‘“No,” he says. “Tell Toby I am not Christian to-night. All Indian.” He had those fits sometimes. I wanted to know more about Monsieur Peringuey, and the emigré party was the very place to find out. It’s neither here nor there of course, but those French emigré parties they almost make you cry. The men that you bought fruit of in Market Street, the hairdressers and fencing-masters and French teachers, they turn back again by candlelight to what they used to be at home, and you catch their real names. There wasn’t much room in the wash-house, so I sat on top of the copper and played ’em the tunes they called for—"Si le Roi m’avait donné,” and such nursery stuff. They cried sometimes. It hurt me to take their money afterwards, indeed it did. And there I found out about Monsieur Peringuey. He was a proper rogue too! None of ’em had a good word for him except the Marquise that kept the French boarding-house on Fourth Street. I made out that his real name was the Count Talleyrand de Périgord—a priest right enough, but sorely come down in the world. He’d been King Louis’ ambassador to England a year or two back, before the French had cut off King Louis’ head; and, by what I heard, that head wasn’t hardly more than hanging loose before he’d run back to Paris and prevailed on Danton, the very man which did the murder, to send him back to England again as Ambassador of the French Republic! That was too much for the English, so they kicked him out by Act of Parliament, and he’d fled to the Americas without money or friends or prospects. I’m telling you the talk in the wash-house. Some of ’em was laughing over it. Says the French Marquise, “My friends, you laugh too soon. That man will be on the winning side before any of us."
‘“I did not know you were so fond of priests, Marquise,” says the Vicomte. His lady did my washing, as I’ve told you.
‘“I have my reasons,” says the Marquise. “He sent my uncle and my two brothers to Heaven by the little door,"—that was one of the emigré names for the guillotine. “He will be on the winning side if it costs him the blood of every friend he has in the world.”
‘“Then what does he want here?” says one of ’em. “We have all lost our game.”
‘“My faith!” says the Marquise. “He will find out, if any one can, whether this canaille of a Washington means to help us to fight England. Genêt (that was my ambassador in the Embuscade) has failed and gone off disgraced; Fauchet (he was the new man) hasn’t done any better, but our abbé will find out, and he will make his profit out of the news. Such a man does not fail.”
‘“He begins unluckily,” says the Vicomte. “He was set upon to-day in the street for not hooting your Washington.”They all laughed again, and one remarks, “How does the poor devil keep himself.”
‘He must have slipped in through the wash-house door, for he flits past me and joins ’em, cold as ice.
‘“One does what one can,” he says. “I sell buttons. And you, Marquise?”
‘“I?"—she waves her poor white hands all burned—"I am a cook—a very bad one—at your service, abbé. We were just talking about you."
‘They didn’t treat him like they talked of him. They backed off and stood still.