THE CONFINED
When you have finished your monkey-tricks, if it please you, will you not forget to give a little attention to the baroness des Ygrées.
* * *
The baron slept in a corner of the room on several travelling blankets. He made a fart which caused his better half to laugh until the tears came. Macarée wept, cried, laughed and a few moments later brought into the world a sturdy child of the male sex. Then, exhausted by these efforts, she rendered up her soul, with a scream that was like the ululation of the eternal first wife of Adam, when she crossed the Red Sea.
In reporting the above, I believe that I have elucidated the important question of the birthplace of Croniamantal. Let the 123 towns in 7 countries dispute the honor of his birth.[3]
We know now, and the state records bear testimony that he was born of the paternal fart at Napoule of the golden skies, on the 25th of August, 1889, but not announced at the mayoralty until the following morning.[4]
It was the year of the Universal Exposition, and the Eiffel Tower, which was just born, saluted the heroic birth of Croniamantal with a beautiful erection.
The baron des Ygrées made another fart which woke him by the macabre bed where the corpse of Macarée reclined. The child cried, the midwives croaked, the father sobbed, and declaimed:
"Ah, Napoule with the golden skies, I have killed my hen with the golden eyes!"
Then he bathed the new-born calling him by a name which he invented forthwith and which did not belong to any saint in Paradise: CRONIAMANTAL. He left on the following day, having arranged for the funeral of his spouse, written the necessary letters assuring his inheritance, and announced the child under the names of Gaëtan—Francis—Etienne—Jack—Amélie—Alonso des Ygrées. And with this nursling whose putative father he was, he took the train for the Principality of Monaco.[5]