M. d’Anquetil turned round to me and said:
“What, sir, you know Greek! You are not then a gentleman?”
“No, sir,” I replied, “I am not. My father is the banner-bearer of the Guild of Parisian Cooks.”
“Well, under such conditions it is impossible for me to kill you. Kindly accept my excuses. But, abbé, you don’t drink. You imposed upon me. I believed you to be a real good tippler, and wished you to become my chaplain as soon as I could set up my own establishment.”
However, M. Coignard did drink all that the bottle contained, and Catherine, inclining to me, whispered in my ear:
“Jacques, I feel that I shall never love anyone but you.”
These words, spoken by a really fine woman clad in no other wrapper than a chemise, troubled me to the extreme. Catherine ended by fuddling me entirely, by making me drink out of her own glass, an action passing unobserved in the confusion of a supper which had overheated the heads of us all.
M. d’Anquetil knocked off the neck of a bottle on the corner of the table and filled our bumpers; from this moment on, I cannot give a reliable account of what was said and done around me. One incident I remember: Catherine treacherously emptying her glass into her lover’s neck, between the nape and the collar of his coat; and M. d’Anquetil retorting by pouring the contents of two or three bottles over the girl. Wearing nothing beyond her chemise, it changed Catherine into a kind of mythological figure of a humid species like nymphs and naiads. She cried herself into a rage and twisted in convulsions.
At that very moment, in the silence of the night, we heard knocks at the house door. We became suddenly motionless and dumb, like people bewitched.
The knocks soon redoubled in strength and frequency. M. d’Anquetil was the first to break the silence by questioning himself aloud, swearing horribly the while, who the deuce the pesterers could be. My good tutor, to whom the most ordinary circumstances often inspired admirable maxims, rose and said with unction and gravity: