"Tears were in my eyes, and I knew that Madame Renard was boiling with
rage, for she kept on nagging at me: 'Oh, how horrid! Don't you see that
he is robbing you of your fish? Do you think that you will catch
anything? Not even a frog, nothing whatever. Why, my hands are tingling,
just to think of it.'

"But I said to myself: 'Let us wait until twelve o'clock. Then this
poacher will go to lunch and I shall get my place again. As for me,
Monsieur le President, I lunch on that spot every Sunday. We bring our
provisions in Delila. But there! At noon the wretch produced a chicken in
a newspaper, and while he was eating, he actually caught another chub!

"Melie and I had a morsel also, just a bite, a mere nothing, for our
heart was not in it.

"Then I took up my newspaper to aid my digestion. Every Sunday I read the
Gil Blas in the shade by the side of the water. It is Columbine's day,
you know; Columbine, who writes the articles in the Gil Blas. I generally
put Madame Renard into a rage by pretending to know this Columbine. It is
not true, for I do not know her and have never seen her, but that does
not matter. She writes very well, and then she says things that are
pretty plain for a woman. She suits me and there are not many of her
sort.

"Well, I began to tease my wife, but she got angry immediately, and very
angry, so I held my tongue. At that moment our two witnesses who are
present here, Monsieur Ladureau and Monsieur Durdent, appeared on the
other side of the river. We knew each other by sight. The little man
began to fish again and he caught so many that I trembled with vexation
and his wife said: 'It is an uncommonly good spot, and we will come here
always, Desire.' As for me, a cold shiver ran down my back, and Madame
Renard kept repeating: 'You are not a man; you have the blood of a
chicken in your veins'; and suddenly I said to her: 'Look here, I would
rather go away or I shall be doing something foolish.'

"And she whispered to me, as if she had put a red-hot iron under my nose:
'You are not a man. Now you are going to run away and surrender your
place! Go, then, Bazaine!'

"I felt hurt, but yet I did not move, while the other fellow pulled out a
bream: Oh, I never saw such a large one before, never! And then my wife
began to talk aloud, as if she were thinking, and you can see her tricks.
She said: 'That is what one might call stolen fish, seeing that we set
the bait ourselves. At any rate, they ought to