“Is he dead, then, sire?”

  “No,” said the king, glancing at the young nobleman, with an expression, which seemed to say. “Do you not understand? — No: he is at Versailles, Rue des Reservoirs, No. 9. The old fellow would not dare to come to see me at the Tuileries.”

  “How so, sire?” said Lafayette.

  “For fear of compromising himself. Just now a King of France is a very dangerous acquaintance, and the evidence is, that all my friends are either at London, Coblentz, or Turin. But, my dear general, if you do not think it inconvenient for him to come with one of his apprentices to give the finishing stroke, I will send for him.”

  “Sire,” said M. de Lafayette, quickly, “your majesty knows perfectly well that you can order what you please, and send for whom you will.”

  “Yes, provided they submit to be felt and handled by your sentinels as if they were smugglers. Poor Gamain would think himself lost, if his files were considered poignards and his sack a cartouch box.”

  “I cannot, sire, excuse myself: but I answer to Paris, to France, to Europe, for the king’s life, and I cannot take too much precaution to preserve that precious life. As far as the man you speak of is concerned, your majesty may give any orders you please.”

  “That is well; thank you, M. de Lafayette, but I shall not need him or his apprentice for ten days,” added he, looking at M. de Bouille aside. “I will send my valet de chambre, Durey, who is one of his friends, for him.”

  “When he comes, sire, he will be admitted to his king. His name will be his passport. God protect me, sir, from bearing the reputation of a jailer, of a watch dog, or a turnkey. No king was ever more free than you are now. I have come even to beg your majesty to resume your hunting parties and your excursions.”

  “My hunting parties! no, thank you. Besides, just now I am thinking of other matters. My excursions, you see, are different. My last one, from Versailles to Paris, has cured me of all desire to wander — at least with so many persons.”

  The king again glanced at young De Bouille, who by a slight motion of the eyes showed that he understood his words.

  “Sire,” said young De Bouille, “in two or three days I leave Paris; not, however, for Metz, but for Versailles, where I have an old grand-mother, in the Rue des Reservoirs, whom I must see. Besides, I am authorised by my father to terminate an important family affair, and eight or ten days hence I am to see the person from whom I am to receive orders. I shall not, therefore, see my father until the early part of December, unless the king wishes me at once to go to Metz.”

  Lafayette smiled at hearing this allusion to his omnipotence.

  “Sire, I would long ago have recommended both the Messieurs de Bouille to M. de Portail, had I not the honour of being their relation. The fear that it should be said I used the king’s favour for the benefit of my family alone has prevented me.”

  “The king will permit me to say that my father would regard as an unkindness, as a disgrace, almost any promotion which would deprive him of the means of serving his king.”

  “Oh! that is well understood, and I will not permit the position of M. de Bouille to be touched, except to make it more consonant with his wishes and with mine. Let M. de Lafayette and myself attend to that, while you attend to pleasure without neglecting business. Go, gentlemen, go.”

  He dismissed the two nobles with an air of majesty which strangely contrasted with his vulgar dress. Then, when the door was shut, he said: “Well, I think the young man understood me, and that in eight or ten days, I will find Master Gamain and his apprentice, to aid me in putting on my lock.”

  CHAPTER XIII.

  Old Acquaintances.

  ON THE EVENING of the day when M. Louis de Bouille had the honour to be received by the queen first, and by the king afterwards, between five and six o’clock, there passed on the third and fourth story of an old, small and sombre house, of Rue de la Juiverie, a scene to which we beg our readers to permit us to introduce them all.

  The interior of the room is miserable; it is occupied by three persons — a man, a woman, and a child.

  The man wears an old uniform of a sergeant of the French Guards, venerated since July 14, when the French Guards joined the people, and exchanged shots with the Germans of M. de Lambesq and the Swiss of M. de Bezenval.

  He has in his hand a full pack of cards, from the ace, deux, trois of the same colour, to king. He tries for the hundredth, for the thousandth, and for the ten thousandth time to effect a perfect martingale. A card with as many holes as there are stars lies by him.

  The woman wears an old silk dress; misery seems in her case the more terrible, because it appears with the remnants of luxury. Her hair is supported by a copper comb, which once was gilt. Her hands are scrupulously clean, and from that cleanliness have acquired a certain aristocratic air. Her nails were carefully rounded; and her slippers, out of shape and with holes made in them here and there, were once brodes, with gold, were worn over the remnants of dress stockings.

  Her face was that of a woman of thirty-four or five years, which if artistically managed according to the fashion of the day, would give the wearer a right to assume any age with lustrum, as the Abbe Celle said, and even two lustra; women ever cling closely to twenty-nine. That face, however, without rouge and Spanish white, deprived of all means of concealing grief and misery, the third and fourth wings of time, seemed four years older than it was in fact.

  The child is five years old; his hair is frise an chertibui; his cheeks, are round; he has the devilish eyes of his mother, the gourmande mouth of the father, and the caprices and idleness of both.

  He is clad in the remnants of an old mottled velvet habit: and while he eats a piece of bread covered with confits by the grocer at the next corner, tears to pieces the remnant of an old tri-coloured sash fringed with copper, and throws the fragments into an old grey felt hat.

  The room is lighted by a candle with a huge wick, to which an empty bottle serves as a candlestick, and which, while it places the man in the light, leaves the rest of the room in total darkness.

  If after all this, explained with our usual precision, the reader has learned nothing, listen.

  The child speaks first; after having thrown down the last of his bread and butter, and thrown himself down on the bed, which is now reduced to a mere mattress:

  “Mamma, I do not want any more bread and preserves, puh!”

  “Well, Toussaint, what do you wish?”

  “A piece of barley-sugar.”

  “Do you hear, Beausire?” said the woman.

  “He shall have some to-morrow.”

  “I shall have it to-night!” cries the child, with an angry yell which betokens a stormy time.

  “Toussaint, my child, you had best be silent, or I will have to settle with you!”

  “You touch him, drunkard!” said the mother, “and you will have to settle with me,” and she stretched forth that white hand, which, thanks to the care taken with her nails, might on occasions become a claw.

  “Who the devil wishes to touch him? You know very well what I mean, for though one sometimes beats the dresses of Eve, mother, one always respects the jacket of the child; come, kiss your dear Beausire, who in eight days will be rich as a king.”

  “When you are rich as a king, my dear fellow, I will kiss you; but — now! no, no!”

  “But I tell you, it is certain as if I had a million. Give me an advance for good luck, and then the baker will trust us.”

  “Bah! the idea of a man who wants credit for four pounds of bread, talking about millions!”

  “I want some barley-sugar,” cried the child in a tone becoming more and more menacing.

  “Come now, you man of millions, give the child some barley-sugar!”

  “Well,” said he, “yesterday I gave you my last piece of twenty-four sous.”

  “Since you have money,” said the child, turning to her whom M. Beausire called Oliva, “give me a sou to buy some barley-sugar. “

  “Here are two, you bad boy, and take care not to hurt yourself as you go down the steps.”

  “Thank you, dear mother,” said the child, leaping up with joy, and now reaching her his hand.

  The woman having looked after the child until the door closed on him, glanced at the father, and said:

  “Ah! M. de Beausire! will your intelligence extract us from our miserable condition? Unless it do, I must have recourse to mine.”

  She pronounced these last words with the finniking air of a woman who looks in the glass and says, Do not be alarmed; with such a face one does not die of hunger.

  “You know, dear Nicole, that I am very busy,” said M. de Beausire.

  “Yes, in shuffling cards and pricking a piece of paste-board.”

  “But since I have found it?”

  “Found what?”

  “My martingale!”

  “There you begin again! M. de Beausire! I warn you that I shall go among my old acquaintances, and see if I can find no one who has influence, and who will be kind enough to lock you up as a madman at Charenton!”

  “But if I tell you, it is infallible!”

