“Oh, Monsieur l’Abbé,” insisted the unhappy Pitou, who appeared to have some weighty motive for not falling out with his master, “do not, I entreat you, withdraw your interest in me on account of a poor halting theme.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the abbé, quite beside himself on hearing this last supplication, and running down the first four steps of the staircase, while Ange Pitou jumped down the four bottom ones and made his appearance in the courtyard,—”ah! you are chopping logic when you cannot even write a theme; you are calculating the extent of my patience, when you know not how to distinguish the nominative from the accusative.”
“You have always been so kind to me, Monsieur l’Abbé,” replied the committer of barbarisms, “and you will only have to say a word in my favor to my lord the bishop.”
“Would you have me belie my conscience, wretched boy?”
“If it be to do a good action, Monsieur l’Abbé, the God of mercy will forgive you for it.”
“Never! never!”
“And besides, who knows, the examiners perhaps will not be more severe towards me than they were towards my foster-brother, Sebastian Gilbert, when last year he was a candidate for the Paris purse; and he was a famous fellow for barbarisms, if ever there was one, although he was only thirteen years old, and I was seventeen.”
“Ah! indeed; and this is another precious stupidity which you have uttered,” cried the abbé, coming down the remaining steps, and in his turn appearing at the door with his cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand, while Pitou took care to keep at the prudent distance from his professor which he had all along maintained. “Yes, I say stupidity,” continued the abbé, crossing his arms and looking indignantly at his scholar; “and this is the reward of my lessons in logic. Triple animal that you are! it is thus you remember the old axiom,—Noli minora, loqui majora volens. Why, it was precisely because Gilbert was so much younger, that they were more indulgent towards a child—a child of fourteen years old—than they would have been to a great simpleton of nearly eighteen.”
“Yes, and because he is the son of Monsieur Honoré Gilbert, who has an income of eighteen thousand livres from good landed property, and this on the plain of Pillaleux,” replied the logician, in a piteous tone.
The Abbé Fortier looked at Pitou, pouting his lips and knitting his brows.
“This is somewhat less stupid,” grumbled he, after a moment’s silence and scrutiny. “And yet it is but specious, and without any basis: Species, non autem corpus.”
“Oh, if I were the son of a man possessing an income of eighteen thousand livres!” repeated Ange Pitou, who thought he perceived that his answer had made some impression on the professor.
“Yes, but you are not so, and to make up for it, you are as ignorant as the clown of whom Juvenal speaks,—a profane citation,” the abbe crossed himself, “but no less just,—Arcadius juvenis. I would wager that you do not even know what Arcadius means?”
“Why, Arcadian, to be sure,” replied Ange Pitou, drawing himself up with the majesty of pride.
“And what besides?”
“Besides what?”
“Arcadia was the country of donkeys, and with the ancients, as with us, asinus was synonymous with stultus.”
“I did not wish to understand your question in that sense,” rejoined Pitou, “seeing that it was far from my imagination that the austere mind of my worthy preceptor could have descended to satire.”
The Abbé Fortier looked at him a second time, and with as profound attention as the first.
“Upon my word!” cried he, somewhat mollified by the incense which his disciple had offered him; “there are really moments when one would swear that the fellow is less stupid than he appears to be.”
“Come, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Pitou, who, if he had not heard the words the abbe had uttered, had caught the expression of a return to a more merciful consideration which had passed over his countenance, “forgive me this time, and you will see what a beautiful theme I will write by to-morrow.”
“Well, then, I will consent,” said the abbé, placing, in sign of truce, his cat-o’-nine-tails in his belt and approaching Pitou, who observing this pacific demonstration, made no further attempt to move.