FullReads

One morning as he ate his breakfast and cursed his fate, he picked up a newspaper savagely. The following lines, ending an article, struck Gazonal as if the mysterious voice which speaks to gamblers before they win had sounded in his ear: “Our celebrated landscape painter, Leon de Lora, lately returned from Italy, will exhibit several pictures at the Salon; thus the exhibition promises, as we see, to be most brilliant.” With the suddenness of action that distinguishes the sons of the sunny South, Gazonal sprang from his lodgings to the street, from the street to a street-cab, and drove to the rue de Berlin to find his cousin.

Leon de Lora sent word by a servant to his cousin Gazonal that he invited him to breakfast the next day at the Cafe de Paris, but he was now engaged in a matter which did not allow him to receive his cousin at the present moment. Gazonal, like a true Southerner, recounted all his troubles to the valet.

The next day at ten o’clock, Gazonal, much too well-dressed for the occasion (he had put on his bottle-blue coat with brass buttons, a frilled shirt, a white waistcoat and yellow gloves), awaited his amphitryon a full hour, stamping his feet on the boulevard, after hearing from the master of the cafe that “these gentlemen” breakfasted habitually between eleven and twelve o’clock.

“Between eleven and half-past,” he said when he related his adventures to his cronies in the provinces, “two Parisians dressed in simple frock-coats, looking like NOTHING AT ALL, called out when they saw me on the boulevard, ‘There’s our Gazonal!'”

The speaker was Bixiou, with whom Leon de Lora had armed himself to “bring out” his provincial cousin, in other words, to make him pose.

“‘Don’t be vexed, cousin, I’m at your service!’ cried out that little Leon, taking me in his arms,” related Gazonal on his return home. “The breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must earn their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter THIRTY SOUS–the price of a whole day’s work!”

During this monstrous breakfast–advisedly so called in view of six dozen Osten oysters, six cutlets a la Soubise, a chicken a la Marengo, lobster mayonnaise, green peas, a mushroom pasty, washed down with three bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of Champagne, plus coffee and liqueurs, to say nothing of relishes–Gazonal was magnificent in his diatribes against Paris. The worthy manufacturer complained of the length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the cold, the rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much else he bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a mighty fancy to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from beginning to end.

“My lawsuit,” he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r’s, “is a very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I’ve employed here in Paris a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he opens an eye, and he is always asleep. He’s a slug, who drives in his coach, while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have had a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of whom is bought up by our prefect. That’s my lawsuit! They want my manufactory! Well, they’ll get it! and they must manage the best they can with my workmen, a hundred of ’em, who’ll make them sing another tune before they’ve done with them.”

“Two years. Ha! that meddling prefect! he shall pay dear for this; I’ll have his life if I have to give mine on the scaffold–“