"Why? Because he allowed himself to be run over!"
"What!" I cried. "They arrest the man who has been run over, and not the man who ran over him?"
"It is the law," said De Barsac, coolly.
"Do you mean to tell me that the runner is left free, while the runnee is arrested?" I asked in deadly calmness, reducing my question to legal and laconic language impossible to misinterpret.
"Exactly. The person who permits a vehicle to run over him in defiance of the French law, which says that nobody ought to let himself be run over, is liable to arrest, imprisonment, and fine—unless, of course, so badly injured that recovery is impossible."
Now at last I understood the Dreyfus Affaire. Now I began to comprehend the laws of the Bandarlog. Now I could follow the subtle logic of the philosophy embodied in "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass!"
This was the country for me! Why, certainly; these people here could understand a man who was guilty of stealing his own pig.
"I think I should like to live in Paris again," I said to my daughters; then I approached the young man from East Boston and bade him cheer up.
He was not hurt; he was only rumpled and dusty and hopping mad.
"I shall pay their darned fine," he said. "Then I'm going to hire a cab and drive it myself, and hunt up that cabman who ran over me, by Judas!"