'Mon Dieu! and so you actually fought a duel with this young spark De Toneins?' exclaimed the dark abbé.
'Yes, because duelling being strictly forbidden in the camp, we fought about everything; even the peccadilloes of the girls at the Hôtel d'Argent, or about who was the best hand with cards, a case of pistols, anything in short. But he fairly ran me through the body.'
'I think you have a luck that way. Ouf! after this, I would have paid a priest to curse him.'
'Bah!' replied the fair abbé, with a bitter smile, 'I can do it cheaper myself.'
'True,' replied the other, and while drumming with his fingers on the table, hummed half-abstractedly—
'Fille d'un simple pelletier,
Elle était gentillette;
Robert en galant chevalier
Vint lui conter fleurette.'
This song, together with the voice, stirred an immediate chord in my memory; and while pretending to examine certain pictures of farriers' shops, riding-houses, and Dutch market-places, by Albert Kuyp, with which the room was decorated, I drew near the two reverend abbés, and observed them more particularly; and despite their perukes, in imitation of the inventor, the absurd Abbé la Rivière, I recognised in the elder and darker, the devil-may-care Chevalier Raoul d'Ische; and in the younger and fair-haired, the Prince of Vaudemont, the son of that Duke of Lorraine, whose territories we were about to enter.
Perplexity and astonishment at the cool daring of these two cavaliers kept me silent; and they continued to converse without observing me.
'You are right,' said the Prince, in reply to some remark of the Chevalier; 'the risks run by Marie Louise, whose beauty and delicacy render her so suspiciously attractive, are a source of great unhappiness to me.'
'But her presence in Paris is as necessary to us, as twenty thousand men upon the frontier,' replied the Chevalier, in the same low, guarded tone. 'The Countess—'