"You mustn't imagine to yourselves, messieurs, that because I teach you boys science at the Pension Brossard, and take you out walking on Thursday afternoons, and all that, that I do not associate avec des gens du monde! Last night, for example, I was dining at the Café de Paris with a very intimate friend of mine—he's a marquis—and when the bill was brought, what do you think it came to? you give it up?" (vous donnez votre langue aux chats?). "Well, it came to fifty‑seven francs, fifty centimes! We tossed up who should pay—et, ma foi, le sort a favorisé M. le Marquis!"
To this there was nothing to say; so none of us said anything, except du Tertre‑Jouan, our marquis (No. 2), who said, in his sulky, insolent, peasantlike manner:
"Et comment q'ça s'appelle, vot' marquis?" (What does it call itself, your marquis?)
Upon which M. Dumollard turns very red ("pique un soleil"), and says:
"Monsieur le Marquis Paul—François—Victor du Tertre‑Jouan de Haultcastel de St.‑Paterne, vous êtes un paltoquet et un rustre!..."
And goes back to his equations.
Du Tertre‑Jouan was nearly six feet high, and afraid of nobody—a kind of clodhopping young rustic Hercules, and had proved his mettle quite recently—when a brutal usher, whom I will call Monsieur Boulot (though his real name was Patachou), a Méridional with a horrible divergent squint, made poor Rapaud go down on his knees in the classe de géographie ancienne, and slapped him violently on the face twice running—a way he had with Rapaud.
It happened like this. It was a kind of penitential class for dunces during play‑time. M. Boulot drew in chalk an outline of ancient Greece on the blackboard, and under it he wrote—
"Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes!"
"Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes!"