Well, well—I suppose Allah Paragot is great and Mahomet Asticot is his prophet.
We wandered and fiddled and zithered and tambourined through France till the chills and rains of autumn rendered our vagabondage less merry. The end of October found us fulfilling a week's engagement at a brasserie on the outskirts of Tours. Two rooms over a stable and a manger in an empty stall below were assigned to us; and every night we crept to our resting places wearied to death by the evening's work.
I have always found performance on a musical instrument exhausting in itself: the tambourine, for instance, calls for considerable physical energy; but when the instrument, tambourine, violin or zither, is practised for several hours in a little stuffy room filled with three or four dozen obviously unwashed humans, reeking with bad tobacco and worse absinthe, and pervaded by the ghosts of inferior meals, it becomes more penitential than the treadmill. A dog's life, said Paragot. Whereat Narcisse sniffed. It was not at all the life for a philosopher's dog, said he.
On the morning of the last day of our engagement, Blanquette entered Paragot's bedchamber as usual, with the bowls of coffee and hunks of coarse bread that formed our early meal. I had risen from my manger and crept into Paragot's room for warmth, and while he slept I sat on the floor by the window reading a book. As for Blanquette she had dressed and eaten long before and had helped the servant of the café to sweep and wash the tables and make the coffee for the household. It was not in her peasant's nature to be abed, which, now I come to think of it, must be a characteristic of the artistic temperament. Paragot loved it. He only woke when Blanquette brought him his coffee. Ordinarily he would remonstrate with picturesque oaths at being aroused from his slumbers, and having taken the coffee from her hands, would dismiss her with a laugh. He observed the most rigid propriety in his relations with Blanquette. But this morning he directed her to remain.
"Sit down, my child; I have to speak to you."
As there was no chair or stool in the uncomfortable room—it had lean-to walls and bare dirty boards and contained only the bed and a table—she sat obediently at the foot of the bed next to Narcisse and folded her hands in her lap. Paragot broke his bread into his coffee and fed himself with the sops by means of a battered table-spoon. When he had swallowed two or three mouthfuls he addressed her.
"My good Blanquette, I have been wandering through the world for many years in search of the springs of Life. I do not find them by scraping catgut in the Café Brasserie Dubois."
"It would be better to go to Orléans," said Blanquette. "We were at the Café de la Couronne there last winter and I danced."
"Not even your dancing at Orléans would help me in my quest," said he.