ended to make a joke about your old women.

--Ah, you, you never understand anything. Where did you come from?

--Why, from your school, from the seminary, and neither you nor my masters
taught me that there.

--To me! to me! to me! you speak in such a manner to me? Oh clever fox!
_Alopex, alopex_. Well, you are sharper than I am, cried the old Cure,
striking the table and looking at Marcel with astonishment mingled with
admiration. Why should I concern myself about your future? You will
succeed, my dear fellow, you will succeed. Oh, oh, you are a master. A
gray-beard like I cannot teach you anything. Jesus, Mary, Joseph! That is
my nephew! My dear old Ridoux, Cure of St. Nicholas, allow me to
congratulate you. Monsieur le Cure of Althausen, I swear you will become a
bishop. Monseigneur, I drink your health!

LXVII.

IN A GLASS.

"The fumes of the wine were working
in my veins; it was one of those
moments of intoxication when everything
one sees, everything one hears,
speaks to us of the beloved."

A. DE MUSSET (_Confession d'un enfant du Siecle_).

They conversed for a long time still, and they drank too, so much so that
Marcel went to his room with his brain charged with the fumes of the wine.
He opened his window and breathed with delight the fresh air of night.
While he gazed on the stars which were rising slowly in the sky, he tried
to analyze the new sensation which he experienced. "How a few mouthfuls of
liquor alter a man," he said to himself.

He felt himself to be totally different, and he allowed his thoughts to
wander in an ocean of delights. His ardent and ecstatic imagination
launched itself into space. Bright unknown worlds rose before him with
their atmosphere saturated with warmth, with caresses, and with perfumes.
He saw the future, and it appeared to him radiant. There were sons without
number and feasts without end; the entire universe belonged to him. He flew
from planet to planet without effort or fatigue, borne by a mysterious wing
into the fields of the Infinite.

He discovered an unknown audacity, and all obstacles subsided before his
powerful will. No more barriers, no more bolts, no more doors, no more
pretences, no more social chains, no more terrible father, no more
servant-mistress; Suzanne alone remained in all her youthful grace and her
chaste nudity. For, after having wandered in boundless space, it was
towards her that his hopes, his desires, his aspirat