“‘Oh! so that is how you understand it?’ began Maxime, enraged by this last piece of presumption. There was something of Talleyrand’s wit in the insolent retort, if you have quite grasped the contrast between the two men and their costumes. Maxime scowled and looked full at the intruder; Cerizet not merely endured the glare of cold fury, but even returned it, with an icy, cat-like malignance and fixity of gaze. “‘Very good, sir, go out--’ “‘Very well, good-day, Monsieur le Comte. We shall be quits before six months are out.’ “‘If you can steal the amount of your bill, which is legally due I own, I shall be indebted to you, sir,’ replied Maxime. ‘You will have taught me a new precaution to take. I am very much your servant.’ “‘Monsieur le Comte,’ said Cerizet, ‘it is I, on the contrary, who am yours.’ “Here was an explicit, forcible, confident declaration on either side. A couple of tigers confabulating, with the prey before them, and a fight impending, would have been no finer and no shrewder than this pair; the insolent fine gentleman as great a blackguard as the other in his soiled and mud-stained clothes. “Which will you lay your money on?” asked Desroches, looking round at an audience, surprised to find how deeply it was interested. “A pretty story!” cried Malaga. “My dear boy, go on, I beg of you. This goes to one’s heart.” “Nothing commonplace could happen between two fighting-cocks of that calibre,” added La Palferine. “Pooh!” cried Malaga. “I will wager my cabinet-maker’s invoice (the fellow is dunning me) that the little toad was too many for Maxime.” “I bet on Maxime,” said Cardot. “Nobody ever caught him napping.” Desroches drank off a glass that Malaga handed to him. “Mlle. Chocardelle’s reading-room,” he continued, after a pause, “was in the Rue Coquenard, just a step or two from the Rue Pigalle where Maxime was living. The said Mlle. Chocardelle lived at the back on the garden side of the house, beyond a big dark place where the books were kept. Antonia left her aunt to look after the business--” “Had she an aunt even then?” exclaimed Malaga. “Hang it all, Maxime did things handsomely.” “Alas! it was a real aunt,” said Desroches; “her name was--let me see----” “Ida Bonamy,” said Bixiou. “So as Antonia’s aunt took a good deal of the work off her hands, she went to bed late and lay late of a morning, never showing her face at the desk until the afternoon, some time between two and four. From the very first her appearance was enough to draw custom. Several elderly men in the quarter used to come, among them a retired coach-builder, one Croizeau. Beholding this miracle of female loveliness through the window-panes, he took it into his head to read the newspapers in the beauty’s reading-room; and a sometime custom-house officer, named Denisart, with a ribbon in his button-hole, followed the example. Croizeau chose to look upon Denisart as a rival. ‘_Monsieur_,’ he said afterwards, ‘I did not know what to buy for you!’