And he was right. There were times in which he would realize the bad effect produced by some rascality of his, whereupon he would make special efforts to appear a very Roland or Cid of perfection. But within a very short while from out of the cuirass of this punctilious knight would stick the mountebank’s claw.
“In matters of honor I admit of no distinctions,” the man would say, in one of his knightly moods. “You may declare to me that honor is a martingale. True enough. But such is my misfortune; I am by temperament a cavalier.”
Mingote was a partisan of anarchico-philanthropico-collectivist ideas; some of his letters he ended with the salutation, “Health and Social Revolution,” which served as no obstacle against his trying to establish, at various times, a loan shop, a house of assignation and other similarly honest means of subsistence.
This ex-loan shark had collaborated in several ignominious labours with the comrades of dynamite and picric acid, wheedling money out of them, now for the purpose of effecting a coup and purchasing bombs, again for the compiling of a libertarian dictionary, wherein he, Mingote, with his formidable powers of analysis, more formidable than the highest explosives, shattered to fragments all the traditional notions of this stupid society.
Whenever Mingote spoke of his dictionary, his disdain for existence, his fanatical glance, his melancholy attitude of a soul misunderstood all indicated the genius of revolution.
On the other hand, when he recounted his successes as an advertising agent, as a business broker, the modern man would appear,—the struggle-for-lifer of the public auction and the loan shop, of the druggist and the perfumer.
“It was I,” he would boast, “who auctioned off La Chavito. I sold the stable to the Marquis de Sacro-Cerro and the lands to the Viscountess. It was I who launched the Pipot Cataphoretic; the Alex Wild Arabian Jasmine Pectoral; Chiper’s Manicure Paste; Pirogoff’s Electrical Cataplasm; Clarckson’s Peptic Flour; Tomás y Gil’s Artificial Heart; Rocagut’s Sudorific Plaster, and yet, here I stand, utterly deserted.”
Mingote imagined that all Madrid was in a conspiracy to keep him down; but he was waiting for the opportune moment in which he should triumph over his enemies.
His greatest illusions were founded upon his mines, which, though they were supposedly wonderful, he was not averse to selling in cheap lots. He was for ever carrying around in his pockets, wrapped up in newspaper sheets, various specimens from his mines in this place and that.