“Finish this bottle,” said the poet, refilling Butscha’s glass.
“You’ll make me drunk,” said the dwarf, tossing off his ninth glass of champagne. “Have you a bed where I could sleep it off? My master is as sober as the camel that he is, and Madame Latournelle too. They are brutal enough, both of them, to scold me; and they’d have the rights of it too—there are those deeds I ought to be drawing!—” Then, suddenly returning to his previous ideas, after the fashion of a drunken man, he exclaimed, “and I’ve such a memory; it is on a par with my gratitude.”
“Butscha!” cried the poet, “you said just now you had no gratitude; you contradict yourself.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “To forget a thing means almost always recollecting it. Come, come, do you want me to get rid of the duke? I’m cut out for a secretary.”
“How could you manage it?” said Canalis, delighted to find the conversation taking this turn of its own accord.
“That’s none of your business,” said the dwarf, with a portentous hiccough.
Butscha’s head rolled between his shoulders, and his eyes turned from Germain to La Briere, and from La Briere to Canalis, after the manner of men who, knowing they are tipsy, wish to see what other men are thinking of them; for in the shipwreck of drunkenness it is noticeable that self-love is the last thing that goes to the bottom.
“Ha! my great poet, you’re a pretty good trickster yourself; but you are not deep enough. What do you mean by taking me for one of your own readers,—you who sent your friend to Paris, full gallop, to inquire into the property of the Mignon family? Ha, ha! I hoax, thou hoaxest, we hoax—Good! But do me the honor to believe that I’m deep enough to keep the secrets of my own business. As the head-clerk of a notary, my heart is a locked box, padlocked! My mouth never opens to let out anything about a client. I know all, and I know nothing. Besides, my passion is well known. I love Modeste; she is my pupil, and she must make a good marriage. I’ll fool the duke, if need be; and you shall marry—”
“Germain, coffee and liqueurs,” said Canalis.
“Liqueurs!” repeated Butscha with a wave of his hand, and the air of a sham virgin repelling seduction; “Ah, those poor deeds! one of ‘em was a marriage contract; and that second clerk of mine is as stupid as—as—an epithalamium, and he’s capable of digging his penknife right through the bride’s paraphernalia; he thinks he’s a handsome man because he’s five feet six,—idiot!”