Seats of the Mighty | Page 8

it
seemed easy to think that we should meet no more.
As we passed into the dining-room, I said, as I had said the first time I
went to dinner in her father's house, "Shall we be flippant, or grave?"
I guessed that it would touch her. She raised her eyes to mine and
answered, "We are grave; let us seem flippant."
In those days I had a store of spirits. I was seldom dismayed, for life
had been such a rough-and-tumble game that I held to cheerfulness and
humour as a hillsman to his broadsword, knowing it the greatest of
weapons with a foe, and the very stone and mortar of friendship. So we
were gay, touching lightly on events around us, laughing at gossip of
the doorways (I in my poor French), casting small stones at whatever
drew our notice, not forgetting a throw or two at Chateau Bigot, the
Intendant's country house at Charlesbourg, five miles away, where base
plots were hatched, reputations soiled, and all clean things dishonoured.
But Alixe, the sweetest soul France ever gave the world, could not
know all I knew; guessing only at heavy carousals, cards, song, and
raillery, with far-off hints of feet lighter than fit in cavalry boots
dancing among the glasses on the table. I was never before so charmed
with her swift intelligence, for I never had great nimbleness of thought,
nor power to make nice play with the tongue.
"You have been three years with us," suddenly said her father, passing
me the wine. "How time has flown! How much has happened!"
"Madame Cournal's husband has made three million francs," said
Doltaire, with dry irony and truth.
Duvarney shrugged a shoulder, stiffened; for, oblique as the suggestion
was, he did not care to have his daughter hear it.
"And Vaudreuil has sent bees buzzing to Versailles about Bigot and
Company," added the impish satirist.

Madame Duvarney responded with a look of interest, and the
Seigneur's eyes steadied to his plate. All at once by that I saw the
Seigneur had known of the Governor's action, and maybe had
counseled with him, siding against Bigot. If that were so--as it proved
to be--he was in a nest of scorpions; for who among them would spare
him: Marin, Cournal, Rigaud, the Intendant himself? Such as he were
thwarted right and left in this career of knavery and public evils.
"And our people have turned beggars; poor and starved, they beg at the
door of the King's storehouse--it is well called La Friponne," said
Madame Duvarney, with some heat; for she was ever liberal to the poor,
and she had seen manor after manor robbed, and peasant farmers made
to sell their corn for a song, to be sold to them again at famine prices by
La Friponne. Even now Quebec was full of pilgrim poor begging
against the hard winter, and execrating their spoilers.
Doltaire was too fond of digging at the heart of things not to admit she
spoke truth.
"La Pompadour et La Friponne! Qu'est que cela, mon petit homme?"
"Les deux terribles, ma chere mignonne, Mais, c'est cela-- La
Pompadour et La Friponne!"
He said this with cool drollery and point, in the patois of the native, so
that he set us all laughing, in spite of our mutual apprehensions.
Then he continued, "And the King has sent a chorus to the play, with
eyes for the preposterous make-believe, and more, no purse to fill."
We all knew he meant himself, and we knew also that so far as money
went he spoke true; that though hand-in-glove with Bigot, he was poor,
save for what he made at the gaming-table and got from France. There
was the thing that might have clinched me to him, had matters been
other than they were; for all my life I have loathed the sordid soul, and
I would rather, in these my ripe years, eat with a highwayman who
takes his life in his hands than with the civilian who robs his king and
the king's poor, and has no better trick than false accounts, nor better
friend than the pettifogging knave. Doltaire had no burning love for

France, and little faith in anything; for he was of those Versailles
water-flies who recked not if the world blackened to cinders when their
lights went out. As will be seen by-and-bye, he had come here to seek
me, and to serve the Grande Marquise.
More speech like this followed, and amid it all, with the flower of the
world beside me at this table, I remembered my mother's words before
I bade her good-bye and set sail from Glasgow for Virginia.
"Keep it in mind, Robert," she said, "that an honest love is the thing to
hold you honest with yourself. 'Tis