“You will not consider I have earned my fee?” said he. “Fifty times over, my friend. Will you take it in a promissory note?” “Ah!” he cried pleasantly. “I perceive I have sown in barren soil.” “Again you justify yourself. Yet should I be a very thicket were all the berries I have swallowed of late to germinate in me.” “Is that so?” said he. “But I have been a scapegoat myself----” and thereat this extraordinary person pressed upon me some food he had with him with an ample and courtly grace. “This shall yield a better crop than my prophesying,” he said, watching me as I munched. “Of a surety,” I answered; “the full harvest of my gratitude.” He pondered at me. “I wish I could convince thee,” he said. “Wherefore? Is not the evil sufficient for the day in this distracted land? Why should one want to probe the future?” “Because forewarned is forearmed.” “Oh, little Quatremains-Quatrepattes! Dost thou not perceive the paradox? How can destiny be altered by foreknowledge? If you interpret that I am to be guillotined, and I profit by the statement to evade such a catastrophe, how is not your prophecy stultified?” “Why, I have no creed of predestination. The lords of life and death are not inexorable. Sometimes, like M. St Meard, one may buy his reprieve of them with a jest. Above all, they hate the sour fatalist whose subscription to his own faith is a gloomy affectation.” “Well; I think I love thee a little.” He looked at me with a smile. “Come with me, then. I long to give thee proof. Dost thou need a safeguard? Thou shalt run under my wing--_ça et là_--to Paris if thou wilt. I am popular with all. If necessity drives, thou shalt figure as my Jack-pudding. What! thou mayst even play up to the part. Thou hast slept in the mire; but ‘many a ragged colt makes a good horse.’” I laughed. “Why not?” I said. “For I have played the tragic to empty houses till I am tired.” * * * * * * * Quatremains-Quatrepattes and his merry-andrew gambolled through a score of villages on their road to Paris. I found the rascal hugely popular, as he had boasted he was, and a most excellent convoy to my humble craft, so perilously sailing under false colours. He was subtle, shrewd, seasonable,--of the species whose opportunity is accident; and perhaps no greater tribute could be paid to his deftness than this--that he never once exposed himself to detection by me in a question of moral fraud. “_Ton génie a la main crochue_,” I would say to him, chuckling; but he would only respond with a rebuking silence.