In the meantime they marched us into the taxing-house, where at a table sat a commissary of a strange figure. I had blundered desperately; yet here, I flatter myself, I turned my faculty for construing character to the account of retrieving my own.
In Citizen Tristan I read—and quite rightly, as events showed—a decent burgher aggrandised, not against his will, but against the entire lack of one. His face was shaped, and something coloured, like a great autumn pear. It was narrow at the forehead, with restless, ineffective eyes, and it dropped to a monstrous chin—a self-protective evolution in the era Sainte Guillotine. Obviously he had studied to save his neck by surrounding it with a rampart of fat. For the rest he was very squat and ungainly; and he kept shifting the papers on his desk rather than look at us.
“Here is a man,” thought I, “who has been promoted because in all his life he has never learned to call anything his own.”
Our guard presented us arrogantly; the wizened post-boy laid his charge volubly.
“Call your witness,” said I in a pet. “The case lies in a nutshell.”
My words made an impression, no doubt, though they were uttered in mere hopeless bravado.
“But, it seems he cannot be found,” protested the commissary, plaintively.
“Then,” I urged, “it is bad law to detain us.”
“You are detained on suspicion.”
“Of not being ourselves? Oh, monsieur——!”