“I have,” he said to all inquirers, “five hundred ornithological objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals.”

“What patience you have had!” said the ladies.

“One must do something for one’s country,” replied the collector.

He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition of the words, “I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will.”  Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting the second floor of the town hall to the “Gourdon Museum,” after the collector’s death.

“I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to the gift,” he replied; “for I dare not hope they would place a marble bust of me—­”

“It would be the very least we could do for you,” they rejoined; “are you not the glory of our town?”

Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities of Burgundy.  The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those our vanity obtains for us have better security.  This man of science was, to employ Lupin’s superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!

Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that the nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks, and the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines of a mountain begin at the summit.  This pinched little man was thought to be one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,—­a Piron, it was the fashion to say.  The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the remark:  “We have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges—­two very distinguished men; men who could hold their own in Paris.”

Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became possessed by another mania,—­that of composing an ode in honor of an amusement which amounted to a passion in the eighteenth century.  Manias among mediocrats often run in couples.  Gourdon junior gave birth to his poem during the reign of Napoleon.  That fact is sufficient to show the sound and healthy school of poesy to which he belonged; Luce de Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Rouche, Vigee, Andrieux, Berchoux were his heroes.  Delille was his god, until the day when the leading society of Soulanges raised the question as to whether Gourdon were not superior to Delille; after which the clerk of the court always called his competitor “Monsieur l’Abbe Delille,” with exaggerated politeness.

The poems manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern, and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an idea of them.  They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art.  “The Chorister” is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally admitted that six would wear the subject threadbare.