"What we want," said a dark, ill-looking, but finely-dressed man, setting his claret down, "and what we have got to have, is"--he was speaking in French, but gave the want in English--"Representesh'n wizout Taxa--" There his eye fell upon Frowenfeld and followed him with a scowl.
"Mah frang," he said to his table companion, "wass you sink of a mane w'at hask-a one neegrow to 'ave-a one shair wiz 'im, eh?--in ze sem room?"
The apothecary found that his fame was far wider and more general than he had supposed. He turned to go out, bowing as he did so, to an Américain merchant with whom he had some acquaintance.
"Sir?" asked the merchant, with severe politeness, "wish to see me? I thought you--As I was saying, gentlemen, what, after all, does it sum up?"
A Creole interrupted him with an answer:
"Leetegash'n, Spoleeash'n, Pahtitsh'n, Disintegrhash'n!"
The voice was like Honoré's. Frowenfeld looked; it was Agamemnon Grandissime.
"I must go to Maspero's," thought the apothecary, and he started up the rue Chartres. As he turned into the rue St. Louis, he suddenly found himself one of a crowd standing before a newly-posted placard, and at a glance saw it to be one of the inflammatory publications which were a feature of the times, appearing both daily and nightly on walls and fences.
"One Amerry-can pull' it down, an' Camille Brahmin 'e pas'e it back," said a boy at Frowenfeld's side.
Exchange Alley was once Passage de la Bourse, and led down (as it now does to the State House--late St. Louis Hotel) to an establishment which seems to have served for a long term of years as a sort of merchants' and auctioneers' coffee-house, with a minimum of china and a maximum of glass: Maspero's--certainly Maspero's as far back as 1810, and, we believe, Maspero's the day the apothecary entered it, March 9, 1804. It was a livelier spot than the Veau-qui-tête; it was to that what commerce is to litigation, what standing and quaffing is to sitting and sipping. Whenever the public mind approached that sad state of public sentiment in which sanctity signs politicians' memorials and chivalry breaks into the gun-shops, a good place to feel the thump of the machinery was in Maspero's.