Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him, and Grantaire began again worse than ever:--
"Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws.
You produce on me no effect with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I excuse you from the task of soothing me.
Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish me to say to you?
Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a failure.
God made a mistake with that animal.
A crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch, Femme--woman--rhymes with infame,-- infamous.
Yes, I have the spleen, complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!"
"Silence then, capital R!" resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:--
"--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an amateur attorney, I maintain this:
that, in accordance with the terms of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases, freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--"
"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire.
Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville was being sketched out.
This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads at work touched each other:
"Let us begin by finding names. When one has the names, one finds the subject."
"That is true.
Dictate.
I will write."
"Monsieur Dorimon."
"An independent gentleman?"