, simple, expressive, appropriate to people and
things, intelligible to all minds; and therefore essentially suitable. - I bit the l goats to the blood.
Les Amours de Gervais and Eulalie were already printed; but I sent my paper copy of China far
above the pegs of the pond of La Goupilliere. After this beautiful peroration, Breloque burst
forth like an orator on the left bank of the Seine, who reads in the Moniteur the three immense
columns, printed in little nomapilla, or in Paris, or in sedan, by means of which he proved the day
before. for the greater benefit of his constituents, one can very well make a bladder a lantern by
putting a lighted candle in it. However, I had something to answer, because all my humility does
not forbid me from impatient access. - But I actually ask that there is not a single man a little
honorably placed in society which can not judge by experience of the immense and sudden
diversion produced in the most preoccupied mind the bustle of a post-chaise which stops in
front of your hotel, especially when you are by chance the only one resident tenant. - Pif, paf,
piaf, patapan. - I believe, in truth, that this deserves another chapter. - 212 - Invention. Pif paf
piaf patapan. Ouhiyns ouhiyns. Ebroh é broha broha. Ouhiyns ouhiyns. Hoé hu. Dia hurau. Tza
tza tza. Cla cla cla. Vli vlan. Flic flac. Flaflaflac. Tza tza tza. Psi psi psi. Ouistle. Zou lou lou.
Rlurlurlu. Ouistle. Cla cla cla. Flaflaflac. Ta ta ta Ta ta ta Pouf. Ouhiyns. Ebrohe broha. Ouhiyns
ouhiyns. Your ta - ta ta ta ta ta. A u ho. Tza tza tza. O hem. O hup. O war! Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Hup. O
hep. O hup. O hem. Hap! Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. O hup. O hey. O halt! O! Oooooh! Xi xi xi xi! Peak ! Pan!
Baound. Hooray !!!!!!!! - 213 - Interpretation. - In the name of heaven, Th eodore, take back your
senses! What language do you speak ? - Could you please to ignore? Is it not the consecrated
language, the imitative and descriptive poetry of the decennial prices, the patented expression
of the imperial muses? Is it not this perfected interpretation of human thought for which the
Iroquois newspaper claims to all excess a patent of invention? You do not notice, moreover, that
this page, unique among all the written monuments of the word, conceals, under the
appearance of a simple game of mind, the most powerful effort of a creative imagination; the
secret of Novum organum and the Characteristic; the universal intelligibility that the Kantists,
eclectists and doctrinaires, so much in love with clarity, are still groping for! You do not know
that if Nemrod (or Nembroth) iswas informed of this discovery on the day of the defection of the
workers of Babel, I could offer you today a very pretty flat boy, a few thousand toises beyond the
summits of Chimboraço, while, if God does not provide we are very exposed to sleep on the
street this winter! - 214 - Indeed, read this chapter with some go it should be inflexible before a
lexicological commission formed in the name of the human race, and in which the most
barbarous tribes will be represented, without excepting the Romantics and the Eskimos; and I
suffer such a punishment that you want to inflict on me, a musical evening of amateurs, a
session of the Athenee, a performance at a profit, the reading of a tragedy, the unexpected
rendezvous of a woman whom the We love the day when we have endured too long the
appointment of a woman we no longer love, if someone among your innumerable listeners
misunderstands the implicit meaning of this sublime composition, which no dictionary provided
the elements. And if genius consists in rendering a natural picture with an energetic and simple
simplicity,I tremble to say that no one maybe ...... - But I'll let him say by my editor in the preface
of the eighth edition, which will be the same as this one, with two or three boxes. From the first
line (it would be up to me to call it a verse, because it has six syllables, and it is held for exactly
metric in Timbuktu) - From the first line, you hear piaffe impatient couriers, - And afterwards ,
listen; they neigh, they quiver, they always neigh! - Autom edon (this is the figured name of the
coachman), Automedon has started. He covers them with his eyes, he warns them with his voice
- the whip has moved , screaming thongs are breaking the air. - Long-time he excites his carriage
only by benevolent cadences or interjections without collar era. The whip still sounds, and the
wick sounds sound still without hurting. They trot, they trot, they neigh, the flying horse gallops.