  “Ah! if M. de Richelieu were not dead!” murmured the woman in a low voice.

  “What do you say?”

  “If the Cardinal de Rohan were not ruined!”

  “What then?”

  “One might find resources, and one would not be forced to share the misery of an old rector like this!”

  With the gesture of a queen, Mademoiselle Nicole Legay, called Madame Oliva, pointed disdainfully at Beausire.

  “But I tell you.,” said the man, “to-morrow we shall be rich!”

  “Worth millions?”

  “Worth millions.”

  “M. Beausire, show me the first ten louis of your millions, and I will believe the rest!”

  “Well, you shall see this evening the ten first louis d’or. That is exactly the sum promised me.”

  “And you will give them to me, dear De Beausire?” said Nicole, eagerly.

  “I will give you five to buy a silk dress for yourself and a velvet jacket for the young one. And with the other five I will win the millions!”

  “You are going to play again?”

  “Yes. I have found my martingale.”

  “Yes, like that one with which you lost the sixty thousand livres left of your Portuguese business!”

  “Money idly earned never lasts,” said Beausire, sententiously. “I always thought that from the manner that money was acquired, it would do us no good.”

  “Then this comes to you by inheritance? You had an uncle who died in the Indies, I presume, and he has left you these ten louis?”

  “These ten louis, Mademoiselle Nicole Legay,” said Beausire, with an air of great superiority, “will be gained honestly! do you understand? even honourably! The more so, as it is a cause in which I and all the nobility in France are interested.”

  “You are then noble, M. Beausire?” said Nicole, mockingly.

  “Say De Beausire, if you please, Madame Legay de Beausire,” added he; “as the certificate of your child’s birth, in the register of the church of St. Paul, which your servant Jean Baptiste Toussaint de Beausire signed when he gave the boy his own name.”

  “A very pretty present,” murmured Nicole.

  “And my fortune,” added De Beausire, emphatically.

  “If you grant him nothing else, the poor child is certain to die in the almshouse or hospital.”

  “Indeed, Nicole,” said the man. “This is insupportable, you are never satisfied.”

  “Then, do not hear it,” said Nicole, letting loose the dyke of her long-repressed wrath. “Eh! good God! who asks you to hear it? Thank God I am not anxious either for myself or for my child, and am ready this very evening to seek my fortune elsewhere.” Nicole took three steps towards the door.

  “Beausire advanced to the same door, which he barred with his arms. “But when you are told that this fortune — ”

  “Well!” said Nicole.

  “Will come this evening. Even if the martingale be lost, which is impossible, after all my calculations, we will only have lost five louis. That is all.”

  “There are moments when five louis are a fortune, Mr. Spenthrift. You do not know that you have wasted the whole of our income.”

  “That, Nicole, proves my merit. If I did waste, I wasted what I had gained. Besides, there is a god who watches over adroit people.”

  “Ah yes! down there, perhaps.”

  “Nicole,” said Beausire, seriously, “are you an atheist?”

  Nicole shrugged her shoulders.

  “Do you belong to the school of Voltaire, which denies a providence?”

  “Beausire, you are a fool!”

  “There is nothing astonishing in the fact that one sprung, like you, from the people, should have such ideas; but I inform you, that they do not suit my social caste, and my ideas of right and wrong.”

  “M. de Beausire, you are insolent.”

  “I, do you understand me, madame? have faith, and if any one should say that my son, Jean Baptiste Toussaint de Beausire, who went downstairs with two sous, to buy a piece of barley-sugar, will come up with a purse of gold in his hand, I would say, certainly, if it be the will of God.”

  Beausire lifted his eyes piously to heaven.

  “Beausire, you are a fool!”

  Just then the voice of the young heir was heard on the stairway, shouting lustily, “Papa! mamma!” and the nearer he came, the louder he bellowed.

  “What has happened?” said Nicole, as she opened the door anxiously, as even the worst mothers do for their children’s sake. “Come, child, come.”

  “Papa! mamma!” said the voice, coming closer and closer, like that of ventriloquist, imitating sounds from the depth of a cave.

