“You have again spat in my beer!” roared he in his voice of thunder. “I’ll not stand it, sir!”
“Go to blazes, do you hear? or I’ll give you a thrashing!” said the little man, standing on the tips of his toes.
Then Bachelard raised his voice very provokingly, without drawing back an inch.
“If you think proper, sir! As you please!”
And the other having with a blow knocked in his hat, which he always wore swaggeringly on the side of his head, even in the cafés, he repeated more energetically still:
“As you please, sir! If you think proper!”
Then, after picking up his hat, he sat himself down with a superb air, and called to the waiter:
“Alfred, change my beer!”
Octave and Trublot, greatly astonished, had caught sight of Gueulin seated at the uncle’s table, his back against the wall, smoking with a tranquillity amounting to indifference. As they questioned him on the cause of the quarrel.
“I don’t know,” replied he, watching the smoke ascend from his cigar. “Always a lot of rot! Oh! a mania for getting his head punched! He never retreats.”