He aspires to this nourishing grain which I dare not name, but which I will very elegantly
designate, by saying that an emperor had it covered with gold leaves for the banquets of the
only consul who had struck the ground with four powdery feet. - Will you roll the wheel, which
bounces the trembling boards and vibrates the heavy ironwork of the drawbridge? "Do you hear
the whistling port slipping, and the thundering thunder of its fall? "You are in the castle, and all
its inhabitants utter a cry of welcome and joy." - 2 A just feeling of modesty forces the translator
to declare that he has not had the slightest intention of struggling with the original, which is all
else expressive. - 216 - Solution. What portcullis, what drawbridge, what castle? exclaimed
Victorine . my God ! my dear friend, the portcullis and the drawbridge of the Knigsgratz Castle -
"Or Konigingratz, or Konigingretz," added Don Pic, rubbing his eyes. - The city went in 1423 to
Jean Ziska. " Konigsgratz? Is it possible! would we already be in the saddest of the seven castles
of the King of Bohemia? - 217 - - We are there, Victorine, since you wanted it. - Ah! my friend !
that the last season was boring at T Oplitz! Could not you tell us to match this year with some
more entertaining story than this long raps of blind men, mummies, academicians, wigs,
slippers, spaniels and bichons? "It's my business," answered Breloque, sitting down in a parlor at
the Milan drawing-room, and finishing to slice a piece of refractory sugar into his glass. He was
about to begin, when a fateful finger ... I will not say that it was the one who minuted, in laconic
slang, on the walls of Balthazar's palace, which the Greeks call Nabonadios, the final judgment of
the monarchy of Babylon. It was simply that of my bookseller, who gave me only three hundred
and eighty-seven pages of white vellum rider to fill, and an inkwell of twenty centilitres to empty,
to perfect this a useless work of sufficiency and idleness which is vulgarly called a book. Charm
was about to begin, I say, when this positive and calculating finger traced, in initials shaded by
twenty-two, at the foot of my completed page, the following monosyllable: - 218 - R
écapitulation. Introduction................................................. ............................. 6
Retraction. .................................................. ........................... 8
Convention ..................... .................................................. ........ 11
Demonstration. .................................................. ..................... 15
Objection ........................... .................................................. .... 17
Statement ............................................ ................................. 20
Continuation. .................................................. ........................ 23
Protest ........................ .................................................. ...
Dubitation. .................................................. ............................ 30
Narration ......................................................... ........................ 33
Insertion ........................ .................................................. ........ 38
Transcription. .................................................. ....................... 41
Conversation. .................................................. ........................ 47
Combustion ........................ .................................................. ... 52
Exhibition ............................................. ................................... 58........................... 47 Combustion
..................... .................................................. ...... 52
Exhibition .......................................... ...................................... 58........................... 47 Combustion
..................... .................................................. ...... 52
Exhibition .......................................... ...................................... 58 - 219 -
Explanation. .................................................. ........................... 59
Annotation. .................................................. ........................... 63
Observation ..................... .................................................. ...... 66 Pr
étérition. .................................................. ............................ 68
Damnation. .................................................. ........................... 70
Commemoration ..................... ................................................ 75
Scholarship . .................................................. .............................. 84
Aberration. .................................................. ............................ 89
Transition .................... .................................................. .......... 92
Mystification. .................................................. ........................ 93
Verification ........................ .................................................. .... 96
Numeration ............................................ ................................. 98
Interlocution. ........................................................................ 103
Uprising. .................................................. ........................ 114
Dissertation ........................ .................................................. 118
Meditation ............................................... .............................. 124
Navigation .................. .................................................. ......... 125
Appearance. .................................................. .......................... 127
Exploration. .................................................. ........................ 129
Procreation ........................ .................................................. .. 132
Distinction .............................................. ............................... 137
Remuneration. .................................................. .................... 138 - 220 - Pr
écaution. .................................................. .......................... 146
Installation ...................... .................................................. .... 148
Teething. .................................................. ............................ 152
Exhumation .................... .................................................. ..... 156
Operation. .................................................. ........................... 158
