Chapter I: Gaillard was a wrecker, a smuggler. He was an honest man

Ships are the effect and cause of commerce. Commerce cheats, commerce adulterates, commerce is bad. To wreck ships engaged in knavery is good. Gaillard the smuggler robbed the revenue, you say; so do monarchs. You take off your hat to a king. I raise mine to Gaillard――to a man. You call me crazy. Keep your temper; I keep mine. You are an idiot. I should like to punch your head. Chapter II. Gaillard was considered ugly. He was not. He had a bump. A dromedary has a hump. The dromedary is beautiful. He had a squint――it is better to squint than to be blind. His eyes were green――that is the colour of Nature’s beauteous sylvan dress. His mouth was extremely large――so is that of the hippopotamus. The hippopotamus is a charming fellow. Gaillard had the beauty of the dromedary, the loveliness of Nature in his eyes, the charm of the hippopotamus. Gaillard was sublime. Chapter III. Gaillard sprang into the sea to bathe; this happened once a year. You will admit that once in three hundred and sixty-five days was not too often. An octopus――a devil fish――was watching him. Man and monster, they eyed each other. Gaillard trembled at its glance――he was not brave. I saw it once, and did not tremble; I am brave. It was at the Aquarium. The octopus has eight legs; Gaillard wished for eighty, but his two sufficed. Fear gave them the swiftness of two hundred. He ran. You would have run. Should I have done so? Everything is possible. It is possible I should have run.

F. P. DELAFOND.

_The Weekly Dispatch._ September 13, 1885.

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THE CAT.

The cat is the concrete symbol of a vacillating politician.

It is always on the fence.

It is the feline embodiment of one of the profoundest human principles wrenched from the circumambience of the Unknown, and hurled into the bosom of consciousness.

Nine tailors make one man. The cat has nine times the life of one man, for it has nine lives. Possession, also, is nine points of the law. Behold a legal possession of existence equal to the span of eighty-one clothiers’ lives.

Let us bow reverently before this august fact.

The wanderer by the midnight seashore, when the moon――that argent cornucopia of heaven――is streaming forth her flowers and fruits of radiance, and the illimitable is illuminated by the ineffable, will have remarked the phosphorescent ridges that scintillate along the billows’ tops, until the breakers seem to curve and snort like horses’ necks with manes of lightning clad.

So, O man, when in the darkness of thine own chamber, thou passeth thine hand along the furry spine of this feline phantom of the back yard, the electric sparks dart forth, and a flash of lightning fuses together the fingers and the fur.

Exquisite antithesis of Nature! The fireside embraces the ocean. The hearthstone is paved with seashells. The monsters of the deep disport, reflected in the glowing embers. The infinite Abroad is brought into amalgamation with the finite at Home.

The ocean roars.

The cat only purrs.

The billows rise and culminate and break.

The cat’s back rises. The feline tide is up, and we have a permanent billow of fur and flesh.

O impossible co-existence of uncontradictory contradictions!

The duke of Wellington _was_ pronounced the greatest captain of his age. Gen. Grant _is_ pronounced the greatest captain of his.

The greatest captain of any age was the captain with his whiskers.

Let us not call this the tergiversation of history. Call it rather the tergiversation of nature.

The whiskers of the captain.

The whiskers of the cat.

The hirsute exponent of martial supremacy. The feline symbolism of the Bearded Lady, crossing her claws before the family fire.

Jealousy has been called the green-eyed monster.

The cat is the green-eyed monster.

Both lie in wait. Neither destroys its victim without toying with it. One is the foe, the other the friend, of the fireside. Either is to be met with in almost every family. Each is of both sexes.

“Old Tom” gin, in excess, is one of man’s bitterest bibulous foes; man is the bitterest bibulous foe of old tom cats.

Osculations between sky and earth! O lips of the Seen touching the lips of the Unseen! O wave of thought careering through the asymptotes of cloudland, crystalizing into angelic foci the tangents of humanity.

The stars are out at night.

So are cats!

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A MANIFESTO BY HICTOR VUGO

We live and move and have our being. By we I express civilisation, which consists first of Paris, then the world at large. We are born with generous instincts. We are naturally humane. I call upon the French Revolution of ’92-3 to prove this theory. We cannot all be Arabis. That would be too supreme a dream. But we can all admire him at a distance. Those horrible _canaille_ the English have warred against a weak race of striplings, descendants of the glorious mummies. They have fought, and aided by the magnificent single-minded abstinent France have won. _Mon dieu!_ Why was I not there? With one impassioned foot firmly planted on the escarpment of Tel-el-Kebir, I would have kept these British brutes at bay. I would have quoted one of my rhythmic poems, and they would have piled arms, awe-stricken and listened. Or, perhaps, these island savages in their ignorance, would have shot me. They are sufficiently unrefined for that. Ah! the thought is too dreadful. France, my beloved France, would in such a case have died also, for with me will perish all the ideas which go to make a great race――Adolphe, bring me a cigarette and a _café noir_. I would be calm.

THE NINETY-NINE GUARDSMEN.
_By Alexandre Dumas._

This parody, which is to be found in Bret Harte’s _Sensation Novels Condensed_ is an ingenious mixture of “The Three Musqueteers” and “The Vicomte de Bragelonne.”

The second chapter is the best:――