in order that you may
climb on to the top of the wall and from there throw yourself into the
pear-tree, which is against the wall. There, now do you say that I am
a blockhead, an animal?"

"No, you are a right loyal cousin, an honest man, and if you have ever
to put an enemy out off the way, I am there, ready to kill even one of
my own friends for you. I am no longer your cousin, but your brother.
Ho there! sweetheart," cried Mau-cinge to La Pasquerette, "put the
tables straight, wipe up your blood, it belongs to me, and I'll pay
you for it by giving you a hundred times as much of mine as I have
taken of thine. Make the best of it, shake the black dog, off your
back, adjust your petticoats, laugh, I wish it, look to the stew, and
let us recommence our evening prayer where we left it off. Tomorrow
I'll make thee braver than a queen. This is my cousin whom I wish to
entertain, even when to do so it were necessary to turn the house out
of windows. We shall get back everything tomorrow in the cellars.
Come, fall to!"

Thus, and in less time than it takes a priest to say his Dominus
vobiscum, the whole rookery passed from tears to laughter as it had
previously from laughter to tears. It is only in these houses of
ill-fame that love is made with the blow of a dagger, and where
tempests of joy rage between four walls. But these are things ladies
of the high-neck dress do not understand.

The said captain Cochegrue was gay as a hundred schoolboys at the
breaking up of class, and made his good cousin drink deeply, who
spilled everything country fashion, and pretended to be drunk,
spluttering out a hundred stupidities, as, that "tomorrow he would buy
Paris, would lend a hundred thousand crowns to the king, that he would
be able to roll in gold;" in fact, talked so much nonsense that the
captain, fearing some compromising avowal and thinking his brain quite
muddled enough, led him outside with the good intention, instead of
sharing with him, of ripping Chiquon open to see if he had not a
sponge in his stomach, because he had just soaked in a big quart of
the good wine of Suresne. They went along, disputing about a thousand
theological subjects which got very much mixed up, and finished by
rolling quietly up against the garden where were the crowns of the
Lombard. Then Cochegrue, making a ladder of Chiquon's broad shoulders,
jumped on to the pear-tree like a man expert in attacks upon towns,
but Versoris, who was watching him,