I got my dinner; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy; I at it again,—and, after two or three hours poring upon it, with almost as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription, I thought I made sense of it; but to make sure of it, the best way, I imagined, was to turn it into English, and see how it would look then;—so I went on leisurely, as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence,—then taking a turn or two,—and then looking how the world went, out of the window; so that it was nine o’clock at night before I had done it.—I then began and read it as follows.
THE FRAGMENT.
PARIS.
—Now, as the notary’s wife disputed the point with the notary with too much heat,—I wish, said the notary, (throwing down the parchment) that there was another notary here only to set down and attest all this.—
—And what would you do then, Monsieur? said she, rising hastily up.—The notary’s wife was a little fume of a woman, and the notary thought it well to avoid a hurricane by a mild reply.—I would go, answered he, to bed.—You may go to the devil, answer’d the notary’s wife.
Now there happening to be but one bed in the house, the other two rooms being unfurnished, as is the custom at Paris, and the notary not caring to lie in the same bed with a woman who had but that moment sent him pell mell to the devil, went forth with his hat and cane and short cloak, the night being very windy, and walk’d out, ill at ease, towards the Pont Neuf.
Of all the bridges which ever were built, the whole world who have pass’d over the Pont Neuf must own, that it is the noblest,—the finest,—the grandest,—the lightest,—the longest,—the broadest, that ever conjoin’d land and land together upon the face of the terraqueous globe.
[By this it seems as if the author of the fragment had not been a Frenchman.]
The worst fault which divines and the doctors of the Sorbonne can allege against it is, that if there is but a capfull of wind in or about Paris, ’tis more blasphemously sacre Dieu’d there than in any other aperture of the whole city,—and with reason good and cogent, Messieurs; for it comes against you without crying garde d’eau, and with such unpremeditable puffs, that of the few who cross it with their hats on, not one in fifty but hazards two livres and a half, which is its full worth.
The poor notary, just as he was passing by the sentry, instinctively clapp’d his cane to the side of it, but in raising it up, the point of his cane catching hold of the loop of the sentinel’s hat, hoisted it over the spikes of the ballustrade clear into the Seine.—
—’Tis an ill wind, said a boatman, who catched it, which blows nobody any good.