"All right, mamzelle, that's enough. I won't stand near you any more, never fear! If you don't like it, why, I----"
"Oh! how wrong-headed you are, Monsieur Georget! a body can't give you a little advice, eh?"
But the young messenger was no longer listening to the pretty flower girl; he walked away with a very pronounced frown, and sat down upon one of the steps of the Château d'Eau. He had hardly settled down when another youngster of nineteen, tall, strong and active, with his cap cocked over one ear in true roistering fashion, came and stood in front of him, crying:
"Ah! here's Georget! here's my little Georget! I am glad of that; I thought he must have been swallowed by the whale on exhibition over yonder, behind us. To be sure, I know that it isn't alive; but never mind, you might have crawled into its mouth. I say, Georget, have you seen the whale?"
"Let me alone, I don't feel like talking!"
"Well! I paid to see the whale, because as I'd never seen the sea, I said to myself: 'That will give me an idea of its inhabitants.'--But confound it! how I was sold! Just fancy--I went into a long, narrow place, like a corridor with boarded walls. I couldn't see anything, no water at all. I said to myself: 'Where in the deuce is the whale?' but there was a fellow in a sailor's suit, walking up and down the corridor, singing out at the top of his lungs: 'See, ladies and gentlemen, look, examine this rare animal! It's the first whale that's been seen in France since the Roman conquest! It was harpooned at Havre and would have been brought to Paris alive, if there had been room enough for it in a first-class carriage!'--When I heard that, I squinted up my eyes to find the marine monster. When I first went into the corridor, I had noticed something like a pile of earth, on the floor between two boards, and I said to myself: 'It seems that they are going to plant flowers in the place to brighten it up!' But not at all: that black thing, between two boards, was the whale! I discovered it when I reached the end of the corridor, because then I saw a kind of head, with a beard, at one end of what I had taken for earth. I was mad, I tell you! I regretted my money, and I said to the sailor: 'If you'd told me beforehand that I was going to see a whale in a box, and dry as a herring, I wouldn't have come into your old barrack!'--Well, little Georget, why don't you laugh?"