"A clever book that of yours, upon my honor. It's a work after my own heart. Your arrangement of matter, I think, however, might be improved, and many of your notions remind me of Aristotle. That philosopher was one of my most intimate acquaintances. I liked him as much for his terrible ill temper, as for his happy knack at making a blunder. There is only one solid truth in all that he has written, and for that I gave him the hint out of pure compassion for his absurdity. I suppose, Pierre Bon-Bon, you very well know to what divine moral truth I am alluding."
"Cannot say that I——"
"Indeed!—why I told Aristotle that by sneezing men expelled superfluous ideas through the proboscis."
"Which is—hiccup!—undoubtedly the case"—said the metaphysician, while he poured out for himself another bumper of Mousseux, and offered his snuff-box to the fingers of his visiter.
"There was Plato too"—continued his majesty, modestly declining the snuff-box and the compliment—"there was Plato, too, for whom I, at one time, felt all the affection of a friend. You knew Plato, Bon-Bon?—ah! no, I beg a thousand pardons. He met me at Athens, one day, in the Parthenon, and told me he was distressed for an idea. I bade him write down that 'o nous estin augos.' He said that he would do so, and went home, while I stepped over to the Pyramids. But my conscience smote me for the lie, and, hastening back to Athens, I arrived behind the philosopher's chair as he was inditing the 'augos.' Giving the gamma a fillip with my finger I turned it upside down. So the sentence now reads 'o nous estin aulos,' and is, you perceive, the fundamental doctrine of his metaphysics."
"Were you ever at Rome?"—asked the Restaurateur as he finished his second bottle of Mousseux, and drew from the closet a larger supply of Vin de Chambertin.
"But once, Monsieur Bon-Bon—but once. There was a time"—said the devil, as if reciting some passage from a book—"'there was an anarchy of five years during which the republic, bereft of all its officers, had no magistracy besides the tribunes of the people, and these were not legally vested with any degree of executive power'—at that time, Monsieur Bon-Bon—at that time only I was in Rome, and I have no earthly acquaintance, consequently, with any of its philosophy."1
1 Ils ecrivalent sur la Philosophie (Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca) mais c'etait la Philosophie Grécque.—Condorcet.
"What do you think of Epicurus?—what do you think of—hiccup!—Epicurus?"
"What do I think of whom?"—said the devil in astonishment—"you cannot surely mean to find any fault with Epicurus! What do I think of Epicurus! Do you mean me, sir?—I am Epicurus. I am the same philosopher who wrote each of the three hundred treatises commemorated by Diogenes Laertes."