“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!”