I repeated my sentence.
"Why do you suppose that?" he said.
"The little book you are reading so attentively, monsieur,—excuse my rudeness, but my eyes fell involuntarily on the title,—contains recipes, does it not? for cooking eggs in more than sixty different ways?"
"Oh yes, true...." he said.
"Monsieur, that book would have been of great use to an uncle of mine, a curé, who was, or rather still is, a great eater, and a fine sportsman: one day he made a bet with one of his confrères that he would eat a hundred eggs at his dinner; he was only able to discover eighteen or twenty ways of serving them ... yes, twenty ways, for he ate them by fives at a time. You see, if he had known sixty ways of cooking them, instead of a hundred, he could have eaten two hundred."
My neighbour looked at me with a certain attention which seemed to imply that he was asking himself, "Am I by any chance seated next to a young lunatic?"
"Well?" he said.
"Well, if I could procure such a book for my dear uncle, I am sure he would be most grateful to me."
"Monsieur," said my neighbour, "I doubt if, in spite of the sentiments which do a nephew's heart the greatest credit, you could procure this book."
"Why not?"