"'Sir,' said I, collecting myself, 'it is not my intention to take post.'
"'But you may,' said he, persisting in his first reply. 'You may if you choose.'
"'And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.[1] But I do not choose.'
"'But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.'
"'Defend me!' cried I. 'I travel by water. I am going down the Rhone this very afternoon; my baggage is in the boat, and I have actually paid nine livres for my passage.'
"'C'est tout égal--'tis all one,' said he.
"'Bon Dieu! What! pay for the way I go and for the way I do not go?'
"'C'est tout égal,' replied the commissary.
"'The devil it is!' said I. 'But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles first. O, England! England! thou land of liberty and climate of good-sense! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses!' cried I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe--when the director of Madame L. Blanc's conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church.
"'I go by water,' said I, 'and here's another will be for making me pay for going by oil.'"
[Footnote 1: It is the penalty--I suppose the just penalty--paid by habitually extravagant humourists, that _meaning_ not being always expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with sufficient care. Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked. The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing the revenue by possessing herrings already pickled.]
The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tristram protests that the treatment to which he is being subjected is "contrary to the law of nature, contrary to reason, contrary to the Gospel:"
"'But not to this,' said he, putting a printed paper into my hand.
"'De par le Roi.' ''Tis a pithy prolegomenon,' quoth I, and so read on.... 'By all which it appears,' quoth I, having read it over a little too rapidly, 'that if a man sets out in a post-chaise for Paris, he must go on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay for it.'