“Oh! the crayfish!”
All four looked at each other and chuckled. Their skins were well-nigh bursting, and they were digesting in the slow and selfish way of four worthy citizens who had just had a tuckout away from the worries of their families. It had cost a great deal; no one had partaken of it with them; there was no girl there to take advantage of their emotion; and they unbuttoned their waistcoats, and laid their stomachs as it were on the table. With eyes half-closed, they even avoided speaking at first, each one absorbed in his solitary pleasure. Then, free and easy, and whilst congratulating themselves that there were no women present, they placed their elbows on the table, and, with their excited faces close together, they did nothing but talk incessantly of them.
“As for myself, I am disabused,” declared uncle Bachelard. “It is after all far preferable to be virtuous.”
This conversation tickled Duveyrier’s fancy. He was sipping kummel, whilst sharp twinges of sensuality kept shooting across his stiff, magisterial face.
“For my part,” said he, “I cannot bear vice. It shocks me. Now, to be able to love a woman, one must esteem her, is it not so? Love could not have a nobler mission. In short, a virtuous mistress, you understand me? Then, I do not deny I might succumb.”
“Virtuous mistresses! but I have had no end of them!” cried Bachelard. “They are a far greater nuisance than the others; and such sluts too! Wenches who, behind your back, lead a life fit to give you every possible ailment! Take, for instance, my last, a very respectable-looking little lady, whom I met at a church door. I set her up in business at Les Ternes as a milliner, just to give her a position. She never had a single customer, though. Well, sir, believe me or not as you like, but she had the whole street to sleep with her.”
Gueulin was chuckling, whilst his carroty hair bristled more than usual, and his forehead was bathed in perspiration from the heat of the candles. He murmured, as he sucked his cigar:
“And the other, the tall one at Passy, who had a sweet-stuff shop. And the other, she who had a room over there, with her outfits for orphan children. And the other, the captain’s widow, you surely remember her! she used to show the mark of a sword-thrust on her body. All, uncle, all of them played the fool with you! Now, I may tell you, may I not? Well! I had to defend myself one night against the one with the sword-thrust. She wanted to, but I was not such a fool! One never knows what such women may lead a man to!”
Bachelard seemed annoyed. He recovered his good humor, however, and, blinking his heavy eyelids, said:
“My little fellow, you can have them all; I have something far better.”