This explains many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs, deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them, containing elixirs and precious balms.
Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle.

With all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"-- he meditated how to capture Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge.

So thinking, he followed his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of care upon his brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all these watchful eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which he should entrap his lady.

It would have to be, he thought, by some intercepted glance, some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon lays his finger on a hidden sore.

That evening Gobenheim did not appear, and Butscha was Dumay's partner against Monsieur and Madame Latournelle.