Often, when he was talking in the presence of five or six other people, he would take the lid off a jar on the counter, dip his hand into it and begin to nibble at something sweet; the glass jar remained open and its contents diminished.

People ceased paying attention to it, it was a mania of his so he had declared.

Besides, he had devised a perpetual cold, an irritation of the throat, which he always talked of calming.
He still did not work, for he had more and more important schemes than ever in view.

He was contriving a superb invention--the umbrella hat, a hat which transformed itself into an umbrella on your head as soon as a shower commenced to fall; and he promised Poisson half shares in the profit of it, and even borrowed twenty franc pieces of him to defray the cost of experiments.

Meanwhile the shop melted away on his tongue.