Once started on his hobby, like a dog running round a cornfield, he rushed about, sniffing the air, gesticulating and heedlessly threatening all the knick-knacks of the drawing-room with sudden ruin. All at once he walked up to a little desk, opened a drawer and drew out a volume, which he brandished in the air as he came back toward his nephew.
“Lecoq’s ‘Cultivation of Vegetables,’” he murmured. “A weighty work, admirable, inimitable!”
He turned over the pages, and smiling happily began to read this passage in a loud voice:
“Whatever the size of a bed, however small may be the corner of ground at an amateur’s disposal, whatever useful knowledge he may gain, whatever curious experiments he may make, and whatever joy he may attain when by artificial cultivation he succeeds in enriching his garden, his friends, even his country, with some new creation which owes its existence to his care and intelligence.” He looked at his nephew over his book, and then finished the quotation: “Everyone may act in his own sphere, in his own corner, may be silent if he is not successful (which is rare), and may justly boast if something remarkable comes to crown his efforts.”
As if he had equalled Napoleon or Cæsar in the gratification of his ambition, M. Loigny murmured sadly as he closed the learned work:
“Yes, I have dreamed of emulating the rose-grower Gonod or Louis Scipio Cochet. I, too, have created a rose! She is lying there with all the rest. I wanted to call her the ‘Souvenir of Loigny the Rosarist’ so that by means of her sweet scent and delicate coloring my name might be transmitted through the ages to all garden-lovers. I, even I, have aspired to glory.”
“That is splendid. Show her to me,” said Jean. “Then let us have dinner, for I am dying of hunger.”
“Now that is what I call sense,” muttered Fanchette.
The hands of the clock stood at nine.
“Go to your stove, my girl,” the old man ordered with dignity. He was already on all fours on the floor, looking for his masterpiece in the heap of roses. Without getting up he handed a magnificent flower to his nephew.