“The deuce! the fellow looks to me as if he had already had a touch of sunstroke.”
Monsieur Pichet, the gardener, was in fact approaching the company, and as he was quite conscious of the fact that his legs wavered under him, he was walking very slowly to maintain his equilibrium, and was trying hard to keep his head back and his body upright.
“Pichet, go and get little Codinde, your son,” said Monsieur Glumeau; “we want him for the rehearsal; go at once.”
Instead of obeying his master and fetching Codinde, the gardener tried to straighten himself up, and answered in a thick voice:
“It’s impossible, monsieur; it’s impossible! Codinde is just what I wanted to talk to monsieur about.”
“Can it be that anything has happened to him?”
“An attack of indigestion has happened to him; we thought he was going to choke to death; he was purple.”
“The devil take you! Why do you stuff your son so’s to make him sick?”
“It wasn’t us, monsieur; the little glutton stuffs himself. As there’s a celebration going on in the house, he must have found lots of things to eat; bless my soul! children, you know, they ain’t reasonable.”
“And then, too, you set him such an excellent example!”