"You answered me that you would do without the consent of the Chambers: is not that it?"

"Precisely: that it what I have taken the great liberty of saying to Mr. Joseph, and what I repeat here to citizen Lucien, begging him to tell me his opinion about it also, himself, apart from his paternal tenderness for his diplomatic conquest."

The discussion perhaps would have stopped there to our great regret, and we were about to start for the door, to leave the Consul free to come out of his bath; he had already made a movement to do so and his body-servant was still holding his sheet spread out, ready to receive his master and to dry him by wrapping him in it, when this master, changing his mind all at once, said to us loud enough to make us turn round:

"And then, gentlemen, think what you please about it, but give this affair up as lost both of you; you, Lucien, on account of the sale in itself, you, Joseph, because I shall get along without the consent of any one whomsoever, do you understand?"

I admit that in the presence of the body-servant I felt hurt at this profession of faith on so delicate a subject, and that there escape from me a smile of astonishment at least, which, I have reason to believe, betrayed my thought, and perhaps even more than my thought of the moment, and in spite of the absolute silence which I maintained, was perhaps the distant or preparatory cause of the tempest which was brewing, not in a tea-pot, according to the proverb, but rather in the bathtub of him who was beginning to make all the sovereigns of Europe quake.

It was Joseph who furnished the final cause, to continue to speak like the disciples of sculapius, of the development of this tempest, because, in reply to this really very inconsiderate affirmation on the part of the chief magistrate of the Republic, followed by his "do you understand," Joseph said to him approaching the bathtub again:

"And you will do well, my dear brother, not to expose your plan to parliamentary discussion, for I declare to you that I am the first one to place himself, if it is necessary, at the head of the opposition which can not fail to be made to you."

I was preparing to support Joseph on the same side, if in a tone not so vehement, when the more than Olympian bursts of laughter of the first Consul checked all at once the word on my lips. Since this laugh was evidently forced, it did not last long, and Joseph, become redder and redder from anger and almost stuttering, said:

"Laugh, laugh, laugh, then! None the less I will do what I say, and although I do not like to mount the tribune, this time they shall see me there.

At these words, the Consul, lifting himself half way out of the bath-tub in which he had sunk down again, said to him in a tone which I will call energetically serious and solemn:

"You You will have no need to stand forth as orator of the opposition, for I repeat to you that this discussion will not take place, for the reason that the plan which is not fortunate enough to obtain your approbation, conceived by me, negotiated by me, will be ratified and executed by me all alone, do you understand? By me who snap my fingers at your opposition."

After these words, the Consul sank down tranquilly in the waves whitened with Cologne-water of his bath-tub. But Joseph, in the tone of the greatest anger, with which his very handsome face seemed inflamed, replied to him immediately:

"Very well! I tell you, general, that you, I, all of us, if you do what you say, may get ready to go and rejoin in a short time the poor innocent devils whom you have so legally, so humanely, above all so justly caused to be transported to Sinnamary."

The blow was struck hard. Useless and silent censurer of this scene between my two elder brothers, I wished and did not dare to leave it. I may say that I felt painfully the offense of these severe and only too just words for him to whom they were addressed. However, I did not have time to linger over it, for there followed an aquatic explosion from which I was luckily protected by my position somewhat distant from the bath-tub, an explosion which had been caused by the rising first and then the sudden sinking down again of the Consul in his bath-tub, the whole accompanied by these words addressed only to Joseph:

"You are an insolent fellow! I ought "

I did not hear the rest, and I believe that nothing followed this beginning of a sentence. I observed only then that following the difference existing between the two characters, exasperated, as it seemed to me, to the same pitch, the paleness of the Consul contrasted singularly with the redness of Joseph ; and finding myself by my sort of silent neutrality in the midst of sharp or offensive remarks, which had been exchanged, as it were raised to the height of the role of peacemaker, and yet not wishing to pose as one, I tried to attain this end, by seeming to take what was going on as a sort of joke, and I quoted rather gaily, with a bombastic accent, the famous "Quos ego . . ." of Vergil; for in fact the image of Neptune rebuking the waves let loose in spite of him had seemed to my mind just a little ludicrous, and the "I ought" of the Neptune of the bath-tub alone reaching my ear completed for me in action at least in parody the literary translation of the celebrated reticence, the first subject of admiration for young Latinists. It is of course understood that it was only to the unsuccessful rebellion of the winds that I was supposed to compare that of my brother Joseph, while I decreed the honor of the irritated divinity to the proper person, that which each one besides understood perfectly well.

The scene had changed its aspect, or rather it had, so to speak, collapsed. Joseph, splashed to the extent of the immersion of his clothes and his face, had received all over him the most copious injection. But apparently, the nature of this perfumed flood had calmed his anger, which, in him, was never more than superficial and shortlived, for he contented himself with letting himself be sponged and dried off by the body-servant, who, to my great regret, had remained a witness of this serious folly between such actors.