--floored, I say.

"Adieu, my kitten. Love me always; be faithful; fidelity through
thick and thin is one of the attributes of the Free Woman. Who is
kissing you on the eyelids?


"Thy Felix Forever."



CHAPTER III

Five days later Gaudissart started from the Hotel des Faisans, at
which he had put up in Tours, and went to Vouvray, a rich and populous
district where the public mind seemed to him susceptible of
cultivation. Mounted upon his horse, he trotted along the embankment
thinking no more of his phrases than an actor thinks of his part which
he has played for a hundred times. It was thus that the illustrious
Gaudissart went his cheerful way, admiring the landscape, and little
dreaming that in the happy valleys of Vouvray his commercial
infallibility was about to perish.

Here a few remarks upon the public mind of Touraine are essential to
our story. The subtle, satirical, epigrammatic tale-telling spirit
stamped on every page of Rabelais is the faithful expression of the
Tourangian mind,--a mind polished and refined as it should be in a
land where the kings of France long held their court; ardent,
artistic, poetic, voluptuous, yet whose first impulses subside
quickly. The softness of the atmosphere, the beauty of the climate, a