“Ah! here’s Georget! here’s my little Georget! I am glad of that; I thought he must have been swallowed by the whale on exhibition over yonder, behind us. To be sure, I know that it isn’t alive; but never mind, you might have crawled into its mouth. I say, Georget, have you seen the whale?”
“Let me alone, I don’t feel like talking!”
“Well! I paid to see the whale, because as I’d never seen the sea, I said to myself: ‘That will give me an idea of its inhabitants.’—But confound it! how I was sold! Just fancy—I went into a long, narrow place, like a corridor with boarded walls. I couldn’t see anything, no water at all. I said to myself: ‘Where in the deuce is the whale?’ but there was a fellow in a sailor’s suit, walking up and down the corridor, singing out at the top of his lungs: ‘See, ladies and gentlemen, look, examine this rare animal! It’s the first whale that’s been seen in France since the Roman conquest! It was harpooned at Havre and would have been brought to Paris alive, if there had been room enough for it in a first-class carriage!’—When I heard that, I squinted up my eyes to find the marine monster. When I first went into the corridor, I had noticed something like a pile of earth, on the floor between two boards, and I said to myself: ‘It seems that they are going to plant flowers in the place to brighten it up!’ But not at all: that black thing, between two boards, was the whale! I discovered it when I reached the end of the corridor, because then I saw a kind of head, with a beard, at one end of what I had taken for earth. I was mad, I tell you! I regretted my money, and I said to the sailor: ‘If you’d told me beforehand that I was going to see a whale in a box, and dry as a herring, I wouldn’t have come into your old barrack!’—Well, little Georget, why don’t you laugh?”
“I tell you to let me alone, I don’t feel like laughing!”
“Why, what under the sun is the matter with the little mummy! He’s got to be as melancholy as an empty stomach for some time past! Come, I propose to cheer you up; I’ll treat you to a glass at the wine merchant’s on Rue Basse.”
“Thanks, I am not thirsty.”
“And then you will come to the theatre this evening with me. I don’t mean the Délasses, or the Funambs, or the Petit-Lazare; I go to the big theatres now; I have become an habitué of the Folies-Dramatiques! Nothing less! You see, when one has seen Mamzelle Duplessis, in ‘Une Mauvaise Nuit Est Bientôt Passée,’ one doesn’t care to see anything else! It is magnificent! Mamzelle Duplessis is in a night jacket embroidered with lace, like a bride preparing to retire. Dieu! how lovely she is! I dream of her every night as I go to bed! And then, Monsieur Christian, in ‘La Perruque de Mon Oncle!’ When he says: ‘Ah! fichtre! sacrebleu! hush or I will thrash you!’ or something else in that line, I tell you it’s amusing! I laugh until I make a show of myself! And just now Monsieur Christian passed here—you didn’t see him—the real man, the one who plays at the Folies; and he bought a bunch of violets, and smiled because I said to him: ‘Monsieur Christian, do you want me to carry you?’—Ha! ha! that made him laugh!—Well, Georget, I say, Georget! you little wretch of a Georget! what in the world has somebody been doing to you, Gringalet?”
“If you call me Gringalet, I’ll punch your head, do you understand?”
“Oho! how ugly the little rascal is! What have you been treading on to-day?”
“I may be small without being a Gringalet, or a wretch. I am seventeen years, eight months and ten days.”