“I dealt with it, Sir, as Agesilaus unceremoniously did with one victim upon the altar of Chalciœcious Pallas, at the same time that with all due ceremony he was sacrificing another. An ox was the premeditated and customary victim; the extemporaneous and extraordinary one was a six-footed ‘small deer.’ Plutarch thought the fact worthy of being recorded; and we may infer from it that the Spartans did not always comb their long hair so carefully as the Three Hundred did at Thermopylæ, when on the morning of that ever glorious fight, they made themselves ready to die there in obedience to the institutions of their country. What the King of Lacedæmon did with his crawler, I did with my skipper;—I cracked it, Sir.” “And for what imaginable reason can you have thought fit to publish such an incident to the world?” “For what reason, Sir?—why, that Hop-o'-my-thumb the critic may know what he has to expect, if I lay hold of him!” CHAPTER LXXXIX. A CHAPTER CHARACTERISTIC OF FRENCH ANTIQUARIES, FRENCH LADIES, FRENCH LAWYERS, FRENCH JUDGES, FRENCH LITERATURE, AND FRENCHNESS IN GENERAL. _Quid de pulicibus? vitæ salientia puncta._ COWLEY. Now, Reader, having sent away the small Critic with a flea in his ear, I will tell you something concerning one of the curiosities of literature. The most famous flea, for a real flea, that has yet been heard of,—for not even the King of the Fleas, who, as Dr. Clarke and his fellow traveller found to their cost, keeps his court at Tiberias, approaches it in celebrity,—nor the flea of that song, which Mephistopheles sung in the cellar at Leipzig,—that flea for whom the King ordered breeches and hose from his own tailor; who was made prime minister; and who, when he governed the realm, distinguished himself, like Earl Grey, by providing for all his relations:—the most illustrious, I say, of all fleas,—_pulicum facile princeps_—was that flea which I know not whether to call Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, or Pasquier's flea, or the flea of Poictiers. In the year 1579, when the _Grands Jours_, or Great Assizes, were held at Poictiers under President de Harlay, Pasquier, who was one of the most celebrated advocates, most accomplished scholars, and most learned men in France, attended in the exercise of his profession. Calling there one day upon Madame des Roches and her daughter, Mademoiselle Catherine, whom he describes as _l'une des plus belles et sages de nostre France_, while he was conversing with the young lady he espied a flea, _parquée au beau milieu de son sein_.