"Himmel! what big socks are those! what potato-sacks!
"Look at your Taffy! what is he good for but to bang great musicians on the back with his big bear's paw! He finds that droll, the bullock!...
"Look at your Frenchmen there—your damned conceited verfluchte pig-dogs of Frenchmen—Durien, Barizel, Bouchardy! What can a Frenchman talk of, hein? Only himself, and run down everybody else! His vanity makes me sick! He always thinks the world is talking about him, the fool! He forgets that there's a fellow called Svengali for the world to talk about! I tell you, Drilpy, it is about me the world is talking—me and nobody else—me, me, me!
"Listen what they say in the Figaro" (reads it).
"What do you think of that, hein? What would your Durien say if people wrote of him like that?
"But you are not listening, sapperment! great big she-fool that you are—sheep's-head! Dummkopf! Donnerwetter! you are looking at the chimney-pots when Svengali is talking! Look a little lower down between the houses, on the other side of the river! There is a little ugly gray building there, and inside are eight slanting slabs of brass, all of a row, like beds in a school dormitory, and one fine day you shall lie asleep on one of those slabs—you, Drilpy, who would not listen to Svengali, and therefore lost him!... And over the middle of you will be a little leather apron, and over your head a little brass tap, and all day long and all night the cold water shall trickle, trickle, trickle all the way down your beautiful white body to your beautiful white feet till they turn green, and your poor, damp, draggled, muddy rags will hang above you from the ceiling for your friends to know you by; drip, drip, drip! But you will have no friends....
"And people of all sorts, strangers, will stare at you through the big plate-glass windows—Englanders, chiffonniers, painters and sculptors, workmen, pioupious, old hags of washer-women—and say, 'Ah! what a beautiful woman was that! Look at her! She ought to be rolling in her carriage and pair!' And just then who should come by, rolling in his carriage and pair, smothered in furs, and smoking a big cigar of the Havana, but Svengali, who will jump out, and push the canaille aside, and say, 'Ha! ha! that is la grande Drilpy, who would not listen to Svengali, but looked at the chimney-pots when he told her of his manly love, and—'"
"Hi! damn it, Svengali, what the devil are you talking to Trilby about? You're making her sick; can't you see? Leave off, and go to the piano, man, or I'll come and slap you on the back again!"
Thus would that sweating, pig-headed bullock of an Englander stop Svengali's love-making and release Trilby from bad quarters of an hour.