Little by little the plot expanded. When the pugs had revealed all their masters’ secrets and hidden thoughts, the masters themselves appeared, and in their turn gave us the paraphrase of what had preceded, together with the culmination of their passions. If you only knew how many odious persons I beheld. Imagine two old foxes in mourning for their tails: these with a couple of superannuated wolves, recumbent, {91} and gazing vacantly around; a pair of badly-licked dancing bears, waltzing to soft music; weasels with frayed ears and gloved hands, made up a staff of threadbare comedians, all professing their loves and passions on the stage. Yet I am told that outside the theatre door they would tear each other’s eyes out for a leg of mutton or horse’s ham. But I had for the moment forgotten that the secrets of public life should be carefully walled around, so I dutifully returned to my analysis, in, I own, a roundabout sort of way. The language was not very intelligible. It was all about the sorrows of unfortunate Queen Zemire and her lover Azor. You have no notion of the singular and unaccountable stuff crowded into this hybrid composition. The beautiful Zemire is a Queen of Spain, descended from a noble stock, counting among her ancestors a jolly dog named Cæsar. In the back-kitchen of the castle, and in the noble _rôle_ of turnspit, a mangey animal, but withal a worthy fellow, named Azor, turned the queen’s spit (while Queen Zemire had turned his head). He says— “Belle Zemire, O vous, blanche comme l’hermine, O mon bel ange à l’œil si doux Quand donc à fin prendrez-vous En pitié mon amour, au fond de la cuisine,” &c. &c. These verses, improvised by the pale light of the lamp, were found admirable. The friends of the poet exclaimed, “Ah! sublime! They are perfumed with the profoundest sentiment!” In vain the linguists—curs, griffins, and boars—sought to criticise. “Why,” said they, “should kitchen and cookery in a high-class composition be mixed up with flowers and sentiment? What was there in a turnspit and its associations—the devouring appetite of the queen, &c.—to fan the flame of passion?” These expressions, let fall at random, nearly cost them their seats. The verses were forcibly rendered by Azor, who scratched himself at intervals, either to relieve his feelings or lend piquancy to his love. At last the lover subsided into his daily barking prose. “Zemire! Zemire! Oh how I long to kiss the ground beneath thy feet!” (in carrying out this ardent desire he would have encountered no reasonable difficulty, as the full-bodied lady left her footprints wherever she trod—this by the way). Azor howls in his agony of heart, when the kitchen-boy all at once throws some hot cinders into his eyes to remind him of his neglected duties at the spit.