The radiant being bowed his head gravely.
"Well, after all, there's nothing very astonishing in that," said Theophrastus. "My name, my real name, my actual family name, is Cartouche; and for a long time everybody has believed that it was a nickname."
"Your name is not Cartouche; it is Theophrastus Longuet," said M. Eliphas de la Nox with gentle firmness.
"The one does not prevent the other," said Theophrastus, who better than anyone else knew what he was talking about, quite logically.
"I beg your pardon," said M. Eliphas de la Nox, with the same gentle firmness. "You must not cherish this confusion of mind. Once upon a time your name was Cartouche, but now it is Theophrastus Longuet. Understand that: you are Theophrastus Longuet. My friend, listen to me carefully, as you would listen to a physician who was going to heal you. For you are ill, my friend, very ill, exactly because you believe you are Cartouche, when you are really Theophrastus Longuet. I appeal to all the simplicity of your soul."
"That's all right," said Theophrastus. "I like simple things myself; so I dislike very much, very much indeed, the way by which one comes to see you, through a labyrinth of passages, with skeletons hanging up in them. What's he doing in your house, by the way, that skeleton, instead of resting quietly on Saint-Chaumont Hill? I recognised him at once. They were dragging him to the charnel-house at the Gallows of Montfaucon the very day of my marriage with my dear wife Marie-Antoinette Neron, when we were having our wedding breakfast at the Chopinettes. Beaulieu and Old Easy-Going were with us. At that epoch, my dear M. Eliphas de Taillepot—"
"Eliphas de Taillebourg," corrected Adolphe in a somewhat shocked tone.
"At that epoch—my friend Adolphe, who's as serious as a donkey, will tell you so—they no longer hung people at the Gallows of Montfaucon, but they used to throw into the charnel-house of those gallows the remains of people whom they hung elsewhere. That's how it was that this poor Gastelard, whose skeleton I recognised just now, was dragged to the charnel-house after having been hung in the Place de Grève. Gastelard, my dear M. St. Elmo's-Fire—"
"De Saint-Elme," M. Lecamus corrected him again.
"My dear M. de Saint-Elme, Gastelard wasn't up to much, a poor beggar full of imagination, who, having one day disguised himself as a King's deputy, demanded his sword from a gentleman, showing him at the same time an Order of Committal. The gentleman believed that he was being duly arrested, and handed over his sword, the hilt of which was gold and the most beautiful you ever saw. The story ended with Gastelard at the end of a rope. But I'll be hanged, my dear M. de l'Equinox—"