We followed the dusty road, ascending from Ballaigues; then in the high path to La Ferrière, I persuaded my companion to bear me company on the way to Jougne.
Cipollina was the only Frenchman of my age whom I had met at the hotel. He was a dark-haired youth, slight and elegant, with refined features, but a crooked nose, a blemish which, according to Jeannine, gave him an expression of incredible falseness. The ladies had not allowed him to meddle with them at all; the cold manner in which they had acknowledged his greetings sometimes made me ill at ease, as I was a friend of his.
A friend! Well, hardly. But for Laquarrière I had no intimate friend, and no wish for any; I made use of Cipollina to fill up the intervals when convention forbade my intruding upon the Landrys.
His society, moreover, was not devoid of interest. He had travelled so much, rubbed up against so many people, seen so many things. Having entered, at the age of fourteen, a big silk firm managed by one of his uncles, whose counting houses were to be found all over the world, he had been successively a sojourner in very varied latitudes, from Colombo to Boston, from Rio Janeiro to Yokohama. An intelligent observer, he owed to his wanderings and to his early contact with the different races of merchants, a dry and caustic turn of mind not unakin to my own. Thence sprang our speedy understanding, which resembled real harmony, without either of us feeling much liking or esteem for the other. As cynics we agreed in our scornful verdicts on others and on ourselves. I must say that he did not flatter himself that he was in any way an intellectual. Each time I sketched some generalisation, or laid the foundations of a system, he escaped me, sneering:
"Oh, that's literature."
Then, irritated, I inwardly dubbed him a "counter-jumper."
"Have you been to see the Landrys off?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes."
"Shall you see them again in Paris?"
"Before that perhaps. They expect to come back here."