With that he departed, walking across the Square towards the Archbishop's house in a stealthy sort of fashion, as though he were a burglar meditating some particularly daring robbery.
"He is a rat—a rat!" exclaimed Henri, suddenly executing a sort of reasonless war-dance round the kitchen—"One wants a cat to catch him!"
"Rats are nice," declared Babette, for she remembered having once had a tame white rat which sat on her knee and took food from her hand,—"Monsieur Cazeau is a man; and men are not nice."
Patoux burst into a loud laugh.
"Men are not nice!" he echoed—"What dost thou know about it, thou little droll one?"
"What I see," responded Babette severely, with an elderly air, as of a person who has suffered by bitter experience; and, undeterred by her parents' continued laughter she went on—
"Men are ugly. They are dirty. They say 'Come here my little girl, and I will give you something,'—then when I go to them they try and kiss me. And I will not kiss them, because their mouths smell bad. They stroke my hair and pull it all the wrong way. And it hurts. And when I don't like my hair pulled the wrong way, they tell me I will be a great coquette. A coquette is to be like Diane de Poitiers. Shall I be like Diane de Poitiers?"
"The saints forbid!" cried Madame Patoux,—"And talk no more nonsense, child,—it's bed-time. Come,—say good-night to thy father, Henri;—give them thy blessing, Jean—and let me get them into their beds before the Archbishop leaves the house, or they will be asking him as many questions as there are in the catechism."
Thus enjoined, Papa Patoux kissed his children affectionately, signing the cross on their brows as they came up to him in turn, after the fashion of his own father, who had continued this custom up to his dying day. What they thought of the benediction in itself might be somewhat difficult to define, but it can be safely asserted that a passion of tears on the part of Babette, and a fit of demoniacal howling from Henri, would have been the inevitable result if Papa Patoux had refused to bestow it on them. Whether there were virtue in it or not, their father's mute blessing sent them to bed peaceably and in good humour with each other, and they trotted off very contentedly beside their mother, hushing their footsteps and lowering their voices as they passed the door of the room occupied by Cardinal Bonpre.
"The Archbishop is not an angel, is he?" asked Babette whisperingly.