“Yes.”
Luc flushed. Instinct, training, tradition were too powerful for even M. de Voltaire’s fiery urgings to move. Though he struggled against the impression he felt as if he had been insulted; then he laughed, and the great man before whom he had stood abashed was swept with that laugh on to a different plane. In the next perfectly courteous words that Luc spoke, it was the Marquis addressing the attorney’s clerk.
“But, Monsieur, I am a gentleman,” he said simply.
M. de Voltaire looked at him for a moment of silence.
“Would you rather be such as M. de Richelieu or such as I?” he asked at last.
Luc did not see the point.
“M. de Richelieu does nothing that a gentleman may not do,” he answered; “he does not write books.”
“No—and he has all the seven deadly sins to his credit, which, I suppose, makes a fine patent of nobility,” remarked M. de Voltaire slowly.
Luc flushed; he found that it was necessary to explain.
“When one is ‘born’ there are things one cannot do, Monsieur. I could no more publish my writings than”—he hesitated for an illustration—“than a stage player could wear a sword.”