“Is it to Monsieur Vernier himself that I have the honor—?” said the traveler, bending his vertebral column with so much grace that it seemed to be elastic.
“Yes, monsieur,” said the wily dyer, interrupting him with a scrutinizing glance, by which he at once took the measure of the man he had to do with.
“I have come, monsieur,” Gaudissart went on, “to request the assistance of your enlightenment to direct me in this district where, as I learn from Mitouflet, you exert the greatest influence. I am an emissary, monsieur, to this Department in behalf of an undertaking of the highest importance, backed by bankers who are anxious—”
“Anxious to swindle us!” said Vernier, laughing, long since used to deal with the commercial traveler and to follow his game.
“Just so,” replied Gaudissart the Great with perfect impudence. “But, as you very well know, sir, since you are so clear-sighted, people are not to be swindled unless they think it to their interest to allow themselves to be swindled. I beg you will not take me for one of the common ruck of commercial gentlemen who trust to cunning or importunity to win success. I am no longer a traveler; I was one, monsieur, and I glory in it. But I have now a mission of supreme importance, which ought to make every man of superior mind regard me as devoted to the enlightenment of his fellow-countrymen. Be kind enough to hear me, monsieur, and you will find that you will have profited greatly by the half hour’s conversation I beg you to grant me. The great Paris bankers have not merely lent their names to this concern, as to certain discreditable speculations such as I call mere rattraps. No, no, nothing of the kind. I can assure you, I would never allow myself to engage in promoting such booby-traps. No, monsieur, the soundest and most respectable houses in Paris are concerned in the undertaking, both as shareholders and as guarantors—”
And Gaudissart unrolled the frippery of his phrases, while Monsieur Vernier listened with an affectation of interest that quite deceived the orator. But at the word guarantor, Vernier had, in fact, ceased to heed this bagman’s rhetoric; he was bent on playing him some sly trick, so as to clear off this kind of Parisian caterpillar, once for all, from a district justly regarded as barbarian by speculators, who can get no footing there.
At the head of a delightful valley, known as the Vallée coquette, from its curves and bends, new at every step, and each more charming than the last, whether you go up or down the winding slope, there dwelt, in a little house surrounded by a vineyard, a more than half-crazy creature named Margaritis. This man, an Italian by birth, was married, but had no children, and his wife took care of him with a degree of courage that was universally admired; for Madame Margaritis certainly ran some risk in living with a man who, among other manias, insisted on always having two long knives about him, not unfrequently threatening her with them. But who does not know the admirable devotion with which country people care for afflicted creatures, perhaps in consequence of the discredit that attaches to a middle-class wife if she abandons her child or her husband to the tender mercies of a public asylum? Again, the aversion is well known which country folks feel for paying a hundred louis, or perhaps a thousand crowns, the price charged at Charenton or in a private asylum. If anyone spoke to Madame Margaritis of Dubuisson, Esquirol, Blanche, or other mad-doctors, she preferred, with lofty indignation, to keep her three thousand francs and her goodman.
The inexplicable caprices of this worthy’s insanity being closely connected with the course of my story, it is needful to mention some of his more conspicuous vagaries. Margaritis would always go out as soon as it began to rain, to walk bareheaded among his vines. Indoors he was perpetually asking for the newspaper; just to satisfy him, his wife or the maidservant would give him an old Journal d’Indre-et-Loire and for seven years he had never discovered that it was always the same copy. A doctor might perhaps have found it interesting to note the connection between his attacks of asking for the paper and the variations in the weather. The poor madman’s constant occupation was to study the state of the sky and its effect on the vines.
When his wife had company, which was almost every evening—for the neighbors, in pity for her position, came in to play boston with her—Margaritis sat in silence in a corner, never moving; but when ten o’clock struck by a clock in a tall wooden case, he rose at the last stroke with the mechanical precision of the figures moved by a spring in a German toy, went slowly up to the cardplayers, looked at them with eyes strangely like the automatic gaze of the Greeks and Turks to be seen in the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, and said, “Go away!”
At times, however, this man recovered his natural wits, and could then advise his wife very shrewdly as to the sale of her wine; but at those times he was exceedingly troublesome, stealing dainties out of the cupboards and eating them in secret.
Occasionally when the customary visitors came in, he answered their inquiries civilly, but he more often replied quite at random. To a lady who asked him, “How are you today, Monsieur Margaritis?”—“I have shaved,” he would reply, “and you?”
“Are you better, monsieur?” another would say. “Jerusalem! Jerusalem!” was the answer. But he usually looked at them with a blank face, not speaking a word, and then his wife would say, “The goodman cannot hear anything today.” Twice or thrice in the course of five years, always about the time of the equinox, he had flown into a rage at this remark, had drawn
