"Je vous en prie, monsieur de la garde!" said the viscount.
"Cette fois, alors, nous allons tirer ensemble!" says Barty, and languidly dons the mask with an affected air, and makes a fuss about the glove not suiting him; and then, in spite of his defective sight, which seems to make no difference, he lightly and gracefully gives M. Jean such a dressing as that gentleman had never got in his life—not even from his maître d'armes: and afterwards to young de Clèves the same. Well I knew his way of doing this kind of thing!
So Barty and M. and Madame Jean became quite intimate—and with his usual indiscretion Barty told them how he fluked that bull's‑eye, and they were charmed!
"Vous êtes impayable, savez‑vous, mon cher!" says M. Jean—"vous avez tous les talents, et un million dans le gosier par‑dessus le marché! Si jamais je puis vous être de service, savez‑vous, comptez sur moi pour la vie ..." said the impulsive viscount when they bade each other good‑bye at the end.
"'À VOUS, MONSIEUR DE LA GARDE!'"
"Et plus jamais d'enveloppes vides, quand vous m'écrirez!" says madame.
So frivolous time wore on, and Barty found it pleasant to frivol in such pleasant company—very pleasant indeed! But when alone in his garret, with his seton‑dressing and dry‑cuppings, it was not so gay. He had to confess to himself that his eye was getting slowly worse instead of better; darkening day by day; and a little more retina had been taken in by the strange disease—"la peau de chagrin," as he nicknamed this wretched retina of his, after Balzac's famous story. He could still see with the left of it and at the bottom, but a veil had come over the middle and all the rest; by daylight he could see through this veil, but every object he saw was discolored and distorted and deformed—it was worse than darkness itself; and this was so distressing, and so interfered with the sight of the other eye, that when the sun went down, the total darkness in the ruined portion of his left retina came as a positive relief. He took all this very desperately to heart and had very terrible forebodings. For he had never known an ache or a pain, and had innocently gloried all his life in the singular perfection of his five wits.