"We had only been there about five minutes when our male neighbor's float began to go down two or three times, and then he pulled out a chub as thick as my thigh, rather less, perhaps, but nearly as big! My heart beat, and the perspiration stood on my forehead, and Mélie said to me: 'Well, you sot, did you see that?'
"Just then, Monsieur Bru, the grocer of Poissy, who is fond of gudgeon fishing, passed in a boat, and called out to me; 'So somebody has taken your usual place, Monsieur Renard?' And I replied: 'Yes, Monsieur Bru, there are some people in this world who do not know the usages of common politeness.'
"The little man in linen pretended not to hear, nor his fat lump of a wife, either."
Here the President interrupted him a second time: "Take care, you are insulting the widow, Madame Flamèche, who is present."
Renard made his excuses: "I beg your pardon, I beg pardon, my anger carried me away." Well, not a quarter of an hour had passed when the little man caught another chub and another almost immediately, and another five minutes later.
"The tears were in my eyes, and then I knew that Madame Renard was boiling with rage, for she kept on nagging at me: 'Oh! how horrid! Don't you see that he is robbing you of your fish? Do you think that you will catch anything? Not even a frog, nothing whatever. Why my hands are burning, just to think of it.'
"But I said to myself: 'Let us wait until twelve o'clock. Then this poaching fellow will go to lunch, and I shall get my place again.' As for me, Monsieur le Président, I lunch on the spot every Sunday; we bring our provisions in Delila. But there! At twelve o'clock, the wretch produced a fowl out of a newspaper, and while he was eating, actually he caught another chub!
"Mélie and I had a morsel also, just a thumb-piece, a mere nothing, for our heart was not in it.
"Then I took up my newspaper, to aid my digestion. Every Sunday I read the Gil Blas in the shade like that, by the side of the water. It is Columbine's day, you know, Columbine who writes the articles in the Gil Blas. I generally put Madame Renard into a passion by pretending to know this Columbine. It is not true, for I do not know her, and have never seen her, but that does not matter; she writes very well, and then she says things straight out for a woman. She suits me, and there are not many of her sort.
"Well, I began to tease my wife, but she got angry immediately, and very angry, and so I held my tongue, and at that moment our two witnesses who are present here, Monsieur Ladureau and Monsieur Durdent appeared on the other side of the river. We knew each other by sight. The little man began to fish again, and he caught so many that I trembled with vexation, and his wife said: 'It is an uncommonly good spot, and we will come here always Desiré.' As for me, a cold shiver ran down my back, and Madame Renard kept repeating: 'You are not a man; you have the blood of a chicken in your veins;' and suddenly I said to her: 'Look here, I would rather go away, or I shall only be doing something foolish.'