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M. Flamaran and I sat down together on the bank, our feet resting on the soft sand strewn with dead branches. Before us spread the little pool I have mentioned, a slight widening of the stream of the Bievre, once a watering-place for cattle. The sun, now at high noon, massed the trees' shadow close around their trunks. The unbroken surface of the water reflected its rays back in our eyes.
I was walking along slowly, looking into every stall, and when I came to the end I turned right about face. Great Heavens! Not ten feet off! M. Flamaran, M. Charnot, and Mademoiselle Jeanne! They had stopped before one of the stalls that I had just left. M. Flamaran was carrying under his arm a pot of cineraria, which made his stomach a perfect bower.
"Jupille!" exclaimed M. Flamaran, "you have shipwrecked us! This is Crusoe's land; and what the dickens do you mean by it?" The old clerk, utterly discomfited, and wearing that hangdog look which he always assumed at the slightest rebuke from Counsellor Boule, pulled a face as long as his arm, went up to M. Flamaran and whispered a word in his ear. "Upon my word!
I was walking along slowly, looking into every stall, and when I came to the end I turned right about face. Great Heavens! Not ten feet off! M. Flamaran, M. Charnot, and Mademoiselle Jeanne! They had stopped before one of the stalls that I had just left. M. Flamaran was carrying under his arm a pot of cineraria, which made his stomach a perfect bower.
The three first examiners had read my essay, especially M. Flamaran, who knew it well and had enjoyed its novel and audacious propositions. He pursed up his mouth preparatory to putting the first question, like an epicure sucking a ripe fruit.
The matter really was a new line, invented by M. Jupille, cast a little further than an ordinary one, and rigged up with a float like a raft, carrying a little clapper. The fish rang their own knell as they took the hook. "It's rattling like mad!" cried Jupille, "and you don't stir! I couldn't have thought it of you, Monsieur Flamaran."
At home he may be seen at his window tending his canaries, which, he says, is no change of occupation. To get to his house I have only to go by my favorite road through the Luxembourg. I am soon at his door. "Is Monsieur Flamaran at home?" The old servant who opened the door eyed me solemnly. Their respects, indeed! They would bore him to death if he had to see them all.
M. Flamaran, somewhat ill at ease, cast inquiring glances on the clearings in the sgrubberies. I thought I heard stifled laughter behind the trees. "You have engaged Chestnut Number Three, gentlemen," said the proprietor. "Up these stairs, please." We ascended a staircase winding around the trunk.
He opened his broad mouth with a smile of fatherly humor, and the groves, attentive, heard him thunder forth these words: "Boys, I promise to give you all white marks if you let me dine in peace!" The last words were lost in a roar of applause. "Three cheers for old Flamaran!"
"That I swear to, with all the pleasure in life!" "Really? I feared you had some ties." "Not one." "Or dislike for Paris." "No, Monsieur; only a preference for Paris, with freedom to indulge it. Your second condition?" "The second, to which my daughter and I both attach importance, is that you should make your peace with your uncle. Flamaran tells me you have quarrelled." "That is true."
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