think I owe a great deal to my master’s wife, who brought me up.  Bless you, the whole town has paid her for that in praises, respect, and admiration,—­the very best of coin.  I don’t recognize any service that is only the capital of self-love.  Men make a commerce of their services, and gratitude goes down on the debit side,—­that’s all.  As to schemes, they are my divinity.  What?” he exclaimed, at a gesture of Canalis, “don’t you admire the faculty which enables a wily man to get the better of a man of genius? it takes the closest observation of his vices, and his weaknesses, and the wit to seize the happy moment.  Ask diplomacy if its greatest triumphs are not those of craft over force?  If I were your secretary, Monsieur le baron, you’d soon be prime-minister, because it would be my interest to have you so.  Do you want a specimen of my talents in that line?  Well then, listen; you love Mademoiselle Modeste distractedly, and you’ve good reason to do so.  The girl has my fullest esteem; she is a true Parisian.  Sometimes we get a few real Parisians born down here in the provinces.  Well, Modeste is just the woman to help a man’s career.  She’s got that in her,” he cried, with a turn of his wrist in the air.  “But you’ve a dangerous competitor in the duke; what will you give me to get him out of Havre within three days?”

“Finish this bottle,” said the poet, refilling Butscha’s glass.

“You’ll make me drunk,” said the dwarf, tossing off his ninth glass of champagne.  “Have you a bed where I could sleep it off?  My master is as sober as the camel that he is, and Madame Latournelle too.  They are brutal enough, both of them, to scold me; and they’d have the rights of it too—­there are those deeds I ought to be drawing!—­” Then, suddenly returning to his previous ideas, after the fashion of a drunken man, he exclaimed, “and I’ve such a memory; it is on a par with my gratitude.”

“Butscha!” cried the poet, “you said just now you had no gratitude; you contradict yourself.”

“Not at all,” he replied.  “To forget a thing means almost always recollecting it.  Come, come, do you want me to get rid of the duke?  I’m cut out for a secretary.”

“How could you manage it?” said Canalis, delighted to find the conversation taking this turn of its own accord.

“That’s none of your business,” said the dwarf, with a portentous hiccough.

Butscha’s head rolled between his shoulders, and his eyes turned from Germain to La Briere, and from La Briere to Canalis, after the manner of men who, knowing they are tipsy, wish to see what other men are thinking of them; for in the shipwreck of drunkenness it is noticeable that self-love is the last thing that goes to the bottom.