* * * * * * * For the moment they could not find the Englishman. He had finished his breakfast and wandered afield. That was a brief respite; but nothing, it seemed, to avail in the end. In the meantime they marched us into the taxing-house, where at a table sat a commissary of a strange figure. I had blundered desperately; yet here, I flatter myself, I turned my faculty for construing character to the account of retrieving my own. In Citizen Tristan I read--and quite rightly, as events showed--a decent burgher aggrandised, not against his will, but against the entire lack of one. His face was shaped, and something coloured, like a great autumn pear. It was narrow at the forehead, with restless, ineffective eyes, and it dropped to a monstrous chin--a self-protective evolution in the era Sainte Guillotine. Obviously he had studied to save his neck by surrounding it with a rampart of fat. For the rest he was very squat and ungainly; and he kept shifting the papers on his desk rather than look at us. “Here is a man,” thought I, “who has been promoted because in all his life he has never learned to call anything his own.” Our guard presented us arrogantly; the wizened post-boy laid his charge volubly. “Call your witness,” said I in a pet. “The case lies in a nutshell.” My words made an impression, no doubt, though they were uttered in mere hopeless bravado. “But, it seems he cannot be found,” protested the commissary, plaintively. “Then,” I urged, “it is bad law to detain us.” “You are detained on suspicion.” “Of not being ourselves? Oh, monsieur----!” He took me up peevishly. “Eh, eh! _voilà ce que c’est!_ Monsieur to me? Art thou not an aristocrat, then?” I answered pregnantly, “The question in itself is a reflection upon him that signed this passport.” He looked about him like a trapped creature, dumbly entreating the Fates for succour. It was my plain policy to harp upon the strings of his nerves. “Well,” said I, “a citizen commissary, I perceive, must have the courage of his opinions; and I can only hope thine will acquit thee when the reckoning is called.” He shifted in his chair; he spluttered little deprecatory interjections under his breath; he shot small furtive glances at his truculent following. Finally he bade all but us two out of the room, and the guard to their post at the barrier. The moment they were withdrawn grumbling, he opened upon me with a poor assumption of bluster-- “Thou art very big with words; but here I am clearly within my rights.” “Are not my papers in order, then?” “It would at least appear so.” His lids rose and fell. Patently his self-possession was an insecure tenure. “Citizen,” I said, shaking my finger at him. “Since when hast thou learned to set thy will in opposition to that of Barrère?”