Sartines coughed with irritation. Balsamo stopped quietly till he was done.
“Hence, you see the speculator in the storehouses enriched by the increase in value. Is this clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” replied the other. “But it seems to me that you are bold enough to promise to denounce a crime or a plot of which his Majesty is the author.”
“You understand it plainly,” said Balsamo.
“This is bold, indeed, and I should be curious to know how the King will take the charge. I am afraid that the result will be precisely the same as that I conceived when I looked through your papers; take care, my lord, you will get into the Bastile all the same.”
“How poorly you judge me and how wrong you are in still taking me for a fool. Do you imagine that I, an ambassador, a mere curious investigator, would attack the King in person? That would be the act of a blockhead. Pray hear me out.”
Sartines nodded to the man with the pistol.
“Those who discovered this plot against the French people—pardon the precious time I am consuming, but you will see presently that it is not lost time—they are economists, who, very minute and painstaking, by applying their microscopic lenses to this rigging of the market, have remarked that the King is not working the game alone. They know that his Majesty keeps an exact register of the market rate of grain in the different markets: that he rubs his hands when the rise wins him eight or ten thousand crowns; but they also know that another man is filling his own alongside of his Majesty’s—an official, you will guess—who uses the royal figures for his own behalf. The economists, therefore, not being idiots, will not attack the King, but the man, the public officer, the agent who gambles for his sovereign.”
Sartines tried to shake his wig into the upright but it was no use.
“I am coming to the point, now,” said Balsamo. “In the same way as you know I am the Count of Fenix through your police, I know you are Lord Sartines through mine.”