“The devil!” exclaimed Pierre as he sat down.  “We are celebrating the accession of Jean the rich.”

After the soup, Madeira was passed round, and already every one was talking at once.  Beausire was giving the history of a dinner he had eaten at San Domingo at the table of a negro general.  Old Roland was listening, and at the same time trying to get in, between the sentences, his account of another dinner, given by a friend of his at Mendon, after which every guest was ill for a fortnight.  Mme. Rosemilly, Jean, and his mother were planning an excursion to breakfast at Saint Jouin, from which they promised themselves the greatest pleasure; and Pierre was only sorry that he had not dined alone in some pot-house by the sea, so as to escape all this noise and laughter and glee which fretted him.  He was wondering how he could now set to work to confide his fears to his brother, and induce him to renounce the fortune he had already accepted and of which he was enjoying the intoxicating foretaste.  It would be hard on him, no doubt; but it must be done; he could not hesitate; their mother’s reputation was at stake.

The appearance of an enormous shade-fish threw Roland back on fishing stories.  Beausire told some wonderful tales of adventure on the Gaboon, at Sainte-Marie, in Madagascar, and above all, off the coasts of China and Japan, where the fish are as queer-looking as the natives.  And he described the appearance of these fishes—­their goggle gold eyes, their blue or red bellies, their fantastic fins like fans, their eccentric crescent-shaped tails—­with such droll gesticulation that they all laughed till they cried as they listened.

Pierre alone seemed incredulous, muttering to himself:  “True enough, the Normans are the Gascons of the north!”

After the fish came a vol-au-vent, then a roast fowl, a salad, French beans with a Pithiviers lark-pie.  Mme. Rosemilly’s maid helped to wait on them, and the fun rose with the number of glasses of wine they drank.  When the cork of the first champagne-bottle was drawn with a pop, father Roland, highly excited, imitated the noise with his tongue and then declared:  “I like that noise better than a pistol-shot.”

Pierre, more and more fractious every moment, retorted with a sneer: 

“And yet it is perhaps a greater danger for you.”

Roland, who was on the point of drinking, set his full glass down on the table again, and asked: 

“Why?”

He had for some time been complaining of his health, of heaviness, giddiness, frequent and unaccountable discomfort.  The doctor replied: 

“Because the bullet might very possibly miss you, while the glass of wine is dead certain to hit you in the stomach.”

“And what then?”

“Then it scorches your inside, upsets your nervous system, makes the circulation sluggish, and leads the way to the apoplectic fit which always threatens a man of your build.”