He sneezed, he coughed, he spat, and swallowed the smoke with ill-disguised grimaces.
"You don't know how to smoke," said Schinner; "look at me!" With a motionless face Schinner breathed in the smoke of his cigar and let it out through his nose without the slightest contraction of feature.

Then he took another whiff, kept the smoke in his throat, removed the cigar from his lips, and allowed the smoke slowly and gracefully to escape them.
"There, young man," said the great painter.
"Here, young man, here's another way; watch this," said Georges, imitating Schinner, but swallowing the smoke and exhaling none.
"And my parents believed they had educated me!" thought Oscar, endeavoring to smoke with better grace.
But his nausea was so strong that he was thankful when Mistigris filched his cigar, remarking, as he smoked it with evident satisfaction, "You haven't any contagious diseases, I hope." Oscar in reply would fain have punched his head.
"How he does spend money!" he said, looking at Colonel Georges.

"Eight francs for Alicante and the cheese-cakes; forty sous for cigars; and his breakfast will cost him--" "Ten francs at least," replied Mistigris; "but that's how things are.
'Sharp stomachs make short purses.'" "Come, Pere Leger, let us drink a bottle of Bordeaux together," said Georges to the farmer.
"Twenty francs for his breakfast!" cried Oscar; "in all, more than thirty-odd francs since we started!" Killed by a sense of his inferiority, Oscar sat down on a stone post, lost in a revery which did not allow him to perceive that his trousers, drawn up by the effect of his position, showed the point of junction between the old top of his stocking and the new "footing,"-- his mother's handiwork.
"We are brothers in socks," said Mistigris, pulling up his own trousers sufficiently to show an effect of the same kind,--"'By the footing, Hercules.'" The count, who overheard this, laughed as he stood with folded arms under the porte-cochere, a little behind the other travellers.

However nonsensical these lads might be, the grave statesman envied their very follies; he liked their bragging and enjoyed the fun of their lively chatter.
"Well, are you to have Les Moulineaux?
for I know you went to Paris to get the money for the purchase," said the inn-keeper to Pere Leger, whom he had just taken to the stables to see a horse he wanted to sell to him.

"It will be queer if you manage to fleece a peer of France and a minister of State like the Comte de Serizy." The person thus alluded to showed no sign upon his face as he turned to look at the farmer.
"I've done for him," replied Pere Leger, in a low voice.
"Good! I like to see those nobles fooled.