“Here I stepped in and told the gardener that his lady did not mean _cats_ or females, but simply _feet_, measures, and scansions of poetry. This mollified him, and the lady courtesied to me, and resumed: “‘Yes, darling--_ogre_’--this last was spoken _sub voce_--‘yes, dearest, the gentleman’s right. Joseph is a poet; Pierre is a lunatic; and the gentleman himself is beyond all question as deeply in love as he can get; and these are the reasons why neither describes the person who attended with him alike. That prince of soldiers, who because he was so terrible in war, when he shook his spear, the English call Shake-the-spear, says that-- “‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool Reason comprehends. The lover, the lunatic, and the poet are of imagination All compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold-- That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things, The poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives To airy nothings a local habitation and a name.’ “‘But what, my dear, has all this to do with the questions I asked you? Look here, Ninette; I believe it’s you that’s gone mad, rose in love--_sacre!_--I wish I could catch you and your Shake-the-spear loving once. I’d fix him and you too, my lady, that I would! I’d fix his flint so that he wouldn’t shake any more spears around my garden, that I would! Will you have done with all your rigmarole, and tell what you know?’ “‘Certainly. The gentleman’s sweetheart, who came with him to-day, and who went with me into my private room to arrange her hair and adjust her petticoats, was as fine and pretty a young blonde of eighteen years as ever sat a man’s heart beating triple bobmajors against his ribs. Such ankles, such feet, such a bloom upon her cheeks and lips!--ah! and such a _tournure_! such hips, such embonpoint! _Sacristie!_ it’s lucky I was not a man when I fixed her crinoline, or, _ma foi_! I should have gone mad and run off with her, leaving monsieur to mourn his loss, while I revelled in the essence of love with his _fiancée_. Besides that’---- “‘Stop, stop, Ninette--for God’s sake stop! I have lost a bottle of _Jean Lafitte_, forty odd years old, and lost my brains besides!’ “Here the whole five of us collected in a group, and an explanation followed which instantly banished all mirth from Pierre, and all poetry from _la Jardinière_.