"The moon has a baleful influence, my son," said he in a thick voice. "And you'll come under it if you sit too long beneath its effulgence. That's what has happened to me. It makes one talk unmentionable imbecility." He just missed concertina-ing the last two words, and looked at me with an air of solemn triumph. "It isn't the Man in the Moon's fault, my little Asticot," he continued. "I've been having a very interesting conversation with him. He is a most polite fellow. He said if I would go up and join him he would make room for me. It's all a lie, you know, about his having been sent there for gathering sticks on a Sunday. He went of his own accord, because it was the only place where he could be four thousand miles away from any woman. Think of it, little Asticot of my heart. There are lots of lies told about the moon, he says. He looks down on the earth and sees all of us little worms wriggling in and out and over one another and thinking ourselves so important and he cracks his sides with laughing; and your bald-headed idiots with spyglasses take the cracks for mountain ranges and volcanoes. I'm going to live in the moon, away from female feminine women, and if you are good my son, you shall come too." I explained to him as delicately as I could that I should regard such a change rather as a punishment than as a reward. He broke into a laugh. "You too--with the milk of the feeding-bottle still wet on your lips? The trail of the petticoat's over us all! What has been putting the sex feminine into your little turnip-head? Have you fallen in love with Blanquette?" "No, Master," said I. "When I fall in love it will be with a very beautiful lady." Paragot pointed upwards. "I see another crack in my friend's sides. We all fall in love with beautiful ladies, my poor Asticot, one after the other, plunging into destruction with the comic sheep-headedness of the muttons of Panurge. Another woolly one over? Ho! ho! laughs the man in the moon, and crack go his sides." The door opened behind us and the proprietor of the auberge appeared on the threshold. "Give me half a litre of red wine, Monsieur Bonnivard," cried Paragot. "I am the descendant of Maître Jehan Cotard whose throat was so dry that in this world he was never known to spit." "Bien, Monsieur," said the _patron_. Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and lit it with clumsy fingers, and did not speak till his wine was brought. "My son, we are leaving Aix the first thing in the morning." I started up in alarm. We had not finished our engagement at the Restaurant du Lac. "I care no more for the Restaurant du Lac than for the rest of the idiot universe," he declared. "But Blanquette--it would break her heart." "All women's hearts can be mended for twopence." "And men's?" "They have to go about with them broken, my son, and the pieces clank and jangle and chink and jingle inside like a crate of broken crockery. We leave Aix tomorrow."