“ ‘Now, my friend, we want you to accurately describe the individual who accompanied me to these gardens to-day. Tell us exactly how the person appeared to you. Will you, my friend?’
“ ‘Oui, certainement. The old lady you mean. Malateste! It makes me laugh—pardonez moi, monsieur, but I can’t help it—it makes me laugh to think about her, ma foi! What a queer old lady it was, to be sure! Such a little pinched-up face; and what a nose and chin, look you! Ecod! it was for all the world la casse-noix—a regular pair of nut-crackers! Certes, I took her to be the grandmother of Methusalah, or sister to Adam’s first wife. Oh, ho, ho—he, ha, peste! I shall die o’ laughing! And then such a dress! Not a single article of cloth about her, but all she wore made of thin green-and-blue morocco; and then such dainty slippers, looking for all the world as if made of the wings of Pappilon! and such a head-dress—withered flowers, and two bushels of faded ribbon! Par le grande Dieu, the lady was a queer one!’ and Pierre went back to his corner, laughing as if he would explode.
“The gardener looked astonished beyond all measure. How I looked cannot be told; but how I felt, no mortal pen could possibly describe. We both kept silent, and advanced to where Madame la Jardinière stood, patiently waiting her turn to be questioned, and impatiently wondering what was the matter with Pierre, the fellow laughed so uproariously, and enjoyed ‘the feast of memory’ with such a decided gusto.
“ ‘Ma chere femme,’ said my comrade, ‘will you please be so good as to describe the person whom you admitted here to-day along with monsieur? Certes, I believe the Devil himself is at the bottom of the business, for no two persons are agreed in description. But you, my darling, you, who are all the while reading poetry books;—all about Vido (Ovid?), and Virgil, and Spearshaker, and all those great people—you can describe this person perfectly; can’t you, my sweet?’ and the gardener looked imploringly at his plump and buxom compagnon de lit.
“Now, of all mortals it is most unsafe and dangerous to flatter a French woman, and madame was French all the way through; consequently she determined, on so fitting an occasion, to prove her husband’s encomiums perfectly well founded; and she began the display with a quotation from the Bard of Avon’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“ ‘Ah, mon ange avec les bottes—my angel in boots—do you not know that Joseph has been a poet ever since I instructed him in trochees, dactyls, spondees, dythyrambics, hexameters, iambics, acatalectics, and—anapests—and’——
“ ‘Oh, may the devil fly away with all of your Anna cats, or Mary cats!—damn all cats! And as for your Anna Pests—why, what’s she got to do with Joseph? Is she another grisette the fellow’s running after? Why, that’s fifteen different women in fifteen weeks. I can’t see how the fellow’s constitution stands it: and then you’ve done the introducing business? Shame on you—you ought to be’——
“Here I stepped in and told the gardener that his lady did not mean cats or females, but simply feet, measures, and scansions of poetry. This mollified him, and the lady courtesied to me, and resumed:
“ ‘Yes, darling—ogre’—this last was spoken sub voce—‘yes, dearest, the gentleman’s right. Joseph is a poet; Pierre is a lunatic; and the gentleman himself is beyond all question as deeply in love as he can get; and these are the reasons why neither describes the person who attended with him alike. That prince of soldiers, who because he was so terrible in war, when he shook his spear, the English call Shake-the-spear, says that—
“ ‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool
Reason comprehends.
The lover, the lunatic, and the poet are of imagination
All compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, sees
Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things,
The poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives
To airy nothings a local habitation and a name.’