Position. .................................................. .............................. 165
Distraction. .................................................. ......................... 166
Reception. .................................................. ........................... 167
Remuneration ..................... .................................................. ..... 173
Riding. ................................................................. ............ 175
Imposition ..................................... ........................................ 180
Staffing. .................................................. ............................. 186
Donation. .................................................. ............................ 189
Supputation .................... .................................................. ..... 196
Desolation. .................................................. .......................... 198
Humiliation ...................... .................................................. ... 201
Opposition ............................................. ................................ 205
Argumentation ................ .................................................. .... 210
Invention ............................................ ................................... 213
Interpretation. .................................................. .................... 214
Solution ............................ .................................................. ... 217
Summary ............................................. .......................... 219 - 221 - NOTE FROM THE PRINTER:
We have carefully noted the pagination number of the chapters, their logical sequence being of
great importance for the intelligence of the book. - 222 - CORRECTION. I d formally echoes that
after having re-read this excellent story with all the attention I am capable of, I found only one
word to change, and that it took me long and painstaking reflections research to ascertain the
necessity of this erratum; I must also warn the reader that this modification is not about a fault
of language, about a phrase of bad taste, nor about a repetition of bad grace, nor about one of
the pedantic pedagogical neologisms of which the timorous journals accuse me, nor on one of
the unintelligible archaisms reproached to me in the salons, but on a delicacy of synonymy which
can only be grasped by the most delicate minds. I pray to enlightened and sensitive people, for
whom the reading of theThe history of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles has become a
daily necessity, such as the study of M. Jacotot's universal education and M. Marle's perfected
perfection, of trying to substitute the word babouche mentally. at the word slipper, wherever
there is talk of Popocambou's slipper, which was necessarily a babouche. Babouche is quite a
name of relation, a noun of locality. It feels its southern origin and its solar regions. Slipper is
indigenous in the middle countries. It is a unique word for the Caucasian race, which is
distinguished from others by the immemorial use of slippers, which will be over-to be willing to
mentally substitute the word slipper for the word slipper, wherever the slipper of Popocambou is
mentioned, which was necessarily a slipper. Babouche is quite a name of relation, a noun of
locality. It feels its southern origin and its solar regions. Slipper is indigenous in the middle
countries. It is a unique word for the Caucasian race, which is distinguished from others by the
immemorial use of slippers, which will be over-to be willing to mentally substitute the word
slipper for the word slipper, wherever the slipper of Popocambou is mentioned, which was
necessarily a slipper. Babouche is quite a name of relation, a noun of locality. It feels its southern
origin and its solar regions. Slipper is indigenous in the middle countries. It is a unique word for
the Caucasian race, which is distinguished from others by the immemorial use of slippers, which
will be over-is a word unique to the Caucasian race, which is distinguished from others by the
immemorial use of slippers, which will be over-is a word unique to the Caucasian race, which is
distinguished from others by the immemorial use of slippers, which will be over- - 223 -
emulated when we discovered a fossil slipper. Babouche participates in something of sovereign
majesty. Slipper suddenly gives rise in thought to the feeling of an intellectual civilization more
complete to the truth, but less primitive and less solemn. It suffices to pronounce these two
words to prove that the babouche is the true slipper of kings, and that the slipper is, at most, the
babouche of the patricians. They say an august babouche; we say a pretty slipper. A pretty
babouche would be inappropriate; an august slipper would be burlesque. The spirit of the
languages pronounced on this question by certain indices. Slipper has a diminutive, and
babouche has none. The idea of a slipper is linked to all the ideas of inconsideration and
carelessness, thebabouche idea to all habits of wisdom and gravity. The girls have slippers, and
the grandmothers have slippers. Slipper is a pejorative object of comparison: the recipient
reasoned like a slipper, the president answered like a slipper. We have a lot more regard for
slippers. There could be no question but babouches in the biography of Popocambou-le-Breche-
dent, since it is written that babouche is suitable for sublime style, and slipper for the temperate
style.There could be no question but babouches in the biography of Popocambou-le-Breche-
dent, since it is written that babouche is suitable for sublime style, and slipper for the temperate
style.There could be no question but babouches in the biography of Popocambou-le-Breche-
dent, since it is written that babouche is suitable for sublime style, and slipper for the temperate
style. - 224 - APPROVAL. I, the undersigned expert weigheur of ideas, patent translator of
equivocal words, the sworn pundor of abstruse cogitations, executor of the low works and
grandfather of literary literature of Timbuktu, certify to whom it will belong that I have tried to
read, by order THE HISTORY OF THE KING OF BOHEMIA AND ITS SEVEN CASTLES; that this work is
neither impious nor obscene, nor seditious, nor satirical, and that it is consequently very
mediocre pleasant; but that the TABLE OF CHAPTERS seemed to me a very agreeable invention
and a very convenient use for grave, religious and well-meaning societies, which, in the winter
evenings, are exercised with edifying and instructive of the corbel. Raminagrobis - 225 -