"Upon what? this insult?"
"No; tell me really now whether lumière does not rhyme with ornière."
"I should make them rhyme—ah! I knew you would—and I have made a hundred thousand such rhymes in my time."
"A hundred thousand!" cried La Fontaine, "four times as many as La Pucelle, which M. Chaplain is meditating. Is it also on this subject too that you have composed a hundred thousand verses?"
"Listen to me, you eternally absent creature," said Moliere.
"It is certain," continued La Fontaine, "that légume, for instance, rhymes with posthume."
"In the plural, above all."
"Yes, above all in the plural, seeing that then it rhymes not with three letters, but with four; as ornière does with lumière."
"But ornières and lumières in the plural, my dear Pellisson," said La Fontaine, clapping his hand on the shoulder of his friend, whose insult he had quite forgotten, "and they will rhyme."
"Hem!" cried Pellisson.