"As yet the thanks are due from me, and Lorgnac is helping me to pay my debts. And now listen, mon ami. One half the world consists of fools who give advice, and the other half of idiots who refuse to benefit by it; let me for once see an exception to the rule."
"I hardly follow you."
"I will explain. Between us there is this difference. In the search for happiness that every man makes I remained in the world, and you left it and turned philosopher. The result is that I am fairly satisfied with life, whereas you are sick of it in your heart. Yet, until this disaster came to you, you tried to play the happy man with your lute, your 'Plutarch's Lives,' and your hermit's cell of a house. Is it not so?"
I made no answer, and he continued:
"Last night, for some reason of your own—perhaps because you still clung to your belief in your own way of life—you refused a chance; that chance has gone; but another is left, and it remains for you to take it or not."
"What is left?"
"What is left is this. Last night you refused the sauce of a prince of the blood; to-day will you refuse the soup of a Queen?"
"Of a Queen!"
"Yes; of the Queen of France. In brief, the Queen wants a reliable person to do something for her. It must be someone unknown to the Court. Will you undertake the business or not? It will, at any rate, enable you to leave Paris in safety, in broad day if you will, though out of Paris you may have to look to your skin."
Like an old war-horse I scented the battle, and my blood flamed through me. Le Brusquet was right. With cunning knowledge he had pulled at my heart-strings, and laid bare my secret to myself. Win or lose, I now knew that I had to come back to the world; and it should be now. I rose to my feet.