“You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one were to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or the sufferers from the Lyons floods—”
“It isn’t beggars like him that’ll frighten us,” interrupted the landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. “Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as long as the ‘Lion d’Or’ exists people will come to it. We’ve feathered our nest; while one of these days you’ll find the ‘Cafe Francais’ closed with a big placard on the shutters. Change my billiard-table!” she went on, speaking to herself, “the table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in the hunting season, I have slept six visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn’t come!”
“Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen’s dinner?”
“Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes six you’ll see him come in, for he hasn’t his equal under the sun for punctuality. He must always have his seat in the small parlour. He’d rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish as he is, and so particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Léon; he sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn’t so much as look at what he eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!”
“Well, you see, there’s a great difference between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector.”
Six o’clock struck. Binet came in.
He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body, and his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of his head with string, showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the sticking out of his big-toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of fair whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his usual way.
“It isn’t with saying civil things that he’ll wear out his tongue,” said the chemist, as soon as he was along with the landlady.
“He never talks more,” she replied. “Last week two travelers in the cloth line were here—such clever chaps who told such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a dab fish and never said a word.”