AS the King had undertaken a very important piece of locksmith work, he sent his valet Hue to beg General Lafayette to come into his smithy.

It was on the second floor above his bedroom, with inner and outer stairs.

Since morning he had been hammering away at the work for which Master Gamain gave him praise and so much regret that the politicians should take him away from it to trouble about foreign countries.

Perhaps he wanted to show the Commander of the National Guard that however weak as a monarch, he was mighty as a Tubal Cain.

On the road Count Louis had time to meditate; and he concluded that the Queen knew nothing of his errand. He would have to study the King’s reception and see if he did not give some sign of better understanding what brought him to Paris than his cousin the marquis.

The valet did not know Bouille so that he only announced the general.

“Ah, it is you, marquis,” said the King, turning. “I must ask pardon for calling you up here, but the smith assures you that you are welcome in his forge. A charcoal-burner once said to my ancestor Henry IV.: ‘Jack is king in his own castle.’ But you are master in the smithy as in the palace.”

Louis spoke much in the same way as Marie Antoinette.

“Sire, under whatever circumstances I present myself to your Majesty,” said Lafayette, “and whatever costume your Majesty is in, the King will be ever the sovereign and I the faithful subject and devoted servant.”

“I do not doubt that, my lord; but you are not alone. Have you changed your aid-de-camp?”

“Oh, son of Marquis Bouille, commander of Metz?” said the King, with a slight start not escaping the young man.

“The same, Sire,” he spoke up quickly.

“Excuse me not knowing you, but I have short sight. Have you been long in town?”

“I left Metz five days ago; and being here without official furlough but under special permission from my father, I solicited my kinsman the marquis for the honor of presentation to your Majesty.”

“You were very right, my lord, for nobody could so well present you at any hour, and from no one could the introduction come more agreeably.”

The words “at any hour” meant that Lafayette had the public and private entry to the King. The few words from the sovereign put the young count on his guard. The question about his coming signified that he wanted to know if Charny had seen his father.

Meanwhile Lafayette was looking round curiously where few penetrated; he admired the regularity with which the tools were laid out. He blew the bellows as the apprentice.

“So your Majesty has undertaken an important work, eh?” queried Lafayette, embarrassed how to talk to a King who was in a smutty apron, with tucked up sleeves and had a file in his hand.

“Yes, general, I have set to making our magnus opus a lock. I tell you just what I am doing or we shall have Surgeon Marat saying that I am forging the fetters of France. Tell him it is not so, if you lay hold of him. I suppose you are not a smith, Bouille?”

“At least I was bound apprentice, and to a locksmith, too.”

“I remember, your nurse’s husband was a smith and your father, although not much of a student of Rousseau acted on his advice in ‘Emile’ that everybody should learn a craft, and bound you to the workbench.”

“Exactly; so that if your Majesty wanted a boy——“

“Is he dead, my lord?”

“No,” replied the King, giving the young gentleman a glance for him to be heedful; “he lives in Versailles, but the dear fellow does not dare come and see me at the Tuileries for fear he will get an ill name. All my friends have gone away, to London, Turin or Coblentz. Still, my dear general, if you do not see any inconvenience in the old fellow coming with one of his boys to lend me a hand, I might ask him to drop in some day.”

“Your Majesty ought to know perfectly that he can see and send for anybody.”

“Yes, on condition that you sentries search them as the revenue officers do those suspected of smuggling; poor Gamain will believe he is to be hanged, drawn and quartered if they found his bag of tools on him and took his three-cornered file for a stiletto!”

“Sire, I do not know how to excuse myself to your Majesty, but I am answerable for your person to the Powers of Europe, and I cannot take too many precautions for that precious life to be protected. As for the honest fellow of whom we are speaking, the King can give what orders he pleases.”

“Very well; thank you, marquis; I might want him in a week or ten days—him and his ’prentice,” he added, with a glance at Bouille; “I could notify him by my valet Durey, who is a friend of his.”

“He has only to call to be shown up to the King; his name will suffice. Lord preserve me from getting the title of your jailer, Sire; never was the monarch more free; and I have even desired your Majesty to resume hunting and riding out.”

“Thank you, but no more hunts for me! Besides, you see I have something to keep me in doors, in my head. As for traveling, that is another matter; the last trip from Versailles to Paris cured me of the desire to travel, in such a large party at all events.”

“Are you soon going back to your father?” inquired the King of the latter.

“Sire, I am leaving Paris in a couple of days to pay a visit to my grandmother, living in Versailles; I am bound to pay my respects. Then I am charged by my father to attend to a rather important family matter, for which I expect to see the person who will give me the directions in about a week. So I shall hardly be with my father before the first week in December, unless the King has particular reasons for me to see him sooner.”

“No, my lord, take your time; go to Versailles and transact your business and when done, go and tell the marquis, that I do not forget him as one of my faithful lieges, and that I will speak of him one of these days to General Lafayette for him to advance him.”

Lafayette smiled faintly at this allusion to his omnipotence.

“Sire,” he said, “I should have long ago recommended Marquis Bouille to your Majesty had he not been my kinsman. The fear of raising the cry that I am looking after my family alone prevented me doing him this justice.”

