"Pray what share had reason," demanded the Chevalier, "in a business altogether so unreasonable? Poo! my dear Albert, you have worked yourself into a boyish fancy of love, and then have clung to it, I suppose, as the last bit of boyhood left about you. What had reason to do with your seeing a pretty girl in a dark lane, and fancying there was nothing like her upon earth?"
"With that, nothing certainly," replied the Count, "but with my after-determination much. Before that time long I had began to school myself a good deal on account of a propensity not so much to fall in love, but, as you term it, Louis, to make love to every fair creature I met with. I had found it needful to put some check upon myself: and if an artificial one was to be chosen, I did not see why this should not be selected as well as any other. I determined that, as the knights of old, and our own troubadours too, if you will, and even--as by your laughing I suppose you would have it--excellent Don Quixote himself, that pattern of all true gentlemen, vowed and dedicated themselves to some fair lady, whom they had seen even less frequently than I had her--I determined, I say, that I would encourage this fancy of loving my fair horsewoman, and would employ the image of beauty, which imagination, perhaps, had its share in framing, and the fine qualities of the mind and heart, which were shadowed out beneath that lovely exterior, as a test, a touchstone, whereby to try and to correct my feelings towards others, and to approach none with words of love who did not appear to me as beautiful in form as she was, and who did not seem at least equal to the standard which fancy had raised up under her image. The matter perhaps was carried farther than I intended, the feeling became more intense than I had expected. For some time I sincerely and truly fancied myself in love; but even since reason has come to my aid in such a matter, and I know how much imagination has to do with the whole, yet from that one circumstance, from that fanciful accident, my standard of perfection in woman has been raised so high, that I find none who have attained it; and yet so habitual has it become with me to apply it to every one I see, that whenever I am introduced to any beautiful creature, to whom I might otherwise become attached, the fanciful image rises up, and the new acquaintance is tried and ever is found wanting."
"Thou art a strange composition, my good friend the Count," said the Chevalier, "but we shall see, now that peace and tranquillity have fallen over the world, whether you can go on still resisting with the courage of a martyr. I don't believe a word of it, although, to say sooth, your quality of heretic is something in your favour. But, in the name of fortune, tell me what are all those loud and tumultuous sounds which are borne by the wind through the open window. Your good people of Morseiul are not in rebellion, I hope."
"Not that I know of," replied the Count, with a smile at the very idea of such a thing as rebellion under Louis XIV.; "but I will call my fellow Riquet, who ought, I think, to have been called Scapin, for I am sure Molière must have had a presentiment of the approaching birth of such a scoundrel. He will tell us all about it; for if a thing takes place on the other side of the earth, Riquet knows it all within five minutes after it happens."
Before he had well finished speaking, the person he alluded to entered. But Riquet deserves a pause for separate notice.
CHAPTER II.
THE VALET--THE TOWNSPEOPLE--THE PROCLAMATION.
The personage who entered the room, which on that the first actual day after his arrival at his own dwelling the Count de Morseiul had used as a dining-room, was the representative of an extinct race, combining in his own person all the faults and absurdities with all the talents and even virtues which were sometimes mingled together in that strange composition, the old French valet. It is a creature that we find recorded in the pages of many an antique play, now either banished altogether from the stage, or very seldom acted; but, alas! the being itself is extinct; and even were we to find a fossil specimen in some unexplored bed of blue clay, we should gain but a very inadequate idea of all its various properties and movements. We have still the roguish valet in sad abundance--a sort of common house-rat; and we have, moreover, the sly and the silent, the loquacious and the lying, the pilfering and the impudent valet, with a thousand other varieties; but the old French valet, that mithridatic compound of many curious essences, is no longer upon the earth, having gone absolutely out of date and being at the same period with his famous contemporary "le Marquis."
At the time we speak of, however, the French valet was in full perfection; and, as we have said, an epitome of the whole race and class was to be found in Maître Jerome Riquet, who now entered the room, and advanced with an operatic step towards his lord. He was a man perhaps of forty years of age, which, as experience and constant practice were absolute requisites in his profession, was a great advantage to him, for he had lost not one particle of the activity of youth, seeming to possess either a power of ubiquity, or a rapidity of locomotion which rendered applicable to him the famous description of the bird which flew so fast "as to be in two places at once." Quicksilver, or a lover's hours of happiness, a swallow, or the wind, were as nothing when compared to his rapidity; and it is also to be remarked, that the rapidity of the mind went hand in hand with the rapidity of the body, enabling him to comprehend his master's orders before they were spoken, to answer a question before it was asked, and to determine with unerring sagacity by a single glance whether it would be most for his interests or his purposes to understand or misunderstand the coming words before they were pronounced.
Riquet was slightly made, though by no means fulfilling the immortal caricature of the gates of Calais; but when dressed in his own appropriate costume, he contrived to make himself look more meagre than he really was, perhaps with a view of rendering his person less recognisable when, dressed in a suit of his master's clothes with sundry additions and ornaments of his own device, he appeared enlarged with false calves to his legs, and manifold paddings on his breast and shoulders, enacting with great success the part of the Marquis of Kerousac, or of any other place which he chose to raise into the dignity of a marquisate for his own especial use.
His features, it is true, were so peculiar in their cast and expression, that it would have seemed at first