"Did you not throw it?"
"Throw it? Yes, assuredly I threw it. But I did not write it."
"Morbleu! what do I care who wrote it?" roared monsieur Gouge, purple with spleen. "Does its authorship improve the condition of my hat? My grievance is its arrival on my head, not its literary quality. Let me tell you that you expose yourself to actions at law, pitching weights like this from a respectable house into a public street."
"I should plead insanity," said Tricotrin; "twenty-seven chapters of that novel, translated into a Spaniard's French, would suffice to people an asylum. Nevertheless, if it arrived on your hat, I owe you an apology."
"You also owe me two hundred francs!" shouted the other, "and I have shown you more patience than you deserve. Well, my folly is finished! You settle up, or you get out, right off!"
"Have you reflected that it is Christmas Eve—do we live in a melodrama, that I should wander homeless on Christmas Eve? Seriously, you cannot expect a man of taste to lend himself to so hackneyed a situation? Besides, I share this apartment with the composer monsieur Nicolas Pitou. Consider how poignant he would find the room's associations if he returned to dwell here alone!"
"Monsieur Pitou will not be admitted when he returns—there is not a pin to choose between the pair of you. You hand me the two hundred francs, or you go this minute—and I shall detain your wardrobe till you pay. Where is it?"
"It is divided between my person and a shelf at the pawnbroker's," explained the poet; "but I have a soiled collar in the left-hand corner drawer. However, I can offer you more valuable security for this trifling debt than you would dare to ask; the bureau is full of pearls —metrical, but beyond price. I beg your tenderest care of them, especially my tragedy in seven acts. Do not play jinks with the contents of that bureau, or Posterity will gibbet you and the name of 'Gouge' will one day be execrated throughout France. Garbage, farewell!"
"Here, take your shaving paper with you!" cried monsieur Gouge, flinging the Spanish novel down the stairs. And the next moment the man of letters stood dejected on the pavement, with the fatal manuscript under his arm.
"Ah, Miranda, Miranda, thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!" he murmured, unconsciously plagiarising. "She brought bad tidings indeed, with her disastrous mien," he added. "What is to become of me now?"