She continued, "And what is more, we can give immortality to anyone who casts off his Skin and adopts ours. Don't think that your people don't know this. For instance, during the last year more than two thousand Humans living along the beaches deserted and went over to us, the Amphibs."
He was a little shocked to hear this, but he did not doubt her. He remembered the mysterious case of the schooner Le Pauvre Pierre which had been found drifting and crewless, and he remembered a conversation he had had with a fisherman in his home port of Marrec.
He put his hands behind his back and began pacing. Lusine continued staring at him through the bars. Despite the fact that her face was in the shadows, he could see—or feel—her smile. He had humiliated her, but she had won in the end.
Rastignac quit his limited roving and called up to the guard.
"Shoo l'footyay, kal u ay tee?"
The guard leaned over the grille. His large hat with its tall wings sticking from the peak was green in the daytime. But now, illuminated only by a far off torchlight and by a glowworm coiled around the band, it was black.
"Ah, shoo Zhaw-Zhawk W'stenyek," he said, loudly. "What time is it? What do you care what time it is?" And he concluded with the stock phrase of the jailer, unchanged through millenia and over light-years. "You're not going any place, are you?"
Rastignac threw his head back to howl at the guard but stopped to wince at the sudden pain in his neck. After uttering, "Sek Ploo!" and "S'pweestee!" both of which were close enough to the old Terran French so that a language specialist might have recognized them, he said, more calmly, "If you would let me out on the ground, monsieur le foutriquet, and give me a good épée, I would show you where I am going. Or, at least, where my sword is going. I am thinking of a nice sheath for it."
Tonight he had a special reason for keeping the attention of the King's mucketeer directed towards himself. So, when the guard grew tired of returning insults—mainly because his limited imagination could invent no new ones—Rastignac began telling jokes. They were broad and aimed at the mucketeer's narrow intellect.
"Then," said Rastignac, "there was the itinerant salesman whose s'fel threw a shoe. He knocked on the door of the hut of the nearest peasant and said...." What was said by the salesman was never known.