“Tiens!” thought Aristide. “I am still a Baron, and I have an old château.”
“Tell us about the château. Has it a fosse and a drawbridge and a Gothic chapel?” asked Miss Christabel.
“Which one do you mean?” inquired Aristide, airily. “For I have two.”
When relating to me this Arabian Nights’ adventure, he drew my special attention to his astuteness.
His host’s eye quivered in a wink. “The one in Languedoc,” said he.
Languedoc! Almost Pujol’s own country! With entire lack of morality, but with picturesque imagination, Aristide plunged into a description of that non-existent baronial hall. Fosse, drawbridge, Gothic chapel were but insignificant features. It had tourelles, emblazoned gateways, bastions, donjons, barbicans; it had innumerable rooms; in the salle des chevaliers two hundred men-at-arms had his ancestors fed at a sitting. There was the room in which François Premier had slept, and one in which Joan of Arc had almost been assassinated. What the name of himself or of his ancestors was supposed to be Aristide had no ghost of an idea. But as he proceeded with the erection of his airy palace he gradually began to believe in it. He invested the place with a living atmosphere; conjured up a staff of family retainers, notably one Marie-Joseph Loufoque, the wizened old major-domo, with his long white whiskers and blue and silver livery. There were also Madeline Mioulles, the cook, and Bernadet the groom, and La Petite Fripette the goose girl. Ah! they should see La Petite Fripette! And he kept dogs and horses and cows and ducks and hens—and there was a great pond whence frogs were drawn to be fed for the consumption of the household.
Miss Christabel shivered. “I should not like to eat frogs.”
“They also eat snails,” said her father.
“I have a snail farm,” said Aristide. “You never saw such interesting little animals. They are so intelligent. If you’re kind to them they come and eat out of your hand.”
