THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
Page: 36

"Well, crazy,--cracked, as people are when they are insane," answered
Mitouflet. "But he is not dangerous; his wife takes care of him. Have
you been arguing with him?" added the pitiless landlord; "that must
have been funny!"

"Funny!" cried Gaudissart. "Funny! Then your Monsieur Vernier has been
making fun of me!"

"Did he send you there?"

"Yes."

"Wife! wife! come here and listen. If Monsieur Vernier didn't take it
into his head to send this gentleman to talk to Margaritis!"

"What in the world did you say to each other, my dear, good Monsieur?"
said the wife. "Why, he's crazy!"

"He sold me two casks of wine."

"Did you buy them?"

"Yes."

"But that is his delusion; he thinks he sells his wine, and he hasn't
any."

"Ha!" snorted the traveller, "then I'll go straight to Monsieur
Vernier and thank him."

And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer,
whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom
he had already recounted the tale.

"Monsieur," said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at
his enemy, "you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain of
being thought a turn-key,--a species of being far below a galley-
slave,--you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared to
offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you
hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?"

Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a
tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.

"What!" cried Vernier, delighted at the presence of an audience, "do
you think we have no right to make fun of a man who comes here, bag
and baggage, and demands that we hand over our property because,
forsooth, he is pleased to call us great men, painters, artists,
poets,--mixing us up gratuitously with a set of fools who have neither
house nor home, nor sous nor sense? Why should we put up with a rascal
who comes here and wants us to feather his nest by subscribing to a
newspaper which preaches a new religion whose first doctrine is, if
you please, that we are not to inherit from our fathers and mothers?