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 café 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
a month later; and when he had sat in the Quimperlé jail for a month,
he reappeared in the little village of St. Gildas soured, thirsty, and
burning for revenge. Of course we named him the Red Admiral, and he
accepted the name with suppressed fury. The Purple Emperor, on the other hand, had gained his imperial title
legitimately, for it was an undisputed fact that the only specimen of
that beautiful butterfly, Apatura Iris, or the Purple Emperor, as it
is called by amateurs--the only specimen that had ever been taken in
Finistère or in Morbihan--was captured and brought home alive by Joseph
Marie Gloanec, ever afterward to be known as the Purple Emperor. When the capture of this rare butterfly became known the Red Admiral
nearly went crazy. Every day for a week he trotted over to the Groix
Inn, where the Purple Emperor lived with his niece, and brought his
microscope to bear on the rare newly captured butterfly, in hopes of
detecting a fraud. But this specimen was genuine, and he leered through
his microscope in vain. "No chemicals there, Admiral," grinned the Purple Emperor; and the Red
Admiral chattered with rage. To the scientific world of Brittany and France the capture of an
Apatura Iris in Morbihan was of great importance. The Museum of Quimper
offered to purchase the butterfly, but the Purple Emperor, though a
hoarder of gold, was a monomaniac on butterflies, and he jeered at the
Curator of the Museum. From all parts of Brittany and France letters
of inquiry and congratulation poured in upon him. The French Academy
of Sciences awarded him a prize, and the Paris Entomological Society
made him an honorary member. Being a Breton peasant, and a more than
commonly pig-headed one at that, these honours did not disturb his
equanimity; but when the little hamlet of St. Gildas elected him mayor,
and, as is the custom in Brittany under such circumstances, he left his
thatched house to take up an official life in the little Groix Inn, his
head became completely turned. To be mayor in a village of nearly one
hundred and fifty people! It was an empire! So he became unbearable,
drinking himself viciously drunk every night of his life, maltreating
his niece, Lys Trevec, like the barbarous old wretch that he was, and
driving the Red Admiral nearly frantic with his eternal harping on the
capture of Apatura Iris. Of course he refused to tell where he had
caught the butterfly. The Red Admiral stalked his footsteps, but in vain. "He! he! he!" nagged the Purple Emperor, cuddling his chin over a glass
of cider; "I saw you sneaking about the St. Gildas spinny yesterday
morning. So you think you can find another Apatura Iris by running
after me? It won't do, Admiral, it won't do, d'ye see?" The Red Admiral turned yellow with mortification and envy, but the next
day he actually took to his bed, for the Purple Emperor had brought
home not a butterfly but a live chrysalis, which, if successfully
hatched, would become a perfect specimen of the invaluable Apatura
Iris. This was the last straw. The Red Admiral shut himself up in
his little stone cottage, and for weeks now he had been invisible to
everybody except 'Fine Lelocard who carried him a loaf of bread and a
mullet or langouste every morning. The withdrawal of the Red Admiral from the society of St. Gildas
excited first the derision and finally the suspicion of the Purple
Emperor. What deviltry could he be hatching? Was he experimenting with
chemicals again, or was he engaged in some deeper plot, the object
of which was to discredit the Purple Emperor? Roux, the postman,
who carried the mail on foot once a day from Bannalec, a distance of
fifteen miles each way, had brought several suspicious letters, bearing
English stamps, to the Red Admiral, and the next day the Admiral had
been observed at his window grinning up into the sky and rubbing his
hands together. A night or two after this apparition the postman left
two packages at the Groix Inn for a moment while he ran across the way
to drink a glass of cider with me.