“Go away!”

Ursus felt something like Jonas when he was leaving the belly of the whale.

Minos continued,—­

“You are discharged.”

Ursus said to himself,—­

“They won’t catch me at this again.  Good-bye, medicine!”

And he added in his innermost heart,—­

“From henceforth I will carefully allow them to die.”

Bent double, he bowed everywhere; to the doctors, to the busts, the tables, the walls, and retiring backwards through the door, disappeared almost as a shadow melting into air.

He left the hall slowly, like an innocent man, and rushed from the street rapidly, like a guilty one.  The officers of justice are so singular and obscure in their ways that even when acquitted one flies from them.

As he fled he mumbled,—­

“I am well out of it.  I am the savant untamed; they the savants civilized.  Doctors cavil at the learned.  False science is the excrement of the true, and is employed to the destruction of philosophers.  Philosophers, as they produce sophists, produce their own scourge.  Of the dung of the thrush is born the mistletoe, with which is made birdlime, with which the thrush is captured. Turdus sibi malum cacat.”

We do not represent Ursus as a refined man.  He was imprudent enough to use words which expressed his thoughts.  He had no more taste than Voltaire.

When Ursus returned to the Green Box, he told Master Nicless that he had been delayed by following a pretty woman, and let not a word escape him concerning his adventure.

Except in the evening when he said in a low voice to Homo,—­

“See here, I have vanquished the three heads of Cerberus.”

CHAPTER VII.

WHY SHOULD A GOLD PIECE LOWER ITSELF BY MIXING WITH A HEAP OF PENNIES?

An event happened.

The Tadcaster Inn became more and more a furnace of joy and laughter.  Never was there more resonant gaiety.  The landlord and his boy were become insufficient to draw the ale, stout, and porter.  In the evening in the lower room, with its windows all aglow, there was not a vacant table.  They sang, they shouted; the great old hearth, vaulted like an oven, with its iron bars piled with coals, shone out brightly.  It was like a house of fire and noise.

In the yard—­that is to say, in the theatre—­the crowd was greater still.

Crowds as great as the suburb of Southwark could supply so thronged the performances of “Chaos Vanquished” that directly the curtain was raised—­that is to say, the platform of the Green Box was lowered—­every place was filled.  The windows were alive with spectators, the balcony was crammed.  Not a single paving-stone in the paved yard was to be seen.  It seemed paved with faces.

Only the compartment for the nobility remained empty.

There was thus a space in the centre of the balcony, a black hole, called in metaphorical slang, an oven.  No one there.  Crowds everywhere except in that one spot.