‘Your voice ought to make your fortune, Philippe,’ said Sainte-Croix, who appeared to know the student intimately.
‘Pardieu! it does me little service. Theria, there, who cannot sing a note, keeps all the galanteries to himself. Ho! Maître Camille! here I pledge your last conquest.’ And he raised his cup as he added, ‘Marie-Marguerite de Brinvilliers!’
Sainte-Croix started at the name; his eyes, flashing with anger, passed rapidly from one to the other of the two students.
‘Chut!’ cried another of the students, a man of small stature, who was dressed in the court costume of the period, but shabbily, and with every point exaggerated. ‘Chut! Monsieur perchance knows la belle Marquise, and will not bear to hear her name lipped amongst us?’
The student had noticed the rapid change and expression of Sainte-Croix’s countenance.
‘No, no—you are mistaken,’ said Gaudin. ‘I am slightly acquainted with the lady. I served with her husband.’
‘Jean Blacquart,’ said Glazer, with much solemnity, to the scholar who had last spoken, ‘if you interrupt the conversation again, I shall let out your Gascon blood with the cook’s spit, and then drop you into the Bièvre. Remember it runs underneath the window.’
The Gascon—for so he was—was immediately silent.
‘The Captain Gaudin cannot know less of La Brinvilliers than I do,’ continued Theria, ‘save by report, as a charitable and spirited lady. I met her at mass a fortnight since, at the Jacobins in the Rue St. Honoré, and escorted her from a tumult that rose in the church. I might have improved on my acquaintance had that senseless Blacquart permitted me.’
The scholars looked towards Blacquart, and simultaneously broke into the same kind of noise they would have made in chasing an animal from the room. The Gascon was evidently the butt of the society.