“Why in the trunk?”
“Because I put him there.”
Monsieur Bergeret went up to the trunk, and remarked:
“It was thus that the child Comatas, who played upon the flute as he kept his master’s goats, was imprisoned in a chest, where he was fed on honey by the bees of the Muses. But not so with you, Riquet; you would have died of hunger in this trunk, for you are not dear to the immortal Muses.”
Having spoken, Monsieur Bergeret freed his little friend, who with wagging tail followed him as far as the hall. Then a thought appeared to strike him. He returned to Pauline’s room, ran to her and jumped up against her skirt, and only when he had riotously embraced her as a sign of his adoration did he rejoin his master on the stairs. He would have felt that he was lacking in wisdom and piety had he failed to bestow these tokens of affection on a being whose power had plunged him into the depths of a trunk.
Monsieur Bergeret thought Paillot’s shop a dismal, ugly place. Paillot and his assistant were busy “calling over” the list of goods supplied to the Communal School. This task prevented him from prolonging his farewell to the professor. He had never had very much to say for himself and as he grew older he was gradually losing the habit of speech. He was weary of selling books; he saw that it was all over with the trade and was longing for the time to come when he could give up his business and retire to his place in the country, where he always spent his Sundays.
As was his wont, Monsieur Bergeret made for the corner where the old books were kept and took down volume XXXVIII of The World’s Explorers. The book opened as usual at pages 212 and 213, and once more he perused these uninspiring lines:
“... towards a northerly passage. ‘It was owing to this check,’ said he, ‘that we were able to revisit the Sandwich Islands and enrich our voyage by a discovery which, although the last, seems in many respects to be the most important which has yet been made by Europeans in the whole extent of the Pacific Ocean.’ The happy anticipations which these words appeared to announce were, unhappily, not realized....”
These lines, which he was reading for the hundredth time, and which reminded him of so many hours of his commonplace and laborious existence, which was embellished, nevertheless, by the fruitful labours of the mind; these lines, for whose meaning he had never sought, filled him, on this occasion, with melancholy and discouragement, as though they contained a symbol of the emptiness of all human hopes, an expression of the universal void. He closed the book, which he had opened so often and was never to open again, and dejectedly left the shop.
In the Place Saint-Exupère he cast a last glance at the house of Queen Marguerite. The rays of the setting sun gleamed upon its historic beams, and in the violent contrast of light and shade the escutcheon of Philippe Tricouillard proudly displayed the outlines of its gorgeous coat of arms, placed there as an eloquent example and a reproach to the barren city.