“This chimes in nicely, then; we will speak of this matter again.”

“The King will kindly allow me to say that my father would consider any change of a post a disgrace that robbed him of the chance to serve your Majesty particularly.”

“Oh, that is fully understood, count,” responded Louis the King, “and Marquis Bouille shall not be moved without it being according to his desires and mine. Let General Lafayette and I manage this, and you run to your pleasure-making without altogether forgetting business. Good bye, gentlemen!”

He dismissed them with a majestic manner in singular contrast with the vulgar attire.

ON the evening of this same day, about five, a scene passed in the third and top flat of a dirty old tumbledown house in Juiverie Street which we would like our readers to behold.

The interior of the sitting-room denoted poverty, and it was inhabited by three persons, a man, a woman, and a boy.

The man looked to be over fifty; he was wearing an old uniform of a French Guards sergeant, a habit venerated since these troops sided with the people in the riots and exchanged shots with the German dragoons.

He was dealing out playing cards and trying to find an infallible means of winning; a card by his side, pricked full of pinholes, showed that he was keeping tally of the runs.

The woman was four-and-thirty and appeared forty; she wore an old silk dress; her poverty was the more dreadful as she exhibited tokens of splendor; her hair was built up in a knot over a brass comb once gilded: and her hands were scrupulously cared for with the nails properly trimmed in an aristocratic style. The slippers on her feet, over openwork stockings, had been worked with gold and silver.

Her face might pass in candlelight for about thirty; but, without paint and powder it looked five years older than reality.

Its resemblance to Queen Marie Antoinette’s was still so marked that one tried to recall it in the dusty clouds thrown up by royal horses around the window of a royal coach.

The boy was five years of age; his hair curled like a cherub’s; his cheeks were round as an apple; he had his mother’s diabolical eyes, and the sensual mouth of his father—in short, the idleness and whims of the pair.

The family was illuminated by a candle with a large “thief in the gutter,” stuck in a bottle for holder, which light fell on the man and left most of the room in darkness.

“Mamma,” the child broke the silence by saying, as he threw the end of the cake on the mattress which served as bed, “I am tired of that kind of cake—faugh! I want a stick of red barley sugar candy.”

“Dear little Toussaint,” said the woman. “Do you hear that, Beausire?”

As the gamester was absorbed in his calculations, she lifted her foot within snatch of her hand and taking off the slipper, cast it to his nose.

“What is the matter?” he demanded, with plain ill-humor.

“Toussaint wants some candy, being tired of cheap cake.”

“He shall have it to-morrow.”

“I want it to-day—this evening—right now!” yelled the innocent in a tearful voice which threatened stormy weather.

“Toussaint, my boy, I advise you to give us quiet or papa will take you in hand,” said the parent.

The boy yelled again but more from deviltry than from fear.

“You drunken sot, you just touch my darling, and I will attend to you,” said the mother, stretching out the white hand towards the bully which her care of the nails made to become a claw at need.

“Who the deuse wants to touch the imp? you know it is only my style of speaking, my dear Oliva, and that though I may dust your skirt now and then I have always respected the kid’s jacket. Tut, tut, come and embrace your poor Beausire who will be rich as a King in a week; come, my little Nicole.”

“When you are rich as a king, it will be another matter: but up to that time no fooling.”

“But I tell you that it is as safe as if I had a million. You might be kind for a little while. Go and get credit of the baker.”

“A man rolling in millions wants a baker to let him have a loaf on trust, ha, ha!”

“Come, you king with the millions, give some sugar sticks to your prince.”

Beausire started to put his hand to his fob but stopped half way.

“You know I gave you my last piece yesterday.”

“Then, if you have the money,” said the child to the woman whom Beausire called indifferently Nicole or Oliva, “give me a penny to buy candy.”

“There are two cents, you naughty boy, and mind you do not fall in sliding down the bannisters.”

“Thank you, dear mother,” said the boy, capering for joy and holding out his hand.

“Come here till I set your hat on and adjust your sash: it must not be said that Captain Beausire let his son race about the streets in disorder—though it is all the same to him, the heartless fellow! I should die of shame!”

At the risk of whatever the neighbors might say against the heir to the Beausire name, the boy would have dispensed with the hat and band, of which he recognized the use before the other urchins did the freshness and beauty. But as the arrangement of his dress was a condition of the gift, the young Hector had to yield to it.

He consoled himself by taunting his father with the coin by thrusting it up under his nose; absorbed in his figuring the parent merely smiled at the pretty freak.

Soon they heard his timid step, though quickened by gluttony, descending the stairs.

“Now then, Captain Beausire,” snapped the woman after a pause, “your wits must lift us out of this miserable position, or else I must have recourse to mine.”

She spoke with a toss of the head as much as to say: “A lady of my lovely face never dies of starvation, never fear!”

“Just what I am busy about, my little Nicole,” responded Beausire.

“By shuffling the cards?”

“Did I not tell you that I have found the infallible coup?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I should find means and not be obliged to share the misery of an old swashbuckler like this one.”

With a queenly flirt of the hand Oliva alias Nicole Legay, disdainfully indicated the gambler.

