“Render insult for insult,” says the sage Menu. These things have most astonished me in Paris.
My first duty (in quality of my rank in the Ming tang, the greatest society of savans in the universe) has been to visit the Royal Library, renowned here as “a vast depot of all human knowledge.” This asylum of meditation, of reflection and study, is situated in the most noisy street in the city; the millions of books it contains shake continually with the passage of carriages and other vehicles. It is very much as if you and I should go for instruction between the bridge Tchoung-yu-Ho-Khias, where all the cats in Pekin are sold, and the street Toung-Kiang-mi-Kiang, where salutes are fired night and day!
One of the librarians received me with great politeness, and offered me a chair.
“Sir,” said I, in tolerable French, “I would be much obliged if you could lend me, for a few moments, the ‘History of the Dynasties of the Five Brothers Loung, and of the sixty-four Ché-ti’? You know that these glorious reigns commenced immediately after the third race of the first emperors—those of the Jin-Hoang, or the Emperors of Men, to distinguish them from the second race, called Ti-Hoang, or Emperors of the Earth.”
The savant did not appear as if he knew it. He put into his nose some of the forbidden opium, and after reflecting awhile, said,
“Lao-yé, we have not that.”
He appeared pleased to show me that he understood that “Lao-yé” was equivalent to “sir,” and repeated it a thousand times during our conversation.
“You know, sir,” said I, continuing, “that after the glorious reigns of Koung-san-che, of Tchen Min, of Y-ti-ché, and of Houx-toun-che, came the reigns, still more glorious, of the seventy-one families, and that so much glory was only effaced by the birth of the immortal Emperor Ki, the greatest musician the world ever saw, and the inventor of Chinese politeness. I would like to consult, in this ‘vast depôt of all human knowledge,’ the history of the immortal Ki.”
The nose of the philosophe received a second time a pinch of the forbidden opium. He then opened an enormous handkerchief of Madras, and suddenly jerking the head, neck, and hand, made a great noise resembling that of a prolonged stroke upon a gong. When this tempest of the brain had passed by, he folded up his Madras, drew it five times across his face, and said,
“We have not the history of the immortal Ki, your emperor.”