“You call Chamoureau a learned man?”
“Who is Chamoureau? where do you find a Chamoureau?”
“I find him here; that is Monsieur de Belleville’s former name.”
“Ah! I didn’t know that circumstance.”
“It makes no difference.—Why do you say that he’s a profound student?”
“Because he has discovered the secret of telling the age of a tree simply by looking at the trunk.”
“So! he has discovered that, has he? But look you; when he says to a tree: ‘Your age is thus and so,’ the tree can’t contradict him.”
“True! I hadn’t thought of that.”
“So you see that there’s no great merit in that; but you are mistaken—it’s not the age of trees, but the age of women that the master of this house has the knack of guessing at first sight.”
“By examining the trunk?”