“Willing to receive informations from her Toy, I examined it. But the vorticose creature spoke in terms of such sublime geometry, that I did not understand one word, nor perhaps did it understand its own language. It was nothing but right lines, concave surfaces, given quantities, longitude, latitude, profundity, solids, living forces, dead forces, cone, cylinder, conic sections, curves, elastic curves, curve re-entring into itself, with its point conjugated—”
“I pray your highness to excuse me from the rest,” cried the favorite mournfully. “You have a cruel memory, enough to put one to death. It has raised a swimming in my head, which I dare say I shall not get rid of these eight days. But was the other so diverting?”
“You shall be the judge,” replied Mangogul. “By Brama’s great toe, I have performed a prodigy. I have retain’d its motly gibberish word for word, though it be so thoroughly void of sense and perspicuity, that if you give me a subtle and critical explanation of it, madam, you will make me an acceptable present.”
“How have you said, prince?” cried Mirzoza. “Let me die, if you have not stolen that phrase from somebody.”
“I can’t tell how it has happened,” replied Mangogul: “for these two Toys are the only persons to whom I have given audience this day. The last, on whom I turned my ring, after a moment’s silence, said, as if addressing an audience,
“ ‘Gentlemen,
“ ‘I shall take the liberty to avoid seeking, to the contempt of my own reason, a model of thinking and expressing myself. But yet if I advance anything new, it shall not be affectation, but the subject shall have furnished me with it: if I repeat what has been already said, it will be my own thought, as well as it has been that of others. Let not irony come to turn this preamble into ridicule, and accuse me of either not having read, or of having read to no purpose. A Toy like me is not made for reading, or profiting by its reading, or foreseeing an objection, or answering it.
“ ‘I shall not debar myself of reflections and ornaments proportioned to my subject; the rather because in this regard it is extremely modest, and will not admit of any great quantity or brilliancy. But I will avoid sinking into those little minute details, which fall to the share of the barren orator. It would be cause of great grief to me to be suspected of this defect.
“ ‘After having informed ye, gentlemen, of what you are to expect from my discoveries and elocution, some few strokes of the pencil will be sufficient, to sketch you out my character.
“ ‘You know, gentlemen, as well as I, that there are two sorts of Toys: proud Toys and modest Toys. The former are haughty, and always expect the place of honour. The latter affect to be courteous, and present themselves with an air of submission. These two intentions appear manifestly in the execution of their projects, and determine both sorts to act according to the genius that guides them.
“ ‘I imagined, through attachment to the prejudices of my first education, that I should open to myself a safer, easier, and more agreeable career, if I preferr’d the part of humility to that of pride; and I offered myself with infantile bashfulness and winning supplications to all, whom I had the good fortune to meet.
“ ‘But oh! how unhappy are the times. After ten times more buts and ifs and ands than were sufficient to make the most unemployed Toy lose all patience, my services were accepted. Alas! this job was of short duration. My first possessor giving himself up to the flattering glory of a new conquest, discarded me, and I found myself all at once out of employment.
“ ‘My treasure was gone, and I did not flatter myself that fortune would make me amends for it. In effect the vacant place was occupied, but not filled by a Sexagenarian, to whom good will was less wanting than the means.
“ ‘He laboured with all his might to make me forget my past state. He had for me all that behavior, which is esteemed polite and engaging in the career that I pursued: but his efforts did not conquer my regret.
“ ‘If industry, which is said never to fall short, made him find in the treasures of the natural faculty some abatement to my grief; this compensation to me appeared insufficient, in spite of my imagination, which was daily on the rack to find new resemblances, and even to suppose imaginary ones, but to no purpose.
“ ‘Such is the advantage of primacy, that it seizes the idea, and forms a barrier against everything that would afterwards present itself under other forms: and such is, shall I say it, to our shame, the ungrateful nature of Toys, that they never take the goodwill for the deed.
“ ‘This remark seems to me so natural, that, without being indebted to anybody for it, I cannot think that I am the only one who has made it. But if any person before me has been struck with it; at least, gentlemen I am the first who undertake, by demonstrating it, to set its full value in a proper light.
“ ‘I am far from laying the least blame to the charge of those who have raised their voice hitherto, for having let this stroke escape them; my self-love being abundantly satisfied, to be able, after so great a number of orators, to present my observation as something new.’ ”
“Ah! prince,” cried Mirzoza smartly, “I fancy I hear the chiromancer of the Manimonbanda. Apply to him, and you will have the subtle and critical explanation, of which you would in vain expect the agreeable present from any other person.”
The African author says, that Mangogul smiled, and continued. “But I do not intend,” says he, “to relate the rest of his discourse. If this beginning has not given as much amusement as the first pages of La Fée Taupe, the sequel would be more tiresome than
