“But how am I to get him out of the clouds and the puddles?” inquired Riviere half peevishly.

“How?” asked Jacintha, with a dash of that contempt uneducated persons generally have for any one who does not know some little thing they happen to know themselves.  “How?  Why, with the nearest blackbeetle, to be sure.”

“A blackbeetle?”

“Black or brown; it matters little.  Have her ready for use in your handkerchief:  pull a long face:  and says you—­’Excuse me, sir, I have the misfortune not to know the Greek name of this merchandise here.’  Say that, and behold him launched.  He will christen you the beast in Hebrew and Latin as well as Greek, and tell you her history down from the flood:  next he will beg her of you, and out will come a cork and a pin, and behold the creature impaled.  For that is how men love beetles.  He has a thousand pinned down at home—­beetles, butterflies, and so forth.  When I go near the rubbish with my duster he trembles like an aspen.  I pretend to be going to clean them, but it is only to see the face he makes, for even a domestic must laugh now and then—­or die.  But I never do clean them, for after all he is more stupid than wicked, poor man:  I have not therefore the sad courage to make him wretched.”

“Let us return to our beetle—­what will his tirades about its antiquity advance me?”

“Oh! one begins about a beetle, but one ends Heaven knows where.”

Riviere profited by this advice.  He even improved on it.  In due course he threw himself into Aubertin’s way.  He stopped the doctor reverentially, and said he had heard he was an entomologist.  Would he be kind enough to tell him what was this enormous chrysalis he had just found?

“The death’s head moth!” cried Aubertin with enthusiasm—­“the death’s head moth! a great rarity in this district.  Where found you this?” Riviere undertook to show him the place.

It was half a league distant.  Coming and going he had time to make friends with Aubertin, and this was the easier that the old gentleman, who was a physiognomist as well as ologist, had seen goodness and sensibility in Edouard’s face.  At the end of the walk he begged the doctor to accept the chrysalis.  The doctor coquetted.  “That would be a robbery.  You take an interest in these things yourself—­at least I hope so.”

The young rogue confessed modestly to the sentiment of entomology, but “the government worked him so hard as to leave him no hopes of shining in so high a science,” said he sorrowfully.

The doctor pitied him.  “A young man of your attainments and tastes to be debarred from the everlasting secrets of nature, by the fleeting politics of the day.”

Riviere shrugged his shoulders.  “Somebody must do the dirty work,” said he, chuckling inwardly.

The chrysalis went to Beaurepaire in the pocket of a grateful man, who that same evening told the whole party his conversation with young Riviere, on whom he pronounced high encomiums.  Rose’s saucy eyes sparkled with fun:  you might have lighted a candle at one and exploded a mine at the other; but not a syllable did she utter.