“Wife! wife! come here and listen. If Monsieur Vernier didn’t take it into his head to send this gentleman to talk to Margaritis!”
“What in the world did you say to each other, my dear, good Monsieur?” said the wife. “Why, he’s crazy!”
“He sold me two casks of wine.”
“Did you buy them?”
“Yes.”
“But that is his delusion; he thinks he sells his wine, and he hasn’t any.”
“Ha!” snorted the traveller, “then I’ll go straight to Monsieur Vernier and thank him.”
And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer, whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom he had already recounted the tale.
“Monsieur,” said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at his enemy, “you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain of being thought a turn-key,—a species of being far below a galley-slave,—you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared to offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?”
Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.