"Ha!" snorted the traveller, "then I'll go straight to Monsieur
Vernier and thank him."

And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer,
whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom
he had already recounted the tale.

"Monsieur," said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at
his enemy, "you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain of
being thought a turn-key,--a species of being far below a
galley-slave,--you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared
to offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do
you hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?"

Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a
tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.

"What!" cried Vernier, delighted at the presence of an audience, "do
you think we have no right to make fun of a man who comes here, bag
and baggage, and demands that we hand over our property because,
forsooth, he is pleased to call us great men, painters, artists,
poets,--mixing us up gratuitously with a set of fools who have neither
house nor home, nor sous nor sense? Why should we put up with a rascal
who comes here and wants us to feather his nest by subscribing to a
newspaper which preaches a new religion whose first doctrine is, if
you please, that we are not to inherit from our fathers and mothers?
On my sacred word of honor, Pere Margaritis said things a great deal
more sensible. And now, what are you complaining about? You and
Margaritis seemed to understand each other. The gentlemen here present