"You too—with the milk of the feeding-bottle still wet on your lips? The trail of the petticoat's over us all! What has been putting the sex feminine into your little turnip-head? Have you fallen in love with Blanquette?"
"No, Master," said I. "When I fall in love it will be with a very beautiful lady."
Paragot pointed upwards. "I see another crack in my friend's sides. We all fall in love with beautiful ladies, my poor Asticot, one after the other, plunging into destruction with the comic sheep-headedness of the muttons of Panurge. Another woolly one over? Ho! ho! laughs the man in the moon, and crack go his sides."
The door opened behind us and the proprietor of the auberge appeared on the threshold.
"Give me half a litre of red wine, Monsieur Bonnivard," cried Paragot. "I am the descendant of Maître Jehan Cotard whose throat was so dry that in this world he was never known to spit."
"Bien, Monsieur," said the patron.
Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and lit it with clumsy fingers, and did not speak till his wine was brought.
"My son, we are leaving Aix the first thing in the morning."
I started up in alarm. We had not finished our engagement at the Restaurant du Lac.
"I care no more for the Restaurant du Lac than for the rest of the idiot universe," he declared.