“This inscription,” said I, “contains an insulting jest; it is almost burlesque, for the gravity of an inscription should not allow of laughter.”
The doctor, like a patriotic Swiss, would not allow it, but I think it was false shame on his part. The inscription ran as follows, and the impartial reader can judge of its nature:
“Deo. opt. Max. Caroli incluti et fortissimi
Burgundie duds exercitus
Muratum obsidens, ab Helvetiis cesus, hoc sui monumentum reliquit
anno MCDLXXVI.”
Till then I had had a great idea of Morat. Its fame of seven centuries, three sieges sustained and repulsed, all had given me a sublime notion of it; I expected to see something and saw nothing.
“Then Morat has been razed to the ground?” said I to the doctor.
“Not at all, it is as it always has been, or nearly so.”
I concluded that a man who wants to be well informed should read first and then correct his knowledge by travel. To know ill is worse than not to know at all, and Montaigne says that we ought to know things well.
But it was the following comic adventure which made me spend the night at Morat:
I found at the inn a young maid who spoke a sort of rustic Italian. She struck me by her great likeness to my fair stocking-seller at Paris. She was called Raton, a name which my memory has happily preserved. I offered her six francs for her favours, but she refused the money with a sort of pride, telling me that I had made a mistake and that she was an honest girl.
“It may be so,” said I, and I ordered my horses to be put in. When the honest Raton saw me on the point of leaving, she said, with an air that was at once gay and timid, that she wanted two louis, and if I liked to give her them and pass the night with her I should be well content.