“And then I woke up, if I was asleep; and if I wasn’t, I wish I could find the store again, for I’d be the greatest dialect-writer of the age if I could get goods on credit there. Say, waiter, we came for lunch, not supper.”
When a Frenchman sets out to write a tale that shall be wholly innocuous, he succeeds--and thereby drives his readers to seek in De Maupassant and Zola the antidote for his poisoning puerility.
He generally lays the scene in London, that he may air his ignorance of things foreign; and when the tale is done it contains absolutely nothing that would bring the blush of shame to any cheek in Christendom, seek said cheek where you might.
The following is a fair sample of the unharmful French story. I trust that if it had been printed without preamble or credit, the discerning reader would have exclaimed, upon reading it, “From the French!” I have called it--
In the great city of London, which, as you may know, is in England, there is a bridge, famous throughout the whole town as London Bridge. One dark night, many years ago, two men started to cross it in opposite directions, and running into each other, their heads crashed together in the fog which day and night envelops the city.
“_Parbleu!_” cried one, a fellow of infinite wealth; “but have you, then, no better use for your head than to make of it a battering-ram?”
“_Sapristi!_” replied the other, speaking in the coarse tones of an English mechanic out of work. “What matters it what I do with it? A moment more and I shall be in the Thames” (a large river corresponding to our Seine, and in equal demand by suicides). “To-night, for the first time in my life, I commit suicide!”
“Why, then,” said the other, “we will jump together, for it is for that purpose that I have come to this great bridge.”
“But,” said the mechanic, “why should you commit suicide? I can tell by the feeling of your garments that you are rich, and by the softness of your head that you are noble.”
“True, I am both of those things, but, also, I have exhausted every pleasure in life but the pleasure of suicide, and would now try that. But you, you are a mechanic out of work, as I can tell by your speech. Why should you seek pleasure instead of employment?”