The next day at ten o'clock, Gazonal, much too well-dressed for the occasion (he had put on his bottle-blue coat with brass buttons, a frilled shirt, a white waistcoat and yellow gloves), awaited his amphitryon a full hour, stamping his feet on the boulevard, after hearing from the master of the cafe that "these gentlemen" breakfasted habitually between eleven and twelve o'clock.
"Between eleven and half-past," he said when he related his adventures to his cronies in the provinces, "two Parisians dressed in simple frock-coats, looking like NOTHING AT ALL, called out when they saw me on the boulevard, 'There's our Gazonal!'"
The speaker was Bixiou, with whom Leon de Lora had armed himself to "bring out" his provincial cousin, in other words, to make him pose.
"'Don't be vexed, cousin, I'm at your service!' cried out that little Leon, taking me in his arms," related Gazonal on his return home. "The breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must earn their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter THIRTY SOUS--the price of a whole day's work!"
During this monstrous breakfast--advisedly so called in view of six dozen Osten oysters, six cutlets a la Soubise, a chicken a la Marengo, lobster mayonnaise, green peas, a mushroom pasty, washed down with three bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of Champagne, plus coffee and liqueurs, to say nothing of relishes--Gazonal was magnificent in his diatribes against Paris. The worthy manufacturer complained of the length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the cold, the rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much else he bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a mighty fancy to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from beginning to end.
"My lawsuit," he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r's, "is a very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I've employed here in Paris a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he opens an eye, and he is always asleep. He's a slug, who drives in his coach, while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have had a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of whom is bought up by our prefect. That's my lawsuit! They want my manufactory! Well, they'll get it! and they must manage the best they can with my workmen, a hundred of 'em, who'll make them sing another tune before they've done with them."
"Two years. Ha! that meddling prefect! he shall pay dear for this;
I'll have his life if I have to give mine on the scaffold--"
"Which state councillor presides over your section?"
"A former newspaper man,--doesn't pay ten sous in taxes,--his name is Massol."
The two Parisians exchanged glances.
"Who is the commissioner who is making the report?"
"Ha! that's still more queer; he's Master of Petitions, professor of something or other at the Sorbonne,--a fellow who writes things in reviews, and for whom I have the profoundest contempt."
"Claude Vignon," said Bixiou.
"Yes, that's his name," replied Gazonal. "Massol and Vignon--there you have Social Reason, in which there's no reason at all."
"There must be some way out of it," said Leon de Lora. "You see, cousin, all things are possible in Paris for good as well as for evil, for the just as well as the unjust. There's nothing that can't be done, undone, and redone."
"The devil take me if I stay ten days more in this hole of a place, the dullest in all France!"
The two cousins and Bixiou were at this moment walking from one end to the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in honor of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips.
Formerly that locality was the Place Royale; next it was the Pont Neuf; in these days this privilege had been acquired by the Boulevard des Italiens.
"Paris," said the painter to his cousin, "is an instrument on which we must know how to play; if we stand here ten minutes I'll give you your first lesson. There, look!" he said, raising his cane and pointing to a couple who were just then coming out from the Passage de l'Opera.
"Goodness! who's that?" asked Gazonal.
THAT was an old woman, in a bonnet which had spent six months in a show-case, a very pretentious gown and a faded tartan shawl, whose face had been buried twenty years of her life in a damp lodge, and whose swollen hand-bag betokened no better social position than that of an ex-portress. With her was a slim little girl, whose eyes, fringed with black lashes, had lost their innocence and showed great weariness; her face, of a pretty shape, was fresh and her hair abundant, her forehead charming but audacious, her bust thin,--in other words, an unripe fruit.
"That," replied Bixiou, "is a rat tied to its mother."
"A rat!--what's that?"
"That particular rat," said Leon, with a friendly nod to Mademoiselle Ninette, "may perhaps win your suit for you."
Gazonal bounded; but Bixiou had held him by the arm ever since they left the cafe, thinking perhaps that the flush on his face was rather vivid.