My mother, listening the while she knitted a woollen stocking, was glad to say a word:
“It must be believed that salt is a good thing, because the priests put a grain of it on the tongues of the babies held over the christening font. When my Jacques felt the salt on his tongue he made a grimace; as tiny as he was he already had some sense. I speak, Sir Priest, of my son Jacques here present.”
The priest looked on me and said:
“Now he is already a grown-up boy. Modesty is painted on his features and he reads the ‘Life of St Margaret’ with attention.”
“Oh!” exclaimed my mother, “he also reads the prayer for chilblains and that of ‘St Hubert,’ which Friar Ange has given him, and the history of that fellow who has been devoured, in the Saint Marcel suburb, by several devils for having blasphemed the holy name of our Lord.”
My father looked admiringly on me, and then he murmured into the priest’s ear that I learned anything I wanted to know with a native and natural facility.
“Wherefore,” replied the priest, “you must form him to become a man of letters, which to be, is one of the honours of mankind, the consolation of human life and a remedy against all evils, actually against those of love, as it is affirmed by the poet Theocritus.”
“Simple cook as I am,” was my father’s reply, “I hold knowledge in high esteem, and am quite willing to believe that it also is, as your reverence says, a remedy for love. But I do not think that it is a remedy against hunger.”
“Well, perhaps it is not a sovereign ointment,” replied the priest; “but it gives some solace, like a sweet balm, although somewhat imperfect.”
As he spoke Catherine the lacemaker appeared on the threshold, with her bonnet sideways over her ear and her neckerchief very much creased. Seeing her, my mother frowned and let slip three meshes of her knitting.