• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1541 0

the compliments by means of which he considered that he paid his whack at a dinner-party, and gave an immediate return of hospitality. “There’s no need to invite them back,” he would often say, in speaking to his wife of one or other couple of their acquaintance: “They were delighted to have us. It was they who thanked me for coming.”) “I may tell you, though, that I’ve been going to Renneville every day for years, and I’ve never seen any more frogs there than anywhere else. Madame de Cambremer brought over to these parts the curé of a parish where she owns a considerable property, who has very much the same turn of mind as yourself, it seems to me. He has written a book.”

“I know, I’ve read it with immense interest,” Brichot replied hypocritically.

The satisfaction that his pride received indirectly from this answer made M. de Cambremer laugh long and loud. “Ah, well, the author of, what shall I call it, this geography, this glossary, dwells at great length upon the name of a little place of which we were formerly, if I may say so, the lords, and which is called Pont-à-Couleuvre. Of course I am only an ignorant rustic compared with such a fountain of learning, but I have been to Pont-à-Couleuvre a thousand times if he’s been there once, and devil take me if I ever saw one of those beastly snakes there—I say beastly in spite of the tribute the worthy La Fontaine pays them.” (The Man and the Snake was one of his two fables.)

“You haven’t seen any, and you saw straight,” replied Brichot. “Undoubtedly, the writer you mention knows his subject through and through, he has written a remarkable book.”

“He has indeed!” exclaimed Mme de Cambremer. “That book, there’s no doubt about it, is a real work of scholarship.”

“No doubt he consulted various cartularies (by which we mean the lists of benefices and cures of each diocese), which may have furnished him with the names of lay patrons and ecclesiastical collators. But there are other sources. One of the most learned of my friends has delved into them. He found that the place in question was named Pont-à-Quileuvre. This odd name encouraged him to carry his researches further, to a Latin text in which the bridge that your friend supposes to be infested with snakes is styled Pons cui aperit: a closed bridge that was opened only upon due payment.”

“You were speaking of frogs. I, when I find myself among such learned folk, feel like the frog before the Areopagus” (this being his other fable), said Cancan who often indulged, with a hearty laugh, in this pleasantry thanks to which he imagined himself to be making at one and the same time, with a mixture of humility and aptness, a profession of ignorance and a display of learning.

Meanwhile Cottard, blocked on one side by M. de Charlus’s silence, and driven to seek an outlet elsewhere, turned to me with one of those questions which impressed his patients when it hit the mark and showed them that he could put himself so to speak inside their bodies, and if on the other hand it missed the mark, enabled him to check certain theories, to widen his previous standpoints. “When you come to a relatively high altitude, such as this where we now are, do you find that the change increases your tendency to breathlessness?” he asked me with the certainty of either arousing admiration or enlarging his own knowledge.

M. de Cambremer heard the question and smiled. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to hear that you have fits of breathlessness,” he flung at me across the table. He did not mean that it cheered him up, though in fact it did. For this worthy man could not hear any reference to another person’s sufferings without a feeling of well-being and a spasm of hilarity which speedily gave place to the instinctive pity of a kind heart. But his words had another meaning which was indicated more precisely by the sentence that followed: “I’m delighted,” he explained, “because my sister has them too.” In short, he was delighted in the same way as if he had heard me mention as one of my friends a person who was constantly coming to their house.