“But I keep telling you that I shall be rich to-morrow,” he repeated, himself at any rate convinced.

“Show me the first gold piece of your million and I shall believe the rest.”

“You will see ten gold pieces this evening—the very sum promised me. You can have five to buy a silk dress and a velvet suit for the youngster: with the balance I will bring you the million I promised.”

“You unhappy fellow, you mean to gamble again?”

“But I tell you again that I have lit on an infallible sequence.”

“Own brother to the one with which you threw away the sixty thousand livres from the amount you stole at the Portuguese Ambassador’s?”

“Money got over the devil’s back goes under his belly,” replied Beausire sententiously. “I always did think that the way I got that cash brought bad luck.”

“Is this fresh lot coming from an inheritance? have you an uncle who has died in the Indies or America and left you the ten louis?”

“Nicole Legay,” rejoined Beausire with a lofty air, “these ten will be earned not only honestly but honorably, for a cause which interests me as well as the rest of the nobility of France.”

“So you are a nobleman, Friend Beausire?” jeered the lady.

“A handsome present that was,” gibed Nicole.

“And my estate,” added the so-called captain emphatically.

“If kind heaven does not send him something more solid,” interposed Nicole, shaking her head, “the poor little dear is sure to live on air and die in the poorhouse.”

“Really, Nicole, this is too much to endure—you are never contented.”

“Endure? good gracious, who wants you to endure?” exclaimed the reduced gentlewoman, breaking down the dam to her long-restrained ire: “Thank God, I am not worried about myself or my little pet, and this very night I shall go forth and seek my fortune.”

She rose and took three steps towards the door, but he strode in between them and opened his arms to bar the way.

“You naughty creature, did I not tell you that my fortune——“

“Go on,” said Nicole.

“Is coming home to-night: though the coup were a mistake—which is impossible, it would only be five louis lost.”

“There are times when a few pieces of money are a fortune, sir. But you would not know that, who have squandered a pile of gold as high as this house.”

“That proves my merit: I made it at the cards, and if I made some once I shall make more another time: besides, there is a special providence for—smart rogues.”

“That is a fine thing to rely on!”

“Do you not believe in Providence? are you an atheist, Nicole? of the school of Voltaire who denies all that sort of thing?”

“Beausire, no matter what I am, you are a fool.”

“Springing from the lower class, as you do, it is not surprising that you nourish such notions. I warn you that they do not appertain to my caste and political opinions.”

“You are a saucebox,” returned the beauty of the past.

“Beausire, you are an idiot,” said Nicole, but she had hardly spoken the words before young Toussaint’s voice was heard on the stairs calling:

“Oh, papa—mamma!”

“What is the matter?” cried Nicole, opening the door with true maternal solicitude. “Come, my darling, come.”

The voice drew near like the ventriloquist doing the trick of the man in the cellar.

“I should not be astonished if he had lit on the streak of good luck I feel promised,” said the gambler.

The boy rushed into the room, holding a sugarstick in his mouth, hugging under his left arm a bag of sugarplums, and showing in his right hand a gold coin which shone in the candle glimmer like the North Star.

“Goodness of heaven, what has occurred?” cried Nicole, slamming the door to.

She covered his gluey face with kisses—mothers never being disgusted, from their caresses seeming to purify everything.

“The matter is a genuine louis of gold, worth full value of twenty-four livres,” said Beausire, skillfully obtaining the piece.

“Where did you pick that up that I may go for the others, my duck?” he inquired.

“I never found it, papa: it was give to me,” replied the boy. “A kind gentleman give it me.”

Ready as Beausire to ask who this donor was, Nicole was prudent from experience on account of Captain Beausire’s jealousy. She confined herself to repeating:

“A gentleman?”

“Yes, mamma dear,” rejoined the child, crunching the barley-sugar between his teeth: “a gentleman who came into the grocer’s store where I was, and he says: ‘God bless me, but, master, do I not behold a young gentleman whose name is De Beausire, whom you have the honor of attending to at the present time?'”

Beausire perked up and Nicole shrugged her shoulders.

“Master Grocer says: ‘I don’t know whether he is a gentleman or not, but his name is Beausire,’ ‘Does he live by here?’ went on the gentleman. ‘Top-floor, next house on the left.’ ‘Give anything the young master wants to him—I will foot the bill,’ said the gentleman. Then he gave me the money saying: ‘There a louis for you, young sir: when you have eaten your candy, that will buy you more. He put the money in my hand; the grocer stuck this bag under my arm and I came away awfully glad. Oh, where is my money-piece?”

Not having seen Beausire’s disappearing trick, he began to look all round for the louis.

“You clumsy little blockhead, you have lost it,” said the captain.

“No, I never!” yelled the child.

The dispute would have become warm but for the interruption which came to put an end to it.

The door opened slowly and a bland voice made these words audible:

“How do you do, Mistress Nicole? good evening, Captain Beausire! How are you, little Toussaint?”

All turned: on the threshold was an elegantly attired man, smiling on the family group.

“Oh, here’s the gentleman who gave me the candy,” cried young Toussaint.

