“You’ll take me over your farm, won’t you?”
Lerne shrugged his shoulders:
“Perhaps,” he said. Then turning towards the house, he shouted:
“Wilhelm, Wilhelm!”
The German with the face like a sundial opened a little window and the Professor apostrophized him in his mother-tongue, so violently that the poor fellow trembled all over.
“By Jove!” I said to myself. “It’s owing to him and his inadvertence that there are going about outside since last night, things that should not be there—that’s certain.”
When the execution was over, we went round the paddock. It contained a black bull and four cows of various kinds, the whole lot of whom, for no particular reason, followed after us. My dreadful relative began to joke:
“Nicolas, let me introduce you to Jupiter; and here is the white Europa, the dun-colored Io, the fair-skinned Athor, and Pasiphaë clad in her robe of milk stained with ink, or ink stained with milk—whichever way you prefer.”
This reference to libertine mythology made me smile. To tell the truth, I should have seized the first pretext to have a laugh; I had physical need of it. I also felt a hunger so intense that to satisfy it seemed the only question of any interest. The château was the one and only attraction. It was there I should eat! And the attraction it exercised on me almost made me fail to examine the hothouse, its neighbor.
That would have been a pity. They had added two halls of glass to it which flanked the original rotunda with their domed naves. Under its lowered outer blinds the building seemed to me to form a whole that was “perfect of its kind.” It suggested something between a Crystal Palace and a glass melon-bell; it had quite a grand and out-of-the-way appearance, if I may so say.