Jean was very indignant with Henri, which was a mistake, because Henri instantly retired into his shell.
“Mon Dieu!” he said to himself. “They come from the country with their eyes glued shut and their mouths open, and then wonder why they remain hungry! It is, after all, only in Paris that we know how to get the world between our teeth! Let him learn this! For myself, I shall do better to keep my mouth shut. It is a terrible task to teach a fool.” And so Jean lost his only friend in Paris.
In the end Jean ordered the suit, and was relieved to find that he should not have to pay for it at once.
“He has come to Paris straight from the bon Dieu,” thought Henri. “Quelle bêtise!”
“Monsieur le Baron will get very wet if he wishes to go as far as Nôtre Dame,” he remarked aloud. “But from this bridge here across the Seine we can see it very well. I should say if anything better; it is not a fashionable church!”
Jean strained his eyes through the curtain of rain to catch the towers of Nôtre Dame. To-day there was no sunshine, and the cathedral crouched menacingly under the dispirited sky, a big, colourless block of time-defiant stone. Henri shivered ostentatiously—he did not wish to encourage Jean to remain out longer in the rain. He ventured to suggest that rain in Paris being, as a well known fact, highly dangerous for strangers, Monsieur le Baron would do well first to get something of a cordial nature to drink, and then to find his lodgings as soon as possible. Jean obeyed both suggestions, and Henri benefited, as he had intended, by the first.
It was not, however, so easy to find lodgings; everything—even the least attractive rooms at the top of the steepest flight of stairs—seemed to Jean’s country mind wickedly extravagant.
“But one cannot need to pay all that just for a room to sleep in?” he expostulated over and over again.
“In Paris,” observed Henri, “the very air is worth more than elsewhere, but, Monsieur le Baron, I grieve very much to have to say it, hitherto we have made an attempt to keep to the fashionable quarter. I know very well where we can get rooms cheaper, but I had not wished to mention it. On my return, Monsieur le Comte will snap his fingers and say to me, ‘Then you have buried Monsieur my nephew in a neighbourhood of greengrocers; I am to fall over cabbages in order to see him, hein!’ And yet if one cannot have Bohemian pheasants, one need not starve on soup made from bones! That is how I look at it, Monsieur le Baron. Shall we try another quarter?”
“Yes,” said Jean impatiently. “Any other quarter. I do not wish to be fashionable to sleep! Anywhere that I can find a clean, decent room, and get into it out of this noise and rain, I shall be satisfied.”