“Now DAUBINET has brought you here, we must show you the calves, and then back to breakfast.  Will that suit you?”

“Perfectly.”  I think to myself—­why “calves”?  It sounded like “calves,” only without the “S.”  Must ask presently.

M. VESQUIER begs to be excused for a minute; he will return directly.  I look to DAUBINET for an explanation.  “We are, then, going to see a farm, I presume?” I say to him.  “Farm!” exclaims DAUBINET, surprised. “Que voulez-vous dire, mon cher?”—­“Well, didn’t Mister—­Mister—­” “VESQUIER,” suggests DAUBINET.

“Yes, Mister VESQUIER—­didn’t he say we were to go and ’see the calves’?—­C’est a dire,” I translate, in despair at DAUBINET’s utterly puzzled look, “que nous irons avec lui a la ferme pour voir les veaux—­the calves.”—­“Ha! ha! ha!” Off goes DAUBINET into a roar.  Evidently I’ve made some extraordinary mistake.  It flashes across me suddenly.  Owing to M. VESQUIER’s speaking such excellent English, it never occurred to me that he had suddenly interpolated the French word “caves” as an anglicised French word into his speech to me.  This accounts for his suppression of the final consonant.

[Illustration]

“Ah!” I exclaim, suddenly enlightened; “I see—­the cellars.”

“Pou ni my?” cries DAUBINET, still in ecstasies, and speaking Russian or modern Greek. “Da!—­of course—­c’est ca—­nous allons voir les caves—­the cellars—­where all the champagne is. Karrascho!”

At this moment M. VESQUIER returns.  He will just take us through the offices to his private rooms.  Clerks at work everywhere.  Uncommonly like an English place of business:  not much outward difference between French clerks in a large house like this and English ones in one of our great City houses; only this isn’t the City, but is, so to speak, more Manchesterian or Liverpoolian, with the immense advantage of being remarkably clean, curiously quiet, and in a pure and fresh atmosphere.  I don’t clearly understand what M. VESQUIER’s business is, but as he seems to take for granted that I know all about it, I trust to getting DAUBINET alone and obtaining definite information from him.  Are they VESQUIER’s caves we are going to see?  “No,” DAUBINET tells me presently, quite surprised, at my ignorance; “we are going to see les caves de Popperie—­Popp & Co., only Co.’s out of it, and it’s all POPP now.”

“Now then, Gentlemen,” says the gerant of POPP & Co, “here’s a voiture.  We have twenty minutes’ drive.”  The Popp-Manager points out to me all the interesting features of the country.  DAUBINET amuses himself by sitting on the box and talking to the coachman.

“It excites me,” he explains, when requested to take a back seat inside—­though, by the way, it is in no sense DAUBINET’s metier to “take a back seat,”—­“it excites me—­it amuses me to talk to a cocher.  On ne peut pas causer avec un vrai cocher tous les jours.” And presently we see them gesticulating to each other and talking both at once, DAUBINET, of course, is speaking English and various other languages, but as little French as possible, to the evident bewilderment of the driver.  DAUBINET is perfectly happy.  “Petzikoff!  Blass the Prince of WAILES!” I hear him bursting out occasionally.  Whereat the coachman smiles knowingly, and flicks the horses.