"That is near the Louvre," I answered. "Get me my cloak, and your own also; and bring your pistols. I am going for a walk. You will accompany me."
He was a good man, La Font, and devoted to my interests. "It will be night in half an hour, Monseigneur," he answered respectfully. "You will take some of the Swiss?"
"In one word, no!" I rejoined. "We will go out by the stable entrance. In the mean time, and until we return, I will bid Maignan keep the door, and admit no one."
The crowd of those who daily left the Arsenal before nightfall happened to be augmented on this occasion by a troop of my clients from Mantes; tenants on the lands of Rosny, who had lingered after the hour of audience to see the courts and garden. By mingling with these we had no difficulty in passing out unobserved; nor, once in the streets, where a thaw had set in, that filled the kennel with water and the pavement with slush, was La Font long in bringing me to the house I sought. It stood on the outskirts of the St. Honoré Faubourg, in a quarter sufficiently respectable, and a street marked neither by extreme squalor nor extravagant ostentation--from one or other of which all desperate enterprises, in my opinion, take their rise. The house, which was high and narrow, presented only two windows to the street, but the staircase was sweet and clean, and it was impossible to cross the threshold without feeling a prepossession in Felix's favor. Already I began to think I had come on a fool's errand.
"Which floor?" I asked La Font.
"The highest. Monsieur," he answered.
I went up softly and he followed me. Under the tiles I found a door, and heard some one moving beyond it. Bidding La Font remain on guard outside, and come to my aid only if I called him, I knocked boldly. A gentle voice bade me enter, and I did so.
There was only one person in the room, a young woman with fair, waving hair, a pale face, and blue eyes, who, seeing a cloaked stranger instead of the friend or neighbor she anticipated, stared at me in the utmost wonder and some alarm. The room, though poorly furnished, was particularly neat and clean; which, taken with the woman's complexion, left me in no doubt as to her native province. On the floor near the fire stood a cradle; and in the window a cage with a singing bird completed the homely and pleasant aspect of this interior, which was such as, if I could, I would multiply by thousands in every town of France.
A small lamp, which the woman was in the act of lighting, enabled me to see those details, and also discovered me to her. I asked politely if I spoke to Madame Felix, the wife of M. Felix of the Chamber of Accounts.
"I am Madame Felix," she answered, advancing slowly toward me. "My husband is late. Do you come from him? It is not bad news, Monsieur?"