“Get out, you fool!” shouted Cadet, laughing at what he regarded the insolence of the clerk. “You are worthy of your master!” And Cadet pushed him forcibly out of the door, and shut it after him with a bang that resounded through the Palace.
“Don't be angry at him, Bigot, he is not worth it,” said Cadet. “'Like master like man,' as the proverb says. And, after all, I doubt whether the furred law-cats of the Parliament of Paris would not uphold the Bourgeois in an appeal to them from the Golden Dog.”
Bigot was excessively irritated, for he was lawyer enough to know that Cadet's fear was well founded. He walked up and down his cabinet, venting curses upon the heads of the whole party of the Honnêtes Gens, the Governor and Commander of the Forces included. The Marquise de Pompadour, too, came in for a full share of his maledictions, for Bigot knew that she had forced the signing of the treaty of Aix la Chapelle,—influenced less by the exhaustion of France than by a feminine dislike to camp life, which she had shared with the King, and a resolution to withdraw him back to the gaieties of the capital, where he would be wholly under her own eye and influence.
“She prefers love to honor, as all women do!” remarked Bigot; “and likes money better than either. The Grand Company pays the fiddler for the royal fêtes at Versailles, while the Bourgeois Philibert skims the cream off the trade of the Colony. This peace will increase his power and make his influence double what it is already!”
“Egad, Bigot!” replied Cadet, who sat near him smoking a large pipe of tobacco, “you speak like a preacher in Lent. We have hitherto buttered our bread on both sides, but the Company will soon, I fear, have no bread to butter! I doubt we shall have to eat your decrees, which will be the only things left in the possession of the Friponne.”
“My decrees have been hard to digest for some people who think they will now eat us. Look at that pile of orders, Cadet, in favor of the Golden Dog!”
The Intendant had long regarded with indignation the ever increasing trade and influence of the Bourgeois Philibert, who had become the great banker as well as the great merchant of the Colony, able to meet the Grand Company itself upon its own ground, and fairly divide with it the interior as well as the exterior commerce of the Colony.
“Where is this thing going to end?” exclaimed Bigot, sweeping from him the pile of bills of exchange that lay upon the table. “That Philibert is gaining ground upon us every day! He is now buying up army bills, and even the King's officers are flocking to him with their certificates of pay and drafts on France, which he cashes at half the discount charged by the Company!”
“Give the cursed papers to the clerk and send him off, De Pean!” said Bigot.
De Pean obeyed with a grimace, and returned.