"Robert Chalmers - Purple Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalmers Robert)

and cyanide jar. Then he rose, swung the box over his shoulder,
stuffed the poison bottles into the pockets of his silver-buttoned
velvet coat, and lighted his pipe. This latter operation was a
demoralizing spectacle, for the Purple Emperor, like all Breton
peasants, smoked one of those microscopical Breton pipes which
requires ten minutes to find, ten minutes to fill, ten minutes to
light, and ten seconds to finish. With true Breton stolidity he went
through this solemn rite, blew three puffs of smoke into the air,
scratched his pointed nose reflectively, and waddled away, calling
back an ironical "Au revoir, and bad luck to all Yankees!"

I watched him out of sight, thinking sadly of the young girl whose
life he made a hell upon earth--Lys Trevec, his niece. She never
admitted it, but we all knew what the black-and-blue marks meant
on her soft, round arm, and it made me sick to see the look of fear
come into her eyes when the Purple Emperor waddled into the cafВ
of the Groix Inn.

It was commonly said that he half-starved her. This she denied.
Marie Joseph and 'Fine Lelocard had seen him strike her the day
after the Pardon of the Birds because she had liberated three
bullfinches which he had limed the day before. I asked Lys if this
were true, and she refused to speak to me for the rest of the week.
There was nothing to do about it. If the Purple Emperor had not
been avaricious, I should never have seen Lys at all, but he could
not resist the thirty francs a week which I offered him; and Lys
posed for me all day long, happy as a linnet in a pink thorn hedge.
Nevertheless, the Purple Emperor hated me, and constantly
threatened to send Lys back to her dreary flax-spinning. He was
suspicious, too, and when he had gulped down the single glass of
cider which proves fatal to the sobriety of most Bretons, he would
pound the long, discoloured oaken table and roar curses on me, on
Yves Terrec, and on the Red Admiral. We were the three objects
in the world which he most hated: me, because I was a foreigner,
and didn't care a rap for him and his butterflies; and the Red
Admiral, because he was a rival entomologist.

He had other reasons for hating Terrec.

The Red Admiral, a little wizened wretch, with a badly adjusted
glass eye and a passion for brandy, took his name from a butterfly
which predominated in his collection. This butterfly, commonly
known to amateurs as the "Red Admiral," and to entomologists as
Vanessa Atalanta, had been the occasion of scandal among the
entomologists of France and Brittany. For the Red Admiral had
taken one of these common insects, dyed it a brilliant yellow by
the aid of chemicals, and palmed it off on a credulous collector as
a South African species, absolutely unique. The fifty francs which
he gained by this rascality were, however, absorbed in a suit for
damages brought by the outraged amateur month later; and when