Page:The Man in the Iron Mask.djvu/68

54 "Where are your verses?"

"In my head."

"Well, if they are in your head you cannot burn them."

'"True," said La Fontaine; "but if I do not burn them"

"Well, what will happen if you do not burn them?"

"They will remain in my mind, and I shall never forget them."

"The deuce!" cried Loret; "what a dangerous thing! One would go mad with it!"

"The deuce! the deuce!" repeated La Fontaine; "what can I do?"

"I have discovered the way," said Molière, who had entered just at this point of the conversation.

"What way?"

"Write them first, and burn them afterward."

"How simple it is! Well, I should never have discovered that. What a mind that devil Molière has!" said La Fontaine. Then, striking his forehead, "Oh, thou wilt never be aught but an ass, Jean La Fontaine!" he added.

"What are you saying there, my friend?" broke in Molière, approaching the poet, whose aside he had heard.

"I say I shall never be aught but an ass," answered La Fontaine, with a heavy sigh and swimming eyes. "Yes, my friend," he added, with increasing grief, "it seems that I rhyme in a slovenly manner."

"Oh, ’tis wrong to say so."

"Nay, I am a poor creature!"

"Who said so?"

"Parbleu! ’twas Pellisson; did you not, Pellisson?"

Pellisson, again lost in his work, took good care not to answer.

"But if Pellisson said you were so," cried Molière, "Pellisson has seriously offended you."

"Do you think so?"

"Ah! I advise you, as you are a gentleman, not to leave an insult like that unpunished."

"How?" exclaimed La Fontaine.

"Did you ever fight?"

"Once only, with a lieutenant in the light horse."

"What wrong had he done you?"

"It seems he had run away with my wife."

"Ah! ah!" said Molière, becoming slightly pale; but, as at La Fontaine's declaration, the others had turned round, Molière kept upon his lips the rallying smile which had so