closets and steal her delicacies, which
he devoured in secret. Occasionally, when the usual visitors made their
appearance he would treat them with civility; but as a general thing
his remarks and replies were incoherent. For instance, a lady once asked
him, "How do you feel to-day, Monsieur Margaritis?" "I have grown
a beard," he replied, "have you?" "Are you better?" asked another.
"Jerusalem! Jerusalem!" was the answer. But the greater part of the time
he gazed stolidly at his guests without uttering a word; and then his
wife would say, "The good-man does not hear anything to-day."

On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy; he
flourished his knives and shouted, "That joke dishonors me!"

As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men in
sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the same
respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture. Among
his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet discovered the
object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the community had
learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries. He insisted on
keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in the cellar of his
house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on them. But then the
month of June came round he grew uneasy with the restless anxiety of a
madman about the sale of the sack and the puncheons. Madame Margaritis
could nearly always persuade him that the wine had been sold at
an enormous price, which she paid over to him, and which he hid so
cautiously that neither his wife nor the servant who watched him had
ever been able to discover its hiding-place.

The evening before Gaudissart reached Vouvray Madame Margaritis had had
more difficulty than usual in deceiving her husband, whose mind happened
to be uncommonly lucid.

"I really don't know how I shall get through to-morrow," she had said to
Madame Vernier. "Would you believe it, the good-man insists on watching
his two casks of wine. He has worried me so this whole day, that I
had to show him two full puncheons. Our neighbor, Pierre Champlain,
fortunately had two which he had not sold. I asked him to kindly let me
have them rolled into our cellar; and oh, dear! now that the good-man
has seen them he insists on bottling them off himself!"

Madame Vernier had related the poor woman's trouble to her