"Goodbye," said Foiral.
"Wait a minute," said the stranger. "Where can I put up in this village? Is there an inn?"
"No," said Foiral, turning into his yard.
"Hell!" said the stranger. "I suppose someone has a room I can sleep in?"
"No," said Foiral.
That set the fellow back a bit. "Well," said he at last, "I'll have to look around, anyway."
So he went up the street. Foiral saw him talking to Madame Arago, and she was shaking her head. Then he saw him trying it on at the baker's, and the baker shook his head as well. However, he bought a loaf there, and some cheese and wine from Barilles. He sat down on the bench outside and ate it; then he went pottering off up the slope.
Foiral thought he'd keep an eye on him, so he followed to the top of the village, where he could see all over the hillside. The fellow was just mooning about; he picked up nothing, he did nothing. Then he began to drift over to the little farm-house, where the well is, a few hundred yards above the rest of the houses.
This happened to be Foiral's property, through his wife: a good place, if they'd had a son to live in it. Seeing the stranger edging that way, Foiral followed, not too fast, you understand, and not too slow either. Sure enough, when he got there, there was the fellow peering through the chinks in the shutters, even trying the door. He might have been up to anything.
He looked round as Foiral came up. "Nobody lives here?" he said.
"No," said Foiral.
"Who does it belong to?" said the stranger.
Foiral hardly knew what to say. In the end he had to admit it was his.
"Will you rent it to me?" said the stranger.
"What's that?" said Foiral.
"I want the house for six months," said the stranger.
"What for?" said Foiral.
"Damn it!" said the stranger. "To live in."
"Why?" said Foiral.
The stranger holds up his hand. He picks hold of the thumb. He says, very slowly, "I am an artist, a painter."
"Yes," says Foiral.
Then the stranger lays hold of his forefinger. "I can work here. I like it. I like the view. I like those two ilex trees."
"Very good," says Foiral.
Then the stranger takes hold of his middle finger. "I want to stay here six months."
"Yes," says Foiral.
Then the stranger takes hold of his third finger. "In this house. Which, I may say, on this yellow ground, looks interestingly like a die on a desert. Or does it look like a skull?"
"Ah!" says Foiral.
Then the stranger takes hold of his little finger, and he says, "How much do you want to let me live and work in this house for six months?"
"Why?" says Foiral.
At this the stranger began to stamp up and down. They had quite an argument. Foiral clinched the matter by saying that people didn't rent houses in that part of the world; everyone had his own.
"It is necessary," said the stranger, grinding his teeth, "for me to paint pictures here."
"So much the worse," said Foiral.
The stranger uttered a number of cries in some foreign gibberish, possibly that of hell itself. "I see your soul," said he, "as a small and exceedingly sterile black marble, on a waste of burning white alkali."
Foiral, holding his two middle fingers under his thumb, extended the first and fourth in the direction of the stranger, careless of whether he gave offence.
"What will you take for the shack?" said the stranger. "Maybe I'll buy it."
It was quite a relief to Foiral to find that after all he was just a plain, simple, ordinary lunatic. Without a proper pair of pants to his backside, he was offering to buy this excellent sound house, for which Foiral would have asked twenty thousand francs, had there been anyone of whom to ask it.
"Come on," said the stranger. "How much?"
Foiral, thinking he had wasted enough time, and not objecting to an agreeable sensation, said, "Forty thousand."
Said the stranger, "I'll give you thirty-five."
Foiral laughed heartily.
"That's a good laugh," said the stranger. "I should like to paint a laugh like that. I should express it by a mlange of the roots of recently extracted teeth. Well, what about it? Thirty-five? I can pay you a deposit right now." And, pulling out a wallet, this Croesus among madmen rustled one, two, three, four, five thousand-franc notes under Foiral's nose.
"It'll leave me dead broke," he said. "Still, I expect I can sell it again?"
"If God wills, "said Foiral.
"Anyway, I could come here now and then," said the other. "My God! I can paint a showful of pictures here in six months. New York'll go crazy. Then I'll come back here and paint another show."
Foiral, ravished with joy, ceased attempting to understand. He began to praise his house furiously: he dragged the man inside, showed him the oven, banged the walls, made him look up the chimney, into the shed, down the well "All right. All right," said the stranger. "That's grand. Everything's grand. Whitewash the walls. Find me some woman to come and clean and cook. I'll go back to Perpignan and turn up in a week with my things. Listen, I want that table chucked in, two or three of the chairs, and the bedstead. I'll get the rest. Here's your deposit."
"No, no," said Foiral. "Everything must be done properly, before witnesses. Then, when the lawyer comes, he can make out the papers. Come back with me. I'll call Arago, he's a very honest man. Guis, very honest. Vign, honest as the good earth. And a bottle of old wine. I have it. It shall cost nothing."
"Fine!" said the blessed madman, sent by God.
Back they went. In came Arago, Guis, Vign, all as honest as the day. The deposit was paid, the wine was opened, the stranger called for more, others crowded in; those who were not allowed in stood outside to listen to the laughter. You'd have thought there was a wedding going on, or some wickedness in the house. In fact, Foiral's old woman went and stood in the doorway every now and then, just to let people see her.
There was no doubt about it, there was something very magnificent about this madman. Next day, after he had gone, they talked him over thoroughly. "To listen," said little Guis, "is to be drunk without spending a penny. You think you understand; you seem to fly through the air; you have to burst out laughing."
"I somehow had the delectable impression that I was rich," said Arago. "Not, I mean, with something in the chimney, but as if I well, as if I were to spend it. And more."
"I like him," said little Guis. "He is my friend."
"Now you speak like a fool," said Foiral. "He is mad. And it is I who deal with him."
"I thought maybe he was not so mad when he said the house was like an old skull looking out of the ground," said Guis, looking sideways, as well he might.
"Nor a liar, perhaps?" said Foiral. "Let me tell you, he said also it was like a die on a desert. Can it be both?"
"He said in one breath," said Arago, "that he came from Paris. In the next, that he was an American."
"Oh, yes. Unquestionably a great liar," said Ques. "Perhaps one of the biggest rogues in the whole world, going up and down. But, fortunately, mad as well."
"So he buys a house," said Lafago. "If he had his wits about him, a liar of that size, he'd take it like that. As it is, he buys it. Thirty-five thousand francs!"