I knew this oddity—M. the Admiral de St Prest—though he had no recognition of me. That, however, was small wonder. By this time I was worse than a sans-culotte, by so much as that my bareness was suggested rather than revealed. My face was sunk away from my eyes, like soft limestone from a couple of ammonites; my ribs were loose hoops on a decayed cask; laughter rattled in my stomach like a pea in a whistle. Besides, I had come, I think, to be a little jealous of my title to neglect, for I had made that my grievance against Fate.
Nevertheless, M. de St Prest and I had been slightly acquainted once upon a time, and it had grieved me to see this red month marked by the advent in La Force of the dubious old fop.
He had been a macaroni of Louis XV.’s Court, and the ancient rôle he had never learnt to forego. The poor puppies of circumstance—the fops of a more recent date, to whom the particular cut of a lapel would figure as the standard of reason—bayed him in the prison as they would have bayed him in the streets. To them, with their high top-boots à l’Anglaise, poor St Prest’s spotted breeches and knee-ribbons were a source of profound amusement. To them, affecting the huskiness of speech of certain rude islanders (my very good friends), his mincing falsetto was a perpetual incitement to laughter. Swaggering with their cudgels that they called “constitutions,” they would strike from under him the elaborate tasselled staff on which he leaned; tossing their matted manes, they would profess to find something exquisitely exhilarating in the complicated toupet that embraced and belittled his lean physiognomy. I held them all poor apes; yet, I confess, it was a ridiculous and pathetic sight, this posturing of an old wrecked man in the tatters of a bygone generation; and it gave me shame to see him lift his plate of a hat to me with a little stick, as the fashion was in his younger days.
“M. Thibaut,” he said, falling into step with me, “these young bloods” (he signified with his cane a group that had been baiting him)—“they worry me, monsieur. Mort de ma vie! what manners! what a presence! It shall need a butcher’s steel to bring their wits to an edge.”
“Oh, monsieur,” said I—“have you not the self-confidence to despise personalities? The fool hath but a narrow world of conventions, and everything outside it is to him abnormal. His head is a drumstick to produce hollow sounds within a blank little area. For my part, I never hear one holding the great up to ridicule without thinking, There is wasted a good stone-cutter of epitaphs.”
“Eh bien, monsieur! but I have been accustomed to leave the study of philosophy to my lackeys.”
He spoke in a lofty manner, waving his hand at me; and he took snuff from a battered wooden box, and flipped his fingers to his thumb afterwards as if he were scattering largesse of fragrance.
“So, you have a royal contempt of personalities?” he said, with a little amused tolerance.
“Why,” said I—“I am not to be put out of conceit with myself because an ass brays at me.”
“Or out of countenance, monsieur?”