"Thanks," she replied; "we'll give up our chance; we'll wait for the next; I don't travel with fish. In a boat, it's all right; but in a carriage it scents you up too much." As for Monsieur Cherami, he had hardly responded to Madame Capucine's farewell; he looked after her with a disdainful air, saying: "What a beast that haberdasher is! to talk to me about the balance of an account, in the street, in broad daylight, when I am kind enough to pay her compliments and to call her two little brats pretty! Go and sell your cotton nightcaps, you Hottentot Venus! for that woman strikes me as a caricature of Venus. Fine stuff her flannel vests are made of; I've only worn them three years, and they're torn already! I see plainly enough why you don't care to have me go to Aunt Duponceau's--that might interfere with your little tete-a-tetes with your clerk Ballot. Oh! poor Capucine! when I told that huge woman that her husband ought to be hunchbacked, she knew what I meant. However, I'd be glad to know where I shall dine to-day; indeed, to express my meaning more frankly, for I can afford to be frank with myself, I would like to know if I shall dine at all to-day." VI MONSIEUR CHERAMI It is a very sad thing to have reached the point where one wonders whether one will have any dinner. And yet there are every day in Paris people who find themselves in that predicament; but it is comforting to know that such people generally end by dining; some very meagrely, to be sure, others moderately well, and others very well indeed and as if they were still prosperous. Those who succeed in dining well generally accomplish that end by some stratagem, by some new exertion of the imagination, which, however, must well-nigh have exhausted its ingenuity. What seems to me most surprising is that they dine gayly, with an excellent appetite, and with no concern for the morrow. One becomes accustomed to everything, they say; if that is philosophy, I do not envy the philosophers. Especially when one has fallen into adversity by his own fault, his misconduct, his dissipated life, it would seem that adversity must be most painful, most bitter, most difficult to endure, and that shame must be his constant companion. Those who are really victims of the injustice of fate, or of the stupidity of their contemporaries, can, at all events, hold their heads erect and refrain from blushing because of their poverty. Such were Homer, who was not appreciated during his life; Plautus, who was reduced to the necessity of turning a potter's wheel; Xylander, who sold his work on Dion Cassius to obtain a crust of bread; Lelio Girardi, author of a curious history of the Greek and Latin poets, who was reduced to a similar extremity; Usserius, too, a learned chronologist; Cornelius Agrippa, who wrote on the vanity of learning, and the excellent qualities of womankind; and the illustrious Miguel Cervantes, to whom we owe the admirable romance of _Don Quixote_.