This particular evening Madame Bergeret said as she went into the kitchen:
“Go and ask your master, Euphémie, how he would like his eggs to be cooked.”
It was quite a new departure on her side to submit the bill of fare to the master of the house. For of old, in the days of her lofty innocence, she had habitually forced him to partake of dishes which he disliked and which upset the delicate digestion of the sedentary student. Euphémie’s mind was not of wide range, but it was impartial and unwavering, and she protested to Madame Bergeret, as she had done several times before on similar occasions, that it was absolutely useless for her mistress to ask Monsieur anything. He never answered a word, because he was in a “contrairy” mood. But Madame, turning her face away and dropping her eyelids as a sign of determination, repeated the order she had just given.
“Euphémie,” she said, “do as I tell you. Go and ask your master how he would like the eggs cooked, and don’t forget to tell him that they are new-laid and come from Trécul’s.”
M. Bergeret was sitting in his study at work on the Virgilius nauticus, which a publisher had commissioned him to prepare as an extra embellishment of a learned edition of the Æneid, at which three generations of philologists had been working for more than thirty years, and the first sheets of which were already through the press. And now, slip by slip, the professor sat compiling this special lexicon for it. He conceived a sort of veneration for himself as he worked at it, and congratulated himself in these words:
“Here am I, a land-lubber who has never sailed on anything more important than the Sunday steamboat which carries the townsfolk up the river to drink sparkling wine on the slopes of Tuillières in summer time; here am I, a good Frenchman, who has never seen the sea except at Villers; here am I, Lucien Bergeret, acting as the interpreter of Virgil, the seaman. Here I sit in my study explaining the nautical terms used by a poet who is accurate, learned and exact, in spite of all his rhetoric, who is a mathematician, a mechanician, a geometrician, a well-informed Italian, who was trained in seafaring matters by the sailors who basked in the sun on the sea-shores of Naples and Misenum, who had, maybe, his own galley, and under the clear stars of Helen’s twin-brothers, ploughed the blue furrows of the sea between Naples and Athens. Thanks to the excellence of my philological methods I am able to reach this point of perfection, but my pupil, M. Goubin, would be as fully equipped for the task as I.”
M. Bergeret took the greatest pleasure in this work, for it kept his mind occupied without any accompanying sense of anxiety or excitement. It filled him with real satisfaction to trace on thin sheets of pasteboard his delicate, regular letters, types and symbols as they were of the mental accuracy demanded in the study of philology. All his senses joined and shared in this spiritual satisfaction, so true is it that the pleasures which man can enjoy are more varied than is commonly supposed. Just now M. Bergeret was revelling in the peaceful joy of writing thus:
“Servius believes that Virgil wrote Attolli malos[11] in mistake for Attolli vela, [12] and the reason which he gives for this rendering is that cum navigarent, non est dubium quod olli erexerant arbores.[13] Ascencius takes the same side as Servius, being either forgetful or ignorant of the fact that, on certain occasions, ships at sea are dismasted. When the state of the sea was such that the masts....”
[11] Attolli malos, for the masts to be raised.
[12] Attolli vela, for the sails to be raised.