“Very well,” said Beauregard, “all that shall be done.”
“And now,” said Lavenne, “I must go and dress for the part, and in an hour, when the testimonial arrives, I will be ready. Let it be dated last month, and let it be for two years’ service. I may not even want it at all; they will be very glad, I should think, to accept Jumeau’s cousin’s service whilst Jumeau is seeing after his sick mother, and so save themselves the trouble of doing without a servant or hunting for one. Still, it is as well to be prepared at all points.”
“Yes, you are right,” said Beauregard. “Well, good luck to you.”
Lavenne took his departure and hurried round to his rooms in the Rue Picpus. It was now seven o’clock in the evening. It had been a busy day for him, but the work of that day was not over yet. When he arrived at the house in the Rue Picpus, he found someone waiting for him. It was Javotte.
“Monsieur,” said Javotte, “when I spoke to you this morning, I did not tell you quite all that I knew about the affairs of Monsieur de Rochefort. There was something I held back, and I would like to tell you it now.”
“Come in,” said Lavenne, with a smile. The eternal feminine was the same in his day as ours—that is to say, it might be summed up in the same words: “The animal with a postscript.”
CHAPTER III
CHOISEUL’S LETTER
LAVENNE inhabited very modest apartments in the Rue Picpus, a street of that old Paris which, always dying and vanishing, never seems quite to die, which showed the towers of Philip Augustus to the people who lived in the time of Charles V. and the old houses of Louis XI. to the subjects of Louis XV., which shows, even to-day, glimpses of the remotest past in odd corners left unswept by the tide of Time.