“My dear friend, your skin is white, and your soul also. Everything astonishes you. That candour is your most striking charm. You’re deceived by anyone who wants to deceive you. They make you believe that Mosaide is a hundred and thirty years old; but he is hardly older than sixty. They told you that for years he lived in the Great Pyramid, but as a fact he has been a banker at Lisbon. And it depended only on me to pass in your eyes as a Salamander.” “What, Jahel, do you tell me the truth? Your uncle--” “Yes, and that is the secret of his jealousy. He believes the Abbé Coignard to be his rival. He disliked him instinctively, at first sight. But it is a great deal worse since he overheard a few words of the conversation I had with that good abbé in the thorn bush, and I’m sure he hates him now as the cause of my flight and my elopement. For, after all, I’ve been abducted, my friend; a fact that ought to enhance my worth in your eyes. I was certainly very ungrateful to leave so good an uncle. But I could not endure any longer the slavery he kept me in. And I also had an ardent wish to become rich, and it is very natural, is it not, to wish for all the good things when one is young and pretty? We have but one life, and that is short enough. No one has taught me all the fine lies about the immortality of the soul.” “Alas! Jahel,” I exclaimed, in an ardour of love, provoked by her own coolness. “Alas! I did not want anything else with you at the Chateau des Sablons. What was wanting for your happiness?” She made me a sign to show that M. d’Anquetil was observing us. The harness had been repaired and our carriage rolled on again along the road bordered on both sides by vineyards. We stopped at Nuits to sup and to sleep. My dear tutor drank half-a-dozen bottles of Burgundy, which warmed up his eloquence marvellously. M. d’Anquetil kept him company, glass in hand, but to hold his own in conversation also was a thing of which this nobleman was not quite capable. The meat was good, the beds were bad. M. Coignard slept in the lower chamber, under the stairs, in the same feather bed with the host and his wife, and all three thought they would be suffocated. M. d’Anquetil with Jahel took the upstairs room, where the bacon and the onions were suspended on hooks driven into the ceiling. I myself climbed by means of a ladder to a loft and stretched out on a bundle of straw. Being awakened by the moonlight, a ray of which fell into my eyes, I suddenly saw Jahel in her night-cap coming through the trap door. At a cry that I gave she put her finger to her lips. “Hush!” she said to me, “Maurice is as drunk as a stevedore and a marquis. He sleeps the sleep of Noah.” “Who is Maurice?” I inquired, rubbing my eyes. “It’s Anquetil. Who did you think it was?” “Nobody, but I did not know that his name was Maurice.” “It’s not long that I knew it myself, but never mind.” “You are right, Jahel, it’s of no importance.”