“Count Cagliostro,” exclaimed Beausire and the lady at the same time.

“That is a winning little boy, and I think you ought to be happy at being a parent, Captain Beausire,” said the intruder.

He advanced and with one scrutinizing glance saw that the couple were reduced to the last penny.

The child was the first to break the silence because he had nothing on his conscience.

“Oh, kind sir, I have lost the shining piece,” said he.

Nicole opened her mouth to state the case but she reflected that silence might lead to a repetition of the godsend and she would inherit it; her expectation was not erroneous.

Pulling out a purse of which the plumpness kindled Beausire’s greedy glances, he dropped two coins into Toussaint’s little sticky paw.

“Look, mamma,” said he, running to Nicole; “here’s one for you and one for me.”

While the child shared his windfall with his mother, the new-comer remarked the tenacity with which the former-soldier watched his purse and tried to estimate the contents before it was pocketted again. On seeing it disappear, he sighed.

“Still glum, captain?” said the visitor.

“And you, count, always rich?”

“Pooh! you are one of the finest philosophers I have ever known, as well at the present as in antiquity, and you are bound to know the axiom to which man does honor in all ages. ‘Riches are not contentment.’ I have known you to be rich, relatively.”

“That’s so: I have owned as much as a hundred thousand francs.”

“It is possible; only when I met you again, you had spent nearly forty thousand of it so as to have but sixty, but that is a round sum for a corporal in the army.”

“What is that to the sums you dispose of?” he sighed.

“I am only the banker, the trustee, Captain Beausire, and if I were obliged to settle up I daresay you could play St. Martin and I the beggar who would be glad to have half your cloak. But, my dear Beausire, do you not remember the circumstances of our last meeting? As I said, just now, you had sixty thousand left of the hundred thousand: were you happier than now?”

The ex-corporal heaved a retrospective sigh which might pass for a moan.

“Would you exchange your present position though you possessed nothing but one poor louis you ‘nicked’ from young Toussaint?”

“My lord!”

“No, my lord, you are right—I should not change. At that epoch, alas! I was parted from my darling Nicole.”

“To say nothing of being hunted by the police, on account of your robbing the Portuguese Embassy. What the mischief has become of that case, a villainous one, as I remember it, Captain B.?”

“It has been dropped, my lord,” was the reply.

“So much the better: though I would not reckon on its not being picked up again. The police are awful for raking up past grievances, and the ruling powers might want to be on good terms with Portugal. However, that apart, in spite of the hard lines to which you are reduced, you are happy. If you had a thousand louis, your felicity would be complete, eh?”

Nicole’s eyes glittered and her partner’s flashed flames.

“Lord be good to us,” cried the latter: “with half I would buy a lot in the country and live a rural life on the rest like a country squire!”

“Like Cincinnatus!”

“While Nicole would educate the boy.”

“Like Cornelia! Death of my life, Captain Beausire! not only would this be exemplary but touching: do you hope to earn as much as that in the piece of business you have in hand?”

“What business?” queried the other, starting.

“That you are carrying on as sergeant of the Guards; for which you are to meet a man, this evening, under the Palais Royal arcades.”

“Oh, my lord,” moaned Beausire, turning pale as a corpse and wringing his hands. “Do not destroy me!”

“Why, you are going distracted now? Am I the Chief of Police to ruin you?”

“But you are wrong, my dear lady, for this is an excellent speculation.”

“Is it not?” cried the gambler. “The count, as a nobleman, understands that all the nobility are in this scheme——“

“For it to succeed. It must be allowed though, that the people are interested in its failure. If you will believe me, captain—you understand that a friend is giving advice—you will take no part in it for the peers or the people. Better act for yourself.”

“Certainly, for yourself,” said Nicole. “Blest if you have not toiled long enough for others: so that it is high time you looked after Number One.”

“You hear the lady, who speaks like a born orator. Bear this in mind, Friend Beausire, all spec’s have a good and a bad side, one for the winners, one for the losers: no affair however good, can benefit everybody; the whole trouble is to hit on the right side.”

“And you do not think I am there, eh?”

“Not at all; I would even add, if you are willful—for you know I dabble in telling fortunes—that you will not only risk your honor, and the fortune you seek—but your life. You will most likely be hanged!”

“They do not hang noblemen,” objected Beausire, wiping the perspiration streaming from his brow.

“That is so: but to avoid the gallows-tree and have your head cut off, you would have to prove your family-tree; it would take so long that the court would lose patience, and string you up for the time being—leaving your widow to demand compensation if you turned out to have deserved decapitation. Still you may say that it does not matter, as it is the crime that casts shame and not the scaffold, to quote a poet. Still again, I dare say you are not so attached to your opinions that you would lay down your life for them; I understand this. Deuse take us, but we have only one life, as another poet says, not so great as the other, but as truthful.”

“Hang me if that is my intention,” responded Cagliostro; “Besides you are not a timid man.”

“No: yet there are circumstances,” began Beausire.

“I understand; such as when one has the jail for theft behind one and the gallows for high treason before one—for I suppose they give that name to the crime of kidnapping the King.”

“My lord,” cried Beausire, terrified.

