its cage, while he roars in anger: "That's it! Just as I was
about, with the velvety tones of my instrument, to imitate the
twittering of little birds in the forest, you have to interrupt with
your infernal din!" The caustic quality of French wit is illustrated
plenteously by Voltaire. There is food for meditation in his utterance:
"Nothing is so disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged." He it was, too,
who sneered at England for having sixty religions and only one gravy. To
an adversary in argument who quoted the minor prophet Habakkuk, he
retorted contemptuously: "A person with a name like that is capable of
saying anything."

But French wit is by no means always of the cutting sort. Its more
amiable aspect is shown by the declaration of Brillat Savarin to the
effect that a dinner without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only
one eye. Often the wit is merely the measure of absurdity, as when a
courtier in speaking of a fat friend said: "I found him sitting all
around the table by himself." And there is a ridiculous story of the
impecunious and notorious Marquis de Favieres who visited a Parisian
named Barnard, and announced himself as follows:

"Monsieur, I am about to astonish you greatly. I am the Marquis de
Favieres. I do not know you, but I come to you to borrow five-hundred
luis."

Barnard answered with equal explicitness:

"Monsieur, I am going to astonish you much more. I know you, and I am
going to lend them to you."

The amiable malice, to use a paradoxical phrase, which is often
characteristic of French tales, is capitally displayed in the following:

The wife of a villager in Poitou became ill, and presently fell into a
trance, which deceived even the physician, so that she was pronounced
dead, and duly prepared for burial. Following the local usage, the body
was wrapped in a sheet, to be borne to the burial place on the shoulders
of four men chosen from the neighborhood. The procession followed a
narrow path leading across the fields to the cemetery. At a turning, a
thorn tree stood so close that one of the thorns tore through the sheet
and lacerated the woman's flesh. The blood flowed from the wound, and
she suddenly aroused to consciousness. Fourteen years elapsed before the
good wife actually came to her deathbed. On this occasion, the
ceremonial was repeated. And now, as the bearers of the body approached
the turn of the path, the husband called to them:

"Look out for the thorn tree, frien