The potter bounded from his wheel, letting the vessel spin off to destruction, and danced, stretching his long mustaches abroad in both hands as the ancients must have rent their clothes. He cried that he had been cheated, stripped, starved.
"I thought they were straitened in Monsieur's court," he raged, "and they have been maintaining a false dauphin!"
"As I said, Bellenger," remarked his superior, "you are either a fool or the greatest rascal I ever saw."
He looked at Bellenger attentively.
"Yet why should you want to mix clues—and be rewarded with evident misery? And how could you lose him out of your hand and remain unconscious of it? He was sent to the ends of the earth for safety—poor shattered child!—and if he is safe elsewhere, why should you be pensioned to maintain another child? They say that a Bourbon never learns anything; but I protest that a Bourbon knows well what he does know. I feel sure my uncle intends no harm to the disabled heir. Who is guilty of this double dealing? I confess I don't understand it."
Now whether by our long and silent stare we drew his regard, or chance cast his eye upward, the potter that instant saw us standing in the cloud above him. He dropped by his motionless wheel, all turned to clay himself. The eyeballs stuck from his face. He opened his mouth and screeched as if he had been started and could not leave off—
"The king!—the king!—the king!—the king!"
IX
The fool's outcry startled me less than Madame de Ferrier. She fell against me and sank downward, so that I was obliged to hold her up in my arms. I had never seen a woman swoon. I thought she was dying, and shouted to them below to come and help me.