[Footnote 9: But I hear an old he-goat of a centurion reply: "I have as much learning as is needful for me! I do not care to become an Arcesilas or a morose Solon!"] [Footnote 10: But for me, it is my delight to grow pale over books at night.] [Footnote 11: To my duties in the morning, to my pleasures in the evening.] [Footnote 12: The table is spread with a dish of raw vegetables, with bread of coarse barley-flour.] [Footnote 13: Together would we work and rest, and refresh ourselves after toil with pleasant festivity.] [Footnote 14: Wisdom, honor, virtue. This said aloud, so that the guest may hear. To himself, and in a low whisper, he murmurs: "Oh, for a magnificent funeral for the father-in-law!"] [Footnote 15: One must live on what he reaps.] [Footnote 16: You know, indeed, how to hold the balance of justice with an impartial hand.] [Footnote 17: But duty calls; a friend has been shipwrecked; he is cast helpless on the Brutian rocks; all his property and his empty vows have gone to the bottom of the sea.] CHAPTER XIV THE COUNCILLOR FLACHSINFINGEN The next day after Létorière's visit to Dr. Sphex, there was an extraordinary disturbance in the house of the Aulic Councillor Flachsinfingen. It was eleven o'clock in the morning; Madame Martha Flachsinfingen, a large woman, about forty years of age, lean, pale, and solemn, clothed in a long brown dress, with a starched neckerchief and a kind of loose sack of black velvet, was conversing with her husband, the councillor, a great abdominous, rubicund man, with a jolly and simple look. Enveloped in a Chinese silk dressing-gown, his head covered with a night-cap bound with a flame-colored ribbon, the councillor seemed to listen to his wife with mingled deference and impatience. She held in her scraggy hands a note which she was reading for the second time, with profound attention, weighing each word. This note read thus: "Monsieur the Marquis of Létorière will have the honor of presenting himself at noon, to-day, to _Madame la Conseillère_ de Flachsinfingen, if she will deign to receive him." After reading it, she repeated: "'Will present himself to Madame la Conseillère.' What impudence!" "But, Martha," said the councillor, humbly, "I don't see any impudence in . . ." "You don't see! oh! certainly, you are so penetrating! you don't see that such a letter, from a libertine, from a débauché, from a Nebuchadnezzar like this Marquis of Létorière, is worse than an insult! for it is, so to speak, a premeditation and threat of insult!" "How so, Martha?" "Have you forgotten all that we have heard of this abominable man, who leaves behind him, they say, only ruined girls and guilty wives? . . . Don't you know that he is a Pharaoh, who thinks he can bewitch one with a glance . . . a kind of unbridled Tarquin, who the first time he meets a woman dares to address her in the most wicked language of gallantry?"