One single circumstance had ruffled it, and that he used often to relate to his gossips, in proof that a hero was spoiled in the making when Scipion became a shopkeeper.
One night, ten years before the time of his introduction to the reader, Scipion had gone to the theatre, and after the performance had taken Madame to a restaurant and treated her to a little supper. Returning home, after he was in bed Scipion heard a noise in the shop. He armed himself with a bootjack, went down, and, with the assistance of the hastily summoned police, captured a burglar.
The man, who said he was an Italian, named Vedova, disclaimed earnestly all felonious intentions, but could give no good account of himself. Scipion prosecuted him vigorously, and he was convicted and sent to Brest.
Two years later Scipion met Vedova in a café and had him arrested as an escaped convict.
In the early part of 1852 Scipion received official notification from Martinique that a bachelor cousin of his on the island, whose name was Pache, was dead and had left him heir to all his property which was large, and included a valuable sugar plantation. Desruelles was further informed by the notary at St. Jean, that it would be necessary for him to come out in person and administer on the estate in order to save himself great loss and inconvenience and many delays.
The bourgeois of Paris is not a traveling character, but neither is he willing to lose money if he can help it. Scipion bought himself a trunk, committed the little boutique in the Rue de Seine to Madame’s charge—she was quite as competent to take care of it as he—made a deed of all his property in Paris to Madame as a preventive of accidents, and then bidding her the most tender adieu, sailed for Martinique, via Bourdeaux, in a brig which took out a cargo of claret and oil for the French islands and New Orleans.
When Desruelles reached Martinique and went to St. Jean, he was simply struck dumb to find his cousin alive and well, and all the notarial papers he had received forgeries!
There was nothing for him to do but go back again.
The brig was to sail in a day for New Orleans, and Scipion determined to go thither in her, take the cars to New York and the steamer thence to Havre, in order to get home again as speedily as possible. He was burning to send the police in search of the rascals who had hoaxed him and made him spend his money and suffer sea-sickness in a wild-goose chase. He was armed with all the preliminary depositions and statements necessary to open the case, duplicates of which were to be forwarded by the authorities from Martinique.
Arrived in New Orleans, Scipion determined to spend a day or two in the city before taking the cars for New York. He put up at a boarding house in the French quarter, and devoted himself to sight-seeing with great assiduity.