CHAPTER X.
I don't suppose you will be astonished at a curious encounter which has just taken place.
I must tell you that in my uncle's character while in Paris, Barbassou-Pasha, General in the Turkish cavalry, predominates over Captain Barbassou the sailor. He takes a ride every morning, and I of course accompany him. These are our occasions both for intimate talks and for discussing serious questions; and I beg you to understand that my uncle's notions upon the latter are by no means ordinary ones. He adorns such questions with quite original views—views which are certainly not the property of any other mortal known or likely to be known in this world below. He starts a subject for me, and I give him the cue as well as I can. I know of nothing more instructive than to follow his lines of argument—he has a separate one for each subject—upon different departments of private and political life, judged from his own standpoint. As a legislator I fancy he would commit radical mistakes; but as a philosopher, I doubt very much if a match could be found for him, for I don't think that his methods can be compared with those of any existing school of thought.
The other morning we went to the forest of Mendon; my uncle, as a lover of the picturesque, considers that the Bois de Boulogne, with its lake, looks as if it had been taken out of a box of German toys. We arrived at Villebon, a sort of farm situated in the middle of the forest, with a few fields attached to it. There is a restaurant there, which is much frequented on Sundays during the summer.
My uncle, enchanted with the place, wanted to stop and take his glass of madeira there. So, leaving our horses in charge of a stable-boy, we went into one of the rooms. At a table at the further end, quite a stylish-looking woman, who looked as if she were out with somebody on the spree, was sitting by herself, finishing a liqueur-ice, with her hat off and lying by her side. Her figure, as viewed from the back, was exquisite, with graceful and well-set shoulders, an elegantly poised neck with a lovely little dimple on the nape, crowned by a luxuriant chignon, from which emerged a profusion of rebellious tresses——.
"Waiter! Madeira, please!" shouted my uncle in his formidable bass voice.
At this unexpected explosion, the strange lady jumped up from her chair and looked suddenly round. But directly she saw the captain, she screamed out and fainted away all at once.