--Whether or not it be to one´s taste, it is only good taste to strike the tone given. When meeting company, we customarily tidy up appearances at the door of the apartment for whomever we are seeing; we pretend to be funny when we are sad; sad, when we would have liked to be funny. We do not want to appear out of place anywhere; so the literary hack politicizes, the political pundit talks metaphysics, the metaphysician moralizes, the moralist talks finance, the financier, letters or logic. Rather than listen or keep quiet, each ramble on about what they are ignorant of, and everyone bores each other with silly vanity or politeness. --You are in a bad mood. --I usually am. --And I think it is appropriate for me to reserve my vignette for a better time. --You mean you will wait for me to leave. --It is not that. --Or you are afraid that I might have less indulgence for you, face to face, than I would for your average gentleman. --It is not that. --Be agreeable then and tell me what it is. --That my vignette will not prove any better than those that have annoyed you. --Hmph. Tell it anyway. --No. You have had enough. --You know that of all the ways the others have enraged me, yours is the most unpleasant? --And what is mine? --That of being asked to do the thing you are dying to do. Well, my friend, I ask you, I pray you satisfy yourself. --Satisfy myself? --Begin, by God, begin. --I will try to be short. --That cannot hurt. Here, a little out of spite, I coughed, I spat, I drew my handkerchief out slowly, I blew my nose, I opened my snuff box, I took out a pinch of snuff; and I heard my fellow man say between his teeth: `If the telling is short, the preliminaries are long...´ I had the urge to call a servant under the pretext of some errand. But I did not, and I said: * * * * * It must be admitted that there are very good men, and very bad women. --One sees that every day, and sometimes without leaving the house. Go on? --Go on? I knew an Alsatian beauty. Beautiful enough to make old men come running and stop younger ones in their tracks. --I also knew her. Her name was Madame Reymer. --That is correct. A newcomer from Nancy by the name of Tanié fell madly in love with her. He was poor, one of those lost children chased from the house by harsh parents with a large family, thrown into the world with no idea what will become of them, knowing instinctually that there will never be a worse sort than the one they are fleeing from. Tanié was infatuated with Madame Raymer, consumed by a passion that gave him courage and ennobled all his actions in his eyes, so that he willingly performed those most disturbing and vile to soothe the misery of his soul. During the day he would work the docks; at evening he begged in the streets. --It was wonderful, but it could not last.