roared Father Grandgousier, each time making that very short word longer and louder and fiercer, and jumping to his feet he fairly kicked learned Master Holofernes out of the palace; meanwhile, rolling his eyes around in his rage, and gnashing his teeth in so horrible a way that the noses of his old friends who had sat at his table for sixty years, and more, turned pale for once, through fright; and there were those of the household who said that, as they fled from the dining-room, in terror, even the paunches of these old friends seemed, somehow, to have grown as flat as the royal pancakes they had just been eating.
FLIGHT OF THE TUTOR.
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE NEW MASTER FOUND FOR GARGANTUA.
"What! not know thy Latin! After forty-eight years, seven months, and two days! Then, my little rogue, it is to Paris thou must go."
This is what Grandgousier said to Gargantua just one week after that luckless dinner. I will tell you how it all happened. The first thing the old King did the next morning was to send, post-haste, to his good friend, Don Philip of the Marshes, Viceroy of Papeligosse, who knew Latin, and who had told him, years and years before, that poor Master Holofernes was nothing but a bit of an old humbug (humbug was not quite the word used at that time, but the meaning was all the same). "Come to me, my friend," he wrote, "thou art always prating of thy Latin scholars. Now bring one of thy wonders along with thee."
So Don Philip came in great state, as befitted a visit to his King, accompanied by the prettiest, the jauntiest, the sharpest, the politest, the sweetest-voiced little fellow ever seen. Don Philip introduced the curled darling as Master Eudemon, his page.