Paragot seated himself heavily by my side.

"The moon has a baleful influence, my son," said he in a thick voice.

"And you'll come under it if you sit too long beneath its effulgence.

That's what has happened to me. It makes one talk unmentionable imbecility."

He just missed concertina-ing the last two words, and looked at me with an air of solemn triumph.

"It isn't the Man in the Moon's fault, my little Asticot," he continued.

"I've been having a very interesting conversation with him. He is a most polite fellow. He said if I would go up and join him he would make room for me. It's all a lie, you know, about his having been sent there for gathering sticks on a Sunday. He went of his own accord, because it was the only place where he could be four thousand miles away from any woman. Think of it, little Asticot of my heart. There are lots of lies told about the moon, he says. He looks down on the earth and sees all of us little worms wriggling in and out and over one another and thinking ourselves so important and he cracks his sides with laughing; and your bald-headed idiots with spygla.s.ses take the cracks for mountain ranges and volcanoes. I'm going to live in the moon, away from female feminine women, and if you are good my son, you shall come too."

I explained to him as delicately as I could that I should regard such a change rather as a punishment than as a reward. He broke into a laugh.

"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 s.e.x 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 Maitre 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.

"But Blanquette--it would break her heart."

"All women's hearts can be mended for twopence."

"And men's?"

"They have to go about with them broken, my son, and the pieces clank and jangle and c.h.i.n.k and jingle inside like a crate of broken crockery.

We leave Aix tomorrow."

"But Master," I cried, "there is no necessity."

"What do you mean?"

"She is leaving Aix herself tomorrow."

"She!" he shouted, quite sober for the moment. "Who the devil do you mean by 'she'?"

I upbraided myself for a vain idiot. Here was I on the point of breaking my oath sworn on Joanna's hand. I felt ashamed and frightened. He grasped my shoulder roughly.

"Who do you mean by 'she'? Tell me."

"The Lady of the Lake, Master," said I.

He looked at me for a moment keenly, then relaxed his grip and shrugged his shoulders with the ghost of a laugh.

"If you see holes in ladders in this perspicacious fas.h.i.+on you'll have to forsake the paths of art for the higher walks of the Prefecture of Police."

He puffed silently at his pipe for a few moments and then turning his head away asked me in a low voice:

"How can you know that she is leaving tomorrow?"

I lied for the first time to Paragot.

"I overheard her say so while I was waiting with the tambourine."

"Sure?"

"Quite sure."

This seemed to satisfy him, to my great relief. How my poor little oath would have fared under cross examination I don't know. At any rate honour was saved. Paragot laid aside his pipe and looked wistfully into the past over his wine bowl.

"The Lady of the Lake," he murmured. "I have called her many things good and bad in my time, but never that. You are a genius, my little Asticot."

He finished his wine slowly, holding the bowl in both hands. The moon smiled at us in a friendly way, sailing high over the mountains. There entered my head the novel reflection that he was smiling on all men alike, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. He was smiling just the same on Joanna's beaky-nosed husband.

Her husband! Something caught at my heart. Did Paragot know? I debated anxiously in my mind whether I should impart the disastrous information.

If he knew that she was a married woman he would put foolish thoughts out of his head, for it was only in Merovingian and such like romantic epochs that men loved other men's wives. I touched him timidly on the arm.

"Master,--I overheard something else."

"Did you?"

"She is married, and that is her husband."

"Did he take off his hat?"

"No, Master."

"He is a scaly-headed vulture," said Paragot dreamily.

"He only gave me five sous," said I, relieved and yet disappointed at finding that my disclosure produced no agitation.

Paragot fumbled in his pocket. "We will not batten on his charity," said he, and he cast three or four coppers into the silent street. They crashed, rolled and fell over with little c.h.i.n.ks. Narcisse who had hitherto been asleep trotted out and sniffed at them. Paragot laughed; then checked himself, and holding up a long-nailed forefinger looked at me with an air of awful solemnity.