"What can we do for you, then?"
"Thank the others. Invite all my friends in Troyes to a banquet in my name this day week, at which you will preside for me. Spare no expense. You shall be witness for me while I am absent in Canada."
"If to serve you is the programme, I shall live happy."
The Baron returned to Troyes and, duly presiding at the dinner given to the Guards in Germain's name, related excitedly what he had seen.
The young men heard the story with outbursts of delight, drank Lecour's health standing on their chairs, heaped his place with roses, sang over and over a chorus in his honour, and parted swearing vehemently that the dismissal of such a good fellow was a wrong to the company of Noailles concocted as an insult to the whole of them by the rival company of Villeroy.
[CHAPTER XXXIII]
THE REGISTER OF ST. GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS
A hazy hope concerning his descent had haunted Lecour for some months past. That the Chevalier de Lincy was really in some manner his relative became his belief. He argued that his own fitness for aristocratic society must have a hereditary explanation and that, were he able to trace his lineage a short distance backward he would discover some higher status fallen from by his family through misfortune. On the day of de Grancey's departure, he began to place together the straws of information which might guide him. He had once heard his father speak of having left France at the age of twelve years. Was he a kidnapped and deported heir? Was he a cadet of some reduced family?
Again, on one of the rare occasions when Lecour senior referred to the past—a winter's evening chat by the fire-side with the curé of the parish—he had described his boyish recollection of the interior of the Paris church of St. Germain-des-Prés, then the family church of his family. Was his own name taken from its patron saint? Would its registers contain records of the Lecours?
He knew at least his father's age—born in 1736, it would make him—yes, and also his birth month, June. Here were straws to start by.