“Willingly. Is M. Georges one of those agitators below the surface?”
“No, indeed. It is for you to play.”
Here M. Georges arrived, and no further conversation on political or social questions ensued.
Graham had already called more than once at M. Lebeau’s office, and asked him to put into good French various letters on matters of business, the subjects of which had been furnished by M. Renard. The office was rather imposing and stately, considering the modest nature of M. Lebeau’s ostensible profession. It occupied the entire ground-floor of a corner house, with a front-door at one angle and a back-door at the other. The anteroom to his cabinet, and in which Graham had generally to wait some minutes before he was introduced, was generally well filled, and not only by persons who, by their dress and outward appearance, might be fairly supposed sufficiently illiterate to require his aid as polite letter-writers,—not only by servant-maids and grisettes, by sailors, zouaves, and journeymen workmen,—but not unfrequently by clients evidently belonging to a higher, or at least a richer, class of society,—men with clothes made by a fashionable tailor; men, again, who, less fashionably attired; looked like opulent tradesmen and fathers of well-to-do families,—the first generally young, the last generally middle-aged. All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by a saturnine clerk into M. Lebeau’s reception-room, very quickly and in precedence of the ouvriers and grisettes.
“What can this mean?” thought Graham; “is it really that this humble business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy concealed,—the International Association?” And so pondering, the clerk one day singled him from the crowd and admitted him into M. Lebeau’s cabinet. Graham thought the time had now arrived when he might safely approach the subject that had brought him to the Faubourg Montmartre.
“You are very good,” said Graham, speaking in the English of a young earl in our elegant novels,—“you are very good to let me in while you have so many swells and nobs waiting for you in the other room. But, I say, old fellow, you have not the cheek to tell me that they want you to correct their cocker or spoon for them by proxy?”
“Pardon me,” answered M. Lebeau in French, “if I prefer my own language in replying to you. I speak the English I learned many years ago, and your language in the beau monde, to which you evidently belong, is strange to me. You are quite right, however, in your surmise that I have other clients than those who, like yourself, think I could correct their verbs or their spelling. I have seen a great deal of the world,—I know something of it, and something of the law; so that many persons come to me for advice and for legal information on terms more moderate than those of an avoue. But my ante-chamber is full, I am pressed for time; excuse me if I ask you to say at once in what I can be agreeable to you to-day.”
“Ah!” said Graham, assuming a very earnest look, “you do know the world, that is clear; and you do know the law of France, eh?”
“Yes, a little.”
“What I wanted to say at present may have something to do with French law, and I meant to ask you either to recommend to me a sharp lawyer, or to tell me how I can best get at your famous police here.”