"Hi! Monsieur!... Monsieur le maître de l'hôtel!" exclaimed my friend, before I had had time to stop him. The maître de l'hôtel turned round.
"My companion here says he will stop for dinner with you if you have by chance a steak of bear flesh."
I have seen many faces express agitation in my life; in consequence of terrible news, unexpected accidents, serious wounds ... but I never saw any face more concerned than that of the unfortunate maître de poste at Martigny.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, seizing his hair with both hands, "again! always the same cry!... Is no traveller to pass by without making the same joke?"
"Yes!" resumed my companion, "I read about it in M. Alexandre Dumas's Impressions de Voyage ..."
"The Impressions de Voyage by M. Alexandre Dumas!" shrieked the wretched inn-keeper; "are there still people who read it?"
"Why should they not read it?" I ventured to ask.
"Because it is an atrocious book, full of lies; people have been burned at the stake who did not deserve it as much as that man.... Oh! M. Alexandre Dumas!" went on the unlucky vendor of soup, passing from rage to exasperation, "if only I ever get hold of him in private one of these days! but I shall have to go to Paris to get even with him. He will not go through Switzerland again, he dare not! he knows I am waiting to strangle him: I have told him so. All right; if you see him, if you know him, tell him once more from me, tell him every time you meet him, tell it him over and over again."
He went into his house like a madman, like one furious and driven to despair.
"What is the matter with your master?" I asked the postilion....