Part 36

"This I found," said he, "beneath the wall of Monsieur le Maire's garden. Behold the shoe of the accused."

The crowd murmured their applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:

"We will go quietly."

"Attention s'il vous plaît," said the policemen, and each holding a prisoner by the arm they made a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau and Aristide followed close behind.

"What did I tell you?" cried Aristide to the brigadier.

"It's Puégas, all the same," said the brigadier, over his shoulder.

"I bet you it's not," said Aristide, and striding swiftly to the back of the male prisoner whipped off the pig's head, and revealed to the petrified throng the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.

Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds open-mouthed, and then fell back into the arms of the Brigadier Pésac screaming with convulsive laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment. Shrieks filled the air. The vast mass of masqueraders held their sides, swayed helplessly, rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each other's garments as they fell.

Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier Pésac laughed and laughed. When he recovered some consciousness of surroundings, he found the Mayor bending over him and using language that would have made Tophet put its fingers in its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her thin fists in his face.

"Imbecile! Triple fool!" she cried.

Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing else to do.

And that was the end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stéphanie crowned with orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Never since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery was there such a hideous welter of shattered hopes.

If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguised to the Police Station, he could have disclosed his identity and that of the lady in private to awe-stricken functionaries. He might have forgiven Aristide. But Aristide had exposed him to the derision of the whole of Roussillon and the never ending wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide asked himself the question: why had the Mayor not taken him into the confidence of his masquerading escapade? Why had he not told him of the pretty widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was courting? Why had he permitted her to wear the ring which he had given her so as to spite his sainted Aunt Philomène? And why had he gone on wearing the pig's head after Aristide had told him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness of mankind.

"If it hadn't been such a good farce I should have wept like a cow," said Aristide, after relating this story. "But every time I wanted to cry, I laughed. Nom de Dieu! You should have seen his face! And the face of Madame Coquereau! She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a good farce! He was very cross with me," he added after a smiling pause, "and when I got back to Paris I tried to pacify him."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I sent him my photograph," said Aristide.

THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE

One day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of woman, I pulled him up.

"My good friend," said I, "you seem to have fallen in love with every woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really cared?"

"Mon Dieu! For all of them!" he cried, springing from his chair and making a wind-mill of himself.

"Come, come," said I; "all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance. Have you ever been really in love in your life?"

"How should I know?" said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and looked out of window.

There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He sighed.

"Perhaps there was Fleurette," said he, not looking at me. "Est-ce qu'on sait jamais? That wasn't her real name--it was Marie-Joséphine; but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know."

I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French tongue.

"The most delicate little flower you can conceive," he continued. "Tiens, she was a slender lily--so white, and her hair the flash of gold on it--and she had eyes--des yeux de pervenche, as we say in French. What is pervenche in English--that little pale-blue flower?"

"Periwinkle," said I.

"Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She had des yeux de pervenche.... She was diaphane, diaphanous ... impalpable as cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of her.... Ah! Cré nom d'un chien! Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.... I've never told you about Fleurette. It was this way."