“Are you still befooled by his tricks, fools that you are? Yes, no doubt there was a fire in the cellar last night, no doubt his creditors will be geese enough to let him off paying his debts! But what you don’t know is, that he didn’t really lose by it at all!”
“He lost all his goods!” the crowd cried on all sides. “More than nine thousand livres! Oil and brandy, do you think those won’t burn? The old witch, she drinks enough to know! If one put a candle near her she would take fire, fast enough!”
“Perhaps,” replied the woman, with renewed gesticulations, “perhaps; but I don’t advise any of you to try. Anyhow, this fellow here is a rogue; he has been emptying his cellar for the last three nights; there were only old empty casks in it and empty packing-cases! Oh yes! I have swallowed his daily lies like everybody else, but I know the truth by now. He got his liquor taken away by Michael Lambourne’s son, the cobbler in the rue de la Parcheminerie. How do I know? Why, because the young man came and told me!”
“I turned that woman out of my shop a month ago, for stealing,” said Derues.
Notwithstanding this retaliatory accusation, the woman’s bold assertion might have changed the attitude of the crowd and chilled the enthusiasm, but at that moment a stout man pressed forward, and seizing the hawker by the arm, said—
“Go, and hold your tongue, backbiting woman!”
To this man, the honour of Derues was an article of faith; he had not yet ceased to wonder at the probity of this sainted person, and to doubt it in the least was as good as suspecting his own.
“My dear friend,” he said, “we all know what to think of you. I know you well. Send to me tomorrow, and you shall have what goods you want, on credit, for as long as is necessary. Now, evil tongue, what do you say to that?”
“I say that you are as great a fool as the rest. Adieu, friend Derues; go on as you have begun, and I shall be selling your ‘sentence’ some day”; and dispersing the crowd with a few twirls of her right arm, she passed on, crying—
“Sentence pronounced by the Parliament of Paris against John Robert Cassel, accused and convicted of Fraudulent Bankruptcy!”