“Now let’s go back to bed,” said the crafty hunchback. “Until to-morrow, messieurs; I promise you that you will see many more wonderful things, if you allow us to make our experiments in peace.”
My companion took my arm and we returned to our room, leaving the inn-keeper and his servants assuring one another that all that they had just seen had really happened.
XII
MARVELOUS EXPERIMENTS OF THE LITTLE HUNCHBACK
When we were closeted in our room, my companion threw himself into my arms and embraced me joyfully.
“My boy, I am delighted with you,” he said; “you played your rôle like an angel! You are an invaluable fellow, and our fortune is made. To-night’s adventure will create a sensation.”
We went to bed well pleased with the way in which we had extricated ourselves from a bad scrape. I fell asleep thinking of Clairette, of her charms, of the pleasure I owed to her, of those I hoped still to enjoy; and my companion, reckoning what his first séance would be worth to him in a town where his reputation had obtained such a favorable start.
The little hunchback was not mistaken in his belief that the adventure of the night would bring us a crowd of curiosity seekers. The servants of the inn had risen early, in order to lose no time in telling all that they had seen and heard. The hair-dressers, the bakers, the grocers were the first to be informed; but that was quite enough to make it certain that the whole town would soon know what we were capable of doing. An adventure becomes so magnified by passing from mouth to mouth that we sometimes have difficulty in recognizing things that have happened to ourselves, when we hear others tell them. Everyone takes delight in adding some strange or marvelous detail, in outbidding his neighbor; thus it is that a brook becomes a rushing torrent, that a child who recites a complimentary poem without a mistake is a prodigy, that a juggler is a magician, that a man who has a soprano voice is a eunuch, that the man whose love is all for his country is a suspicious person in the eyes of him who loves only his own interest, and that a comet announces the end of the world.
The maid-servant, when she went to buy her ounce of coffee, learned from the grocer’s clerk that there were two most extraordinary men at the Tête-Noire inn, who were endowed with the power to tell you what you had done and what you meant to do.
“Pardieu! I must go and tell my mistress that,” said the maid as she left the shop; “she went to walk with her cousin the other night, and she don’t want her husband to know it; I’ll tell her not to go and let those sorcerers get scent of it.”
“What’s the news?” the old bachelor asked the barber, as he took his seat in the chair and put on his towel.