“I have the good fortune of seeing M. Trix?” said the King; “the protégé of our late lamented Marquis? It is a pleasure of which I have often dreamed, and now realise to my instruction. You were very attached to your patron, Monsieur?”
“I returned his regard for me, Sire, with duty and affection.”
“He is a great loss to us. We had looked upon him as a bulwark against the licentious encroachments of the age. He would have found for your modern Rousseaus poor quarters at Chambéry—or at Le Prieuré, for that matter. No question of subversive petitions, had he remained alive. It was a pity he was so appallingly ugly. I am not sure about the laces, monsieur. They are a little democratic.”
“They have gold tags, Sire,” was all that Trix could find to answer.
“True,” said the King, “and that perhaps redeems them, like the jewel in the toad’s head. I understand, Monsieur, that the widow is as great a beauty as she is a fortune.”
Cartouche sniggered to himself, dogging these apparently inconsequent “doublings” of the royal mind.
“She is priceless in every way, Sire.”
The King looked at him rather keenly.
“It would want a courageous man,” he said, “to aspire to the priceless.”
Cartouche smiled, in a state of inner astonishment. To what end, of favour or correction, was all this irrelevance of the royal flibbertigibbet addressed? Knowing his own reputation in Turin, he could hardly flatter himself with a thought of promotion. And the next remark of the monarch only deepened his perplexity.