"Oh! oh! what a good lark! my general learning flash!"
"I tell you I amuse myself like anything. These jockeys adore me; some of them are even familiar as relations. I am not proud, like a little gentleman, Germain, a barefoot, who has not the means to be separate, and yet pretends to play the disdainful with them."
"But he must have been delighted to find a man so much at home as you are, to talk with, if he is so highly disgusted with the others?"
"Bah! he did not seem to remark who I was; but had he remarked it, I should have been very guarded to respond to his advances. He is the butt of the prison. They will play him, sooner or later, a bad turn, and I have not, of course, any desire to partake of the aversion of which he is the object."
"You are very right."
"That would spoil my recreation; for my promenade with the prisoners is a real promenade. Only these robbers have not a great opinion of me, mentally. You comprehend—my accusation of a simple abuse of confidence—it is a sad thing for such fellows. Thus they look upon me as no great shakes, as Arnal says."
"In fact, alongside of these matadores of crime, you are—"
"A lamb, my dear comrade. Since you are so obliging, do not forget my commissions."
"Do not be uneasy, my general."
"1st Alexandrine; 2d the fish, and the hamper of wine; 3d the old 1817 Cognac, the ground coffee, and the eiderdown coverlet."