M. Bergeret had reached this point in his work when Euphémie opened the study door with the noise that always accompanied her slightest movement, and repeated the considerate message sent by Madame Bergeret to her husband: “Madame wants to know how you would like your eggs cooked?” M. Bergeret’s only reply was a gentle request to Euphémie to withdraw. He went on writing: “ran the risk of breaking, it was customary to lower them, by lifting them out of the well in which their heels were inserted....” Euphémie stood fixed against the door, while M. Bergeret finished his slip. “The masts were then stored abaft either on a crossbar or a bridge.” “Sir, Madame told me to say that the eggs come from Trécul’s.” “Una omnes fecere pedem.”[14] [14] _Una omnes fecere pedem_, then with one accord they veered out the sheet. Filled with a sense of sadness M. Bergeret laid down his pen, for he was suddenly overwhelmed with a perception of the uselessness of his work. Unfortunately for his own happiness, he was intelligent enough to recognise his own mediocrity, and, at times, it would actually appear to him in visible shape, like a thin, little, clumsy figure dancing about on his table between the inkstand and the file. He knew it well and hated it, for he would fain have seen his personality come to him under the guise of a lissom nymph. Yet it always appeared to him in its true form, as a lanky, unlovely figure. It shocked him to see it, for he had delicate perceptions and a taste for dainty conceits. “Monsieur Bergeret,” he said to himself, “you are a professor of some distinction, an intelligent provincial, a university man with a tendency to the florid, an average scholar shackled by the barren quests of philology, a stranger to the true science of language, which can be plumbed only by men of broad, unbiassed and trenchant views. Monsieur Bergeret, you are not a scholar, for you are incapable of grasping or classifying the facts of language. Michel Bréal will never mention your poor, little, humble name. You will die without fame, and your ears will never know the sweet accents of men’s praise.” “Sir ... Sir,” put in Euphémie in urgent tones, “do answer me. I have no time to hang about. I have my work to do. Madame wants to know how you’d like your eggs done. I got them at Trécul’s and they were laid this morning.” Without so much as turning his head, M. Bergeret answered the girl in a tone of relentless gentleness: “I want you to go and never again to enter my study—at any rate, not until I call you.”