“Pouf! Call it what you mean—black disgrace—and yet I tell you that I hold its favour in the hollow of my hand.”
The Chevalier’s eyes glistened more.
“I do not doubt your powers of propitiation; else, with grateful thanks for the proffered honour—”
“Exactly—you must decline so sinful a connection. Make it a condition if you will: reconciliation with the Government, and Yolande; or failure, and no Yolande. I am confident. I know myself and others. I will be Marchese in a week, and M. de France will have won his first step towards the position from which he has been too long excluded.”
“H’m!”
“Moreover, he will have acquired a devoted and generous son-in-law” (the Chevalier smiled), “whose first act will be to settle the reversion of his entire property on his own widow.”
“You are serious? And if I decline?”
“I shall leave everything—including bills, acceptances, securities, all the little pigeons waiting in my casier to be plucked—to M. Gaston Trix.”
“Who is he?”
“I am very fond of him. They call him also Cartouche. What does it matter? The hawk is not named hawk in every country of the world. Here he is this—there that. Trix was Cartouche in Chambéry, Scaramuccio in Turin, anything elsewhere. His mother was English; he was born in London; his father forgot to leave his address. Yes, I am very fond of him.”