The request to give them up to this unsympathetic Englishman, who valued them because they had belonged to his friend the late Seigneur, only exasperated him.
"I am ready to pay the highest possible price for them, as I have said," urged the Englishman, realising as he spoke that it was futile to urge the sale upon that basis.
"Money cannot buy the things that Frenchmen love.

We are not a race of hucksters," retorted the Seigneur.
"That accounts for your envious dispositions then.

You can't buy what you want--you love such curious things, I assume.

So you play the dog in the manger, and won't let other decent folk buy what they want." He wilfully distorted the other's meaning, and was delighted to see the Seigneur's fingers twitch with fury.

"But since you can't buy the things you love--and you seem to think you should--how do you get them?
Do you come by them honestly?
or do you work miracles?
When a spider makes love to his lady he dances before her to infatuate her, and then in a moment of her delighted aberration snatches at her affections.