“A moment. What of Gaillard?”
“He has grown very fat. You know, Toto shook him off when he married, Pelisson forsook him, De Brie gave him the cold shoulder; and what did he do? He sat down and wrote ‘Poum-Poum,’ and turned all the minor poets into ridicule, and sold a hundred thousand copies in a month, and ‘slew art,’ to use his own expression, because it tried to slay him. He is making eighty thousand francs a year, if he is making a sou. I am glad of it; he is not a bad sort—Gaillard.”
Transcriber’s Notes:
The original spelling, hyphenation, accentuation and punctuation has been retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors which have been corrected.