“What a hurry you are in, Pierrotin!” said the inn-keeper.  “Can’t you stay and breakfast?  The colonel here pays for the wine at fifty sous, and has ordered a bottle of champagne.”

“I can’t.  I’ve got a fish I must deliver by three o’clock for a great dinner at Stors; there’s no fooling with customers, or fishes, either.”

“Very good,” said Pere Leger to the inn-keeper.  “You can harness that horse you want to sell me into the cabriolet; we’ll breakfast in peace and overtake Pierrotin, and I can judge of the beast as we go along.  We can go three in your jolter.”

To the count’s surprise, Pierrotin himself rebridled the horses.  Schinner and Mistigris had walked on.  Scarcely had Pierrotin overtaken the two artists and was mounting the hill from which Ecouen, the steeple of Mesnil, and the forests that surround that most beautiful region, came in sight, when the gallop of a horse and the jingling of a vehicle announced the coming of Pere Leger and the grandson of Czerni-Georges, who were soon restored to their places in the coucou.

As Pierrotin drove down the narrow road to Moisselles, Georges, who had so far not ceased to talk with the farmer of the beauty of the hostess at Saint-Brice, suddenly exclaimed:  “Upon my word, this landscape is not so bad, great painter, is it?”

“Pooh! you who have seen the East and Spain can’t really admire it.”

“I’ve two cigars left!  If no one objects, will you help me finish them, Schinner? the little young man there seems to have found a whiff or two enough for him.”

Pere Leger and the count kept silence, which passed for consent.

Oscar, furious at being called a “little young man,” remarked, as the other two were lighting their cigars: 

“I am not the aide-de-camp of Mina, monsieur, and I have not yet been to the East, but I shall probably go there.  The career to which my family destine me will spare me, I trust, the annoyances of travelling in a coucou before I reach your present age.  When I once become a personage I shall know how to maintain my station.”

“‘Et caetera punctum!’” crowed Mistigris, imitating the hoarse voice of a young cock; which made Oscar’s deliverance all the more absurd, because he had just reached the age when the beard sprouts and the voice breaks. “‘What a chit for chat!’” added the rapin.

“Your family, young man, destine you to some career, do they?” said Georges.  “Might I ask what it is?”

“Diplomacy,” replied Oscar.

Three bursts of laughter came from Mistigris, the great painter, and the farmer.  The count himself could not help smiling.  Georges was perfectly grave.

“By Allah!” he exclaimed, “I see nothing to laugh at in that.  Though it seems to me, young man, that your respectable mother is, at the present moment, not exactly in the social sphere of an ambassadress.  She carried a handbag worthy of the utmost respect, and wore shoe-strings which—­”