  “I would not be surprised,” said Beausire, “if the miracle were accomplished, for the child’s voice is so joyous, that he may have found the purse spoken of.”

  Just then the child appeared at the top step of the stairway, and rushed into the room, having in one hand a stick of barley-sugar, clasping a bundle of candy to hie breast, and showing in his right hand a louis d’or, which in the dimness of the candle shone like the star Aldebaran.

  “My God!” said Nicole, suffering the door to close itself. “What has happened?” She covered the gelatinous face of the young vagabond with such kisses that nothing makes disgusting, for they are a mother’s.

  “This is,” said Beausire, adroitly taking possession of the gold louis d’or, “good, and, is worth twenty-four livres.”

  He then said to the child, “Tell me, my son, where you found this; for I wish to look for the others.”

  “I did not find it, papa,” said the child. “It was given to me.”

  “Who gave it to you?” said the mother.

  “A gentleman, who came into the grocer’s while I was there,” and as he spoke, the young scamp crushed the barley-sugar in his teeth; “a gentleman —

  Beausire echoed the words, “A gentleman?”

  “Yes, papa, a gentleman, who came into the grocer’s while I was there, and said, ‘Monsieur, do you not now serve a nobleman named De Beausire?’“

  Beausire looked up proudly, and Nicole shrugged her shoulders. “What said the grocer, my son?” asked Beausire.

  “He replied: ‘I do not know if he be noble or not, but his name is Beausire.’ ‘Does he not live near here?’ asked the gentleman. ‘Here, in the house next door to the left, on the third story, at the head of the staircase. This is his son.’ ‘Give all sorts of good things to this child,’ said he, ‘I will pay.’ He then said to me, ‘Here, my lad, is a louis, to buy more when they are gone.’ He then put the money in my hand, the grocer gave me this package, and I left very well satisfied. Where is my louis?”

  The child, who had not seen the sleight of hand by which Beausire took possession of his louis, began to look around for it everywhere.

  “Awkward fellow,” said Beausire, “you have lost it.”

  “No, no, no!” said the young one.

  The discussion might have been serious, but for an event we are about to relate, and which necessarily terminated it.

  While the child, though evidently in doubt himself, was hunting everywhere on the floor for the money, which was snugly ensconced in Beausire’s pocket, while Beausire admired the intelligence of young Toussaint, manifested by his relating the story we just told, while Nicole partook of her husband’s admiration of the precocious eloquence, and asked who the bestower of bonbons and giver of gold possibly could be, the door opened, and a voice of exquisite softness exclaimed:

  “Bon soir, M. de Beausire, bon soir, Toussaint, bon soir, Mdlle. Nicole.”

  All turned to the place whence the voice came. At the door, smiling on this family picture, was a man elegantly dressed.

  “Ah! the gentleman who gave me the bonbons!” exclaimed Toussaint.

  “Count Cagliostro!” said Nicole and Beausire.

  “You have a charming child, M. de Beausire, and you should be proud of him.”

  After these gracious words of the count, there was a moment of silence, during which Cagliostro advanced to the middle of the chamber, and looked around him, without doubt, to form an idea of the moral and pecuniary condition of his old acquaintances.

  “Ah! monsieur! what a misfortune, I have lost my louis!” exclaimed Toussaint.

  Nicole was about to tell the truth, but she reflected that if she held her tongue, the child might get another louis, which she would inherit.

  Nicole was not mistaken.

  “You have lost your louis, my poor child?” said Cagliostro; “here are two more; try not to lose them this time.”

  “Here, mamma,” said he, turning to Nicole, “here is one for me, and another for you.”

  The child divided his treasure with his mother.

  Cagliostro had remarked the tenacity with which the false sergeant followed his purse. As he saw it disappear in the depth of his pocket, the lover of Nicole sighed.

  “Eh! what, M. de Beausire,” said Cagliostro, “always melancholy?”

  “Yes, count, and you always a millionaire.”