“Oh, little Quatremains-Quatrepattes! Dost thou not perceive the paradox? How can destiny be altered by foreknowledge? If you interpret that I am to be guillotined, and I profit by the statement to evade such a catastrophe, how is not your prophecy stultified?”
“Why, I have no creed of predestination. The lords of life and death are not inexorable. Sometimes, like M. St Meard, one may buy his reprieve of them with a jest. Above all, they hate the sour fatalist whose subscription to his own faith is a gloomy affectation.”
“Well; I think I love thee a little.”
He looked at me with a smile.
“Come with me, then. I long to give thee proof. Dost thou need a safeguard? Thou shalt run under my wing—ça et là—to Paris if thou wilt. I am popular with all. If necessity drives, thou shalt figure as my Jack-pudding. What! thou mayst even play up to the part. Thou hast slept in the mire; but ‘many a ragged colt makes a good horse.’”
I laughed.
“Why not?” I said. “For I have played the tragic to empty houses till I am tired.”
* * * * * * *
Quatremains-Quatrepattes and his merry-andrew gambolled through a score of villages on their road to Paris. I found the rascal hugely popular, as he had boasted he was, and a most excellent convoy to my humble craft, so perilously sailing under false colours. He was subtle, shrewd, seasonable,—of the species whose opportunity is accident; and perhaps no greater tribute could be paid to his deftness than this—that he never once exposed himself to detection by me in a question of moral fraud. “Ton génie a la main crochue,” I would say to him, chuckling; but he would only respond with a rebuking silence.
Early he handed over the bag of broadsides—the revolutionary songs and ballads (some, it must be confessed, abominably coarse)—to my care, that so he himself might assume a lofty indifference to the meaner processes of his business. This delighted me. It was like a new rattling game to me to hawk my commodities amongst the crowd; to jest and laugh with my fellows once more under cover of the droll I represented. Shortly, I think, I became as popular as Quatremains himself; and over this, though he loved me as a valuable auxiliary, he began to look a little sober by-and-by, as if he dreaded I should joke the weightier part of his commerce out of all respect.