“Wretch, is it on kidnapping that you build your fortune?” demanded Oliva.

“Oh, he was not wrong to dwell in golden dreams, my dear lady; only, as I have already said, each affair has a dark side and a bright one and Beausire has the misfortune to take the dark one; all he has to do is to shift.”

“If there is time, what must I do?” asked the bully.

“Suppose one thing,” said the gentleman; “that your conspiracy fails. Suppose that the accomplices of the masked man and the one in the brown cloak are arrested; we may suppose anything in these times—suppose they are doomed to death! Suppose—for Augeard and Bezenval have been acquitted, so that anything unlikely may come round nowadays—suppose that you are one of these accomplices; you have the halter round your neck, when—say what they like—a man always shows a little of the white feather about then——“

“Do have done, my lord! I entreat you, for I seem to feel the rope throttling me!”

“But how am I to elude it—how make the thousand to ensure my peace and that of dear Nicole and little Toussaint?”

“Your good angel would say: ‘Why not apply to the Count of Cagliostro, a rich nobleman who is in town for his pleasure and who is weary of nothing to do. Go to him and tell him——“

“But I do not know where he lives! I did not even know he is in town; I did not know he was still alive!” protested Beausire.

“He lives ever. It is because you would not know these facts that he comes to you, my dear Beausire, so that you will have no excuse. You have merely to say to him: ‘Count, I know how fond you are of hearing the news. I have some fresh for you. The King’s brother is conspiring with Marquis Favras. I speak from full knowledge as I am the right-hand man of the marquis. The aim of the plot is to take the King away to Peronne. If your lordship likes to be amused, I will tell him step by step how the moves are played.’ Thereupon the count, who is a generous lord, would reply: ‘If you will really do this, Captain Beausire, as all laborers are worthy of their hire, I put aside twenty-four thousand livres for a charitable act; but I will balk myself in this whim, and you shall have them on the day when you come and tell me either that the King shall be taken off or Marquis Favras captured—in the same way as you are given these ten louis—not as hand-money or as an advance, or a loan, but as a pure gift.”

Like an actor rehearsing with the “properties,” Cagliostro pulled out the weighty purse, stuck in finger and thumb and with a dexterity bearing witness to his experience in such actions, whipped out just ten pieces, neither more nor less, which Beausire—we must do him justice—thrust out his hand with alacrity to receive.

“Excuse me, captain,” said the other, gently fencing off the hand, “we are only playing at Supposes.”

“Have we reached this point?”

Beausire hesitated; let us hasten to say that it was not honor, fidelity to plighted word, or a pricked conscience which caused the wavering. Did our readers know Beausire, they would not want this denial. It was the simple fear that the count would not keep his word.

“I see what you are passing through,” said the tempter.

“Ay, my lord, I shrink from betraying the trust a gentleman puts in me,” replied the adventurer. “It is very hard,” he seemed to say as he raised his eyes heavenward.

“Nay, it is not that, and this is another proof of the old saw that ‘No man knows himself',” said the count. “You are afraid that I will not pay you the sum stated. The objection is quite natural; but I shall give security.”

“My lord certainly need not.”

“Personal security, Madam Legay.”

“Oh, if the count promises, it is as good as done,” said the lady.

“You see, sir, what one gains by scrupulously keeping one’s promises. One day when the lady was in the same quandary as yourself, I mean the police were hunting after her, I offered her an asylum in my residence. The lady hesitated, fearing that I was no Joseph—unless so christened. I gave her my word to respect her, and this is true, eh?”

“I swear it, on my little Toussaint,” said Oliva-Nicole.

“So you believe that I will pay the sum mentioned on the day when the King shall have been abducted or Marquis Favras arrested, to say nothing of my serving the running knot strangling him a while ago. For this affair, at all events, there shall be no halter or gibbet, for I cannot bind myself any farther. You understand: The man who is born to be—ahem!”

“My lord, it is as if the courts had awarded us the money,” said the woman.

He waved his hand for the gambler to confer with his partner. Their parley lasted only five minutes, but it was most lively. Meanwhile Cagliostro looked at the cards and the one by which tally was kept.

“I know the run,” he observed, “it is that invented by John Law who floated the Mississippi Bubble. I lost a million on it.”

This remark seemed to give fresh activity to the dialogue of Beausire and his light-o-love. At last Beausire was decided; he came forward to offer his hand to Cagliostro like a horse-dealer about to strike a bargain. But the other frowned.

“Captain, between gentlemen the parole suffices. Give me yours.”

“On the faith of Beausire, it shall be done.”

“That is enough for me,” said the other, drawing out a diamond-studded watch on which was a portrait of Frederick the Great. “It is now a quarter to nine. At nine precisely you are expected under the Royale Place arcades, near Sully House. Take these ten pieces, pocket them, put on your coat and buckle on your sword—and do not keep them waiting.”

“Where am I to see your lordship next?” inquired Beausire, obeying the instructions, without asking reiteration.

“In St. Jean’s Cemetery, if you please. When we have such deadly matters to discuss the company of the dead is better than the living. Come when you are free; the first to arrive waits for the other. I have now to chat with the lady.”

