The bookbinder, regarding him as a clever man of ill-regulated life, always treated him with great consideration, for faults of behaviour almost cease to shock us except among neighbours, or at most fellow-countrymen.  Without knowing it, Jean found a fund of amusement in the witticisms and harangues of his old teacher, who united in himself the contradictory attributes of high-priest and buffoon.  He was great at telling a story, and though his tales were beyond the child’s intelligence, they did not fail to leave behind a confused impression of recklessness, irony, and cynicism.  Mademoiselle Servien alone never relaxed her attitude of uncompromising dislike and disdain.  She said nothing against him, but her face was a rigid mask of disapproval, her eyes two flames of fire, in answer to the courteous greeting the tutor never failed to offer her with a special roll of his little grey eyes.

One day the Marquis Tudesco walked into the shop with a staggering gait; his eyes glittered and his mouth hung half open in anticipation of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried, gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to a little rustic god his ancestors worshipped, the old Silenus.

Lessons that day were fitful and haphazard.  Jean was repeating in a drawling voice:  moneo, mones, monet ... monebam, monebas, monebat... Suddenly Monsieur Tudesco sprang forward, dragging his chair along the floor with a horrid screech, and clapping his hand on his pupil’s shoulder: 

“Child,” he said, “to-day I am going to give you a more profitable lesson than all the pitiful teaching I have confined myself to up to now.

“It is a lesson of transcendental philosophy.  Hearken carefully, child.  If one day you rise above your station and come to know yourself and the world about you, you will discover this, that men act only out of regard for the opinion of their fellows—­and per Bacco! they are consummate fools for their pains.  They dread other folks’ blame and crave their approval.

“The idiots fail to see that the world does not care a straw for them, and that their dearest friends will see them glorified or disgraced without missing one mouthful of their dinner.  This is my lesson, caro figliuolo, that the world’s opinion is not worth the sacrifice of a single one of our desires.  If you get this into your pate, you will be a strong man and can boast you were once the pupil of the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice, the exile who has translated in a freezing garret, on scraps of refuse paper, the immortal poem of Torquato Tasso.  What a task!”

The child listened to the tipsy philosopher without understanding one word of his rigmarole; only Monsieur Tudesco struck him as a strange and alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet than anybody he had ever seen before.

The professor warmed to his subject: