malicious as a monkey, and it seldom lets you catch it."

"Will you let us buy the two for a hundred sous?" asked Pauline.

The man seemed petrified.

"You shall not have it!" I said to her, laughing. "I'll pay ten
francs; we should count the emotions in."

"Very well," she said, "then I'll pay ten francs, two sous."

"Ten francs, ten sous."

"Twelve francs."

"Fifteen francs."

"Fifteen francs, fifty centimes," she said.

"One hundred francs."

"One hundred and fifty francs."

I yielded. We were not rich enough at that moment to bid higher. Our
poor fisherman did not know whether to be angry at a hoax, or to go
mad with joy; we drew him from his quandary by giving him the name of
our landlady and telling him to take the lobster and the crab to her
house.

"Do you earn enough to live on?" I asked the man, in order to discover