The captain stood on one foot.

“Be easy; I did not make bold when she was a single woman; I have the more reason to respect her since she is a mother of a family. Be off, captain.”

IT was nearly midnight when a man hesitatingly walked up to the iron gateway of St. Jean’s burying-ground, in Croix Blanche Street.

As midnight boomed, he saw a spectre cross the grounds under the yews and cypresses, and, approaching the grating, turn a key harshly in the gatelock to show that, if he were a ghost and had the leave to quit his grave, he also had that to go beyond the cemetery altogether.

“Do you not recognize me, Captain B.?” queried the jesting voice of Cagliostro, “or did you forget our appointment?”

“I am glad it is you,” said the man in the French Guards sergeant dress, breathing as if his heart were relieved of great weight. “These devilish streets are so dark and deserted that I do not know but it is better to run up against any body than not to meet a soul.”

“Pshaw,” returned the magician, “the idea of your fearing any thing at any hour of the day or night! You will never make me believe that of a man like you who would go anywhere with a sword by his side. However, step on this side of the railings, and you will be tranquil, my dear Captain Beausire, for you will meet no one but me.”

Beausire acted on the invitation, and the key grated again in the lock, to fasten the gate behind him.

“Keep to this little path,” continued Cagliostro, “and at twenty paces you will come upon a little broken altar, on the steps of which we can nicely manage our little business.”

“Where the mischief do you see any path?” he grumbled, after starting with a good will. “I meet nothing but nettles tearing my ankles and grass up to my knees.”

Beausire followed the guide so closely that he locked steps with him like a soldier in the second rank with the predecessor so that when the latter stopped suddenly he ran up against him.

“Ah! this is a fresh one; the grave of your comrade Fleurdepine, one of the murderers of François the Assemblymen’s baker, who was hanged a week ago by sentence at the Chatelet; this ought to interest you, as he was, like you, a corporal, a sergeant by his own promotion, and a crimp—I mean a recruiter.”

The hearer’s teeth chattered; the thistles he walked among seemed so many skeleton fingers stretched up to trip him, and make him understand that this is the place where he would have his everlasting sleep.

“Well, we have arrived,” said the cicerone, stopping at a mound of ruins.

Sitting down on a stone he pointed out another to his companion, as if placed for a conversation. It was time, for the ex-soldier’s knees were knocking together so that he fell rather than sat on the elevation.

“Now that we are comfortable for a chat,” went on the magician, “let us know what went on under the Royale Place arches. The meeting must have been interesting?”

“To tell the truth, count, I am so upset that I really believe you will get a clearer account by questioning me.”

“Be it so, I am easy going, and the shape of news little matters provided I get it. How many of you met at the arches?”

“I wonder if they were the persons I conjecture to be there? Primo, you, no doubt.”

Beausire groaned as though he wished there could be doubt on that head.

“You do me much honor in commencing by me, for there were very great grandees compared with me.”

“My dear boy, I follow the Gospel: ‘The first shall be last.’ If the first are to be last, why, the last will naturally lead. So I begin with you, according to Scripture. Then there would be your comrade Tourcaty, an old recruiting officer who is charged to raise the Brabant Legion?”

“Yes, we had Tourcaty.”

“Then, there would be that sound royalist Marquie, once sergeant in the French Guards, now sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the centre line. Favras, of course? the Masked Man? Any particulars to furnish about the Masked Man?”

The traitor looked at the inquirer so fixedly that his eyes seemed to kindle in the dark.

“Why, is it not—“ but he stopped as if fearing to commit a sacrilege if he went farther.

“What’s this? have you a knot in your tongue? Take care of being tongue-tied. Knots in the tongue lead to knots round the neck, and as they are slip ones, they are the worst kind.”

“Well, is it not the King’s b-b-brother?” stammered the other.

“Nonsense, my dear Beausire, it is conceivable that Favras, who wants it believed that he clasps hands with a royal prince in the plot, should give out that the Mask hides the King’s brother, Provence, but you and your mate, Tourcaty, recruiting-sergeants, are men used to measure men by their height in inches and lines, and it is not likely you would be cheated that way.”

“No, it is not likely,” agreed the soldier.

“The King’s brother is five feet three and seven lines,” pursued the magician, “while the Masked Man is nearly five feet six.”

“To a T.,” said the traitor, “that occurred to me; but who can it be if not the King’s brother?”

“But if your lordship knows who this man is,” said the ex-corporal, becoming more at home, “might I ask his name?”

“A name is a serious thing to divulge,” responded the strange man: “and really I prefer you should guess. Do you know the story of Œdipus and the Sphinx?”

“I went to see a tragedy of that title and fell asleep, unfortunately, in the fourth act.”

“Plague take me, but you ought not to call that a misfortune!”

“But I lose by it now.”

“Not to go into details, suffice it that Œdipus, whom I knew as a boy at one royal court and as a man at another, was predicted to be the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. Believing King Polybius this father, he departed from his realm, but would not take a hint from me about the road. The result was that he met his own sire on the road where, as neither would turn out, a fight ensued in which he slew his father. Some time after he met the Sphinx. It was a monster with a woman’s head on a lion’s body which I regret never to have seen, as it was a thousand years after her death that I travelled that road. She had the habit of putting riddles to the wayfarers and eating those who could not read them aright. To my friend Œdipus she put the following:

“'What animal goes upon four legs at morning, two at noon and three at night?'”

“Œdipus answered off-hand: ‘Man, who in the morning of life as a child crawls on all fours; as an adult walks upright; as an old man hobbles with a stick.'”

“That is so,” exclaimed Beausire: “it crossed the sphinx!”

“She threw herself down a precipice and the winner went on to where he married his father’s widow to accomplish the prophecy.”

“But what analogy between the Sphinx and the Masked Man?”

“The devil!” burst forth Beausire, falling into a reverie. “Can you not also help me out here, my lord?”

“Let us turn from pagan story to sacred history, then. Do you know the tale of Lot?”

“Lot and the Pillar of Salt, and his daughters?”

“The same.”

“Of course, I do. Wait a bit, do they not say that old King Louis XIV, and his daughter the Lady Adeliade——“

“You are getting warm, captain——“

“In that case the Masked Man would be Count Louis Narbonne!”

“Now that we are no longer in doubt about this conspirator, let us finish with the aim of the plot. The object is to carry off the King? And take him to Peronne? what means have you?”

“For money we have two millions cash——“

“Lent by a Genoese banker? I know him. Any other funds?”

“I know of none.”

“So much for the money: now for the men.”

“General Lafayette has authorized the raising of a legion to fly to the help of Brabant revolting against the Empire.”

“Under cover of which you form a royalist legion? I see the hand of Lafayette in this,” muttered Cagliostro. “But you will want more than a legion to carry out this plan—an army.”

“Oh, we have the army. Two hundred horsemen are gathered at Versailles ready to start at the appointed hour: they can arrive in three columns at Paris by two in the morning. The first gets in to kill General Lafayette: the second to settle old Necker; the third will do for Mayor Baily.”

“Good!” exclaimed the listener.

“This done, the cannons are spiked, and all rally on the Champs Elysées, and march on the Tuileries where our friends will be masters.”

“What about the National Guards there?”

“Capital!”

“There we find twenty thousand infantry, with all the country royalists, well armed, in great force, who conduct the King to Peronne.”

“Better and better. What do you do there?’

“The gathering there brings our whole array up to one hundred and fifty thousand men.”

“A very pretty figure,” commented the Chief of the Invisibles.

“With the mass we march on Paris, cutting off supplies above and below on the river. Famished Paris capitulates; the Assembly is kicked to pieces, and the King enjoys his own again on the throne of his fathers.”

“Amen!” sang Cagliostro. “My dear Beausire,” he went on, rising, “your conversation is most agreeable; but as they say of the greatest orators, when they have spoken all that is in them, nothing more is to be got. You are done?”

“Yes, my lord, for the moment.”

“Then, good-night: when you want another ten louis call for them at my home, at Bellevue.”

“At the Count of Cagliostro’s?”

“No; they would not know who you meant. Ask for Baron Zannone.”

“But that is the banker who cashed up the two millions on the King’s brother’s notes!” ejaculated Beausire.

“That is not unlikely; only I do such a large business that I have confounded it with the others. That is why it was not clear in my mind but now you remind me, I believe I did something of the kind.”

THE reader will not be much surprised, after the permission Lafayette gave for the King to have his locksmith call to relieve him of a trouble in lockmaking, that Gamain should present himself at the palace with his apprentice who gave the name of Louis Lecomte.

Though there was nothing in the pair aristocratic, King Louis ran to the forge door on hearing the announcement and bade them enter.

“Here I am,” returned Gamain, with the familiarity of a crony.

Whether he was less used to royal company, or endowed by more respect for crowned heads under whatever attire they appeared, the boy kept on the sill, at a space from his master, with his cap in his hand near the door closed by the valet behind both.

He may have been better placed there to catch the gleam of glee in the King’s dull eye, and to give unseen a respectful nod.

“Glad to see you, my old Gamain,” said Louis; “I really did not look for you—I thought you had forgotten old times.”

“And that is why you have taken on a ’prentice,” said Gamain. “You did right enough to have help when I was not on hand, but unfortunately an apprentice is not a master.”

“How could I help it? I was assured that you did not care to come near me from fear of injuring yourself.”

A cloud passed over the royal brow and the apprentice hung his head.

“But folks say that you are getting on nicely since you came back to town, and that you can make the Parisians do anything you like; not that it is astonishing, for the Parisians are ninnies and the Queen is such a weedler when she likes to be.”

Louis made no remark, but his cheeks were colored. The young man seemed pained by the locksmith’s familiarity. After wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, rather fine for a locksmith’s help, he approached the King to whom he said:

“Does your Majesty allow me to tell how we have Master Gamain here and how I am in your employment?”

“Yes, my dear Louis,” said the King.

“That is the style! ‘My dear Louis!’ as long as your arm. To a fortnight’s acquaintance, a workman, a ’prentice! why, what are you going to call me, who has known you these five and twenty years? who put the file in your fist? who am the master? this is the advantage of having white hands and a glib tongue.”

“I will call you ‘My good Gamain’ if you like. I speak to the lad affectionately because I owe to him the joy of seeing my old master again: not because he speaks prettily or keeps his hands smooth, for you know I think nothing of these fine ways—but I like him for proving it was false what they said about my never seeing you any more.”

“Well, it was not me that held back, but that wife of mine. She was always saying: ‘Gamain, you have bad acquaintances, those who fly too high for you. It is not good to hobnob with aristocrats nowadays. We have a little property—look after it. Let us rear our young ones: and let the Dauphin learn locksmithing from others than you, if he wants to, like his father before him. There are plenty of smiths in France.'”

Louis glanced at the apprentice, and stifling a sigh, partly sad and partly rallying, said:

“No doubt, but there are few like you.”

“I should think so,” interrupted Gamain: “bless you, the bolt is the backbone of a lock. It is not given to everybody to get over that difficulty.”

“No, nor mine in passing the examination you put me through to be convinced I came from the King,” replied the young man, laughing. “You said it was a trap laid by your enemies; but the twenty-five yellow boys sent by his Majesty convinced you. So off we started, and here we are.”

“And welcome,” said the royal smith, thanking the speaker with a glance; “and now, Master Gamain, as you appear in a hurry, let us tackle the job.”

“You have hit it. I promised the mistress that I should be home by evening. Let us see this puzzler of a lock.”

The King put in his hands a lock three-parts finished.

“Lord help us,” said the man, grinning: “this is not a secret bolt but a trunk lock. You have three wards on it and the second ought to catch while the first is released by the key.”

He was using the key as he spoke and the others contemplated his demonstration with awe for his learning.

“But the second ward catches, like the Assembly when you want it to do something your way and says: ‘I won’t budge.'”

“But there must be some way of getting over the fix,” said the King.

“Of course; it would be a day’s work to an ordinary workman but I will knock it off in a couple of hours. Only,” said he, with the suspicious air of an artisan jealous of the secrets of the craft; “I want no fussing round me.”

What Gamain desired was the yearning of the King. His loneliness would allow him a dialogue apart with the Apprentice.

“But you may need something?”

“I will set the footman trotting.”

They went by a secret stairway into the royal study, where a table was covered by a large map of France, showing the King had been studying the route of the flight.

“Now that we are alone, count,” said he, “let me compliment you on your skill and thank you for your dedication of services to me.”

“And I ask to be excused for my apparel and the language I have had to use before you.”

“You speak like a brave gentleman and your apparel covers a loyal heart in any case. But we have no time to lose. Even the Queen is ignorant of your presence here; nobody is listening; so to the point.”

“Did not your Majesty send us a naval officer, the count of Charny, who brought a letter——“

“Insignificant,” interrupted the monarch, “a mere introduction to a verbal communication.”

“He fulfilled it and it was to make its performance certain that my father sent me to town to try to have an interview alone with your Majesty. The King can have the certainty of leaving France. My father is proud and happy of the honor done him.”

“Now for the principal point; what says he of the project?”

“That it is hazardous and requires great precautions but is not impossible.”

“Firstly, will not your father want the command over the adjoining districts?”

“It is his advice, but he would not like it to be thought personal ambition——“

“Pooh, do I not know his disinterestedness? did he explain about the best road to take?”

“In the first place he fears one thing: that many projects of flight have been proposed and that all these getting entangled, this one will meet some block which will be ascribed to fatality, when it will be the spite or the rashness of the other parties.”

“Has your Majesty planned out the flight or is this but a sketch?” queried the count.

“Nothing is settled,” replied Louis, “and all depends on circumstances. If I see the Queen and the Family running fresh dangers from the ruffians I will take an irrevocable decision.”

“My father thinks the dangers of the journey will be diminished by dividing the passengers.”

“Yes, but it is useless to discuss this point. In a solemn hour the Queen and I resolved to go together or not at all.”

The envoy bowed.

“At the meet moment the King has but to issue the orders to have them executed,” he said. “Now, for the route. There are three ways to Montmedy.”

“I have marked them on the map. The best is through Reims, but I was consecrated there and would be recognized by many. I choose the Chalons Road via Vacennes and going round Verdun. Let the regiments be posted in the petty towns between Chalons and Montmedy: I see no inconvenience in the first detachment awaiting me in the former place.”

“Sire, the location of the regiments will have to be settled. By the way, the King should know that there is no posting-house at Varennes.”

“I am glad you are so well informed,” observed the King, merrily; “it shows you have deeply studied the plans. But do not worry about such matters. Charny is my engineer, who has drawn up the maps and he will see to the supply of horses.”

“Delay is always prejudicial, and there is no wholly favorable time in any business; hence if one were to wait for a perfect chance, nothing would ever be done, or if done be bungled.”

“That is Machiavelli,” said the King. “I will remember the advice of that secretary to the Magnificent Republic of Venice. But hush! I hear steps—it is Gamain; let us go to meet him so that he may not think we were busy about something else than the cupboard the lock is for.”

He opened the secret door, in time, for the master locksmith was there, with the lock in his hand and a grin on his face.