He also was a suitor for Colombe's hand, but by no means a favored one. He was a fair-haired scamp, with a pink face, consequential, insolent, garrulous, forever boasting of his relations with women, who often used him as a cloak for their serious amours, overflowing with pride in his post of secretary to the king, which permitted him to approach his Majesty in the same way in which his greyhounds and parrots and monkeys approached him. The provost, therefore, was not deceived by his apparent favor and the superficial familiarity of his relations with his Majesty, which favor and familiarity he owed, so it was said, to his decidedly unmoral additions to the duties of his post. Furthermore, the Vicomte de Marmagne had long since devoured all his patrimony, and had no other fortune than the liberality of François. How it might happen any day that this liberal disposition would cease, so far as he was concerned, and Messire Robert d'Estourville was not fool enough to rely, in matters of such importance, upon the caprice of a very capricious monarch. He had therefore gently denied the suit of the Vicomte de Marmagne, admitting to him confidentially and under the seal of secrecy that his daughter's hand had long been promised to another. Thanks to this confidential communication, which supplied a motive for the provost's refusal, the Vicomte de Marmagne and Messire Robert d'Estourville had continued to be in appearance the best friends in the world, although from that day the viscount detested the provost, and the provost was suspicious of the viscount, who could not succeed in concealing his rancor beneath an affable and smiling exterior from a man so accustomed as Messire Robert to peer into the dark corners of courts, and the deepest depths of men's hearts. So it was that, whenever the viscount made his appearance, the provost expected to find in him, notwithstanding his invariably affable and engaging demeanor, a bearer of bad news, which he would always impart with tears in his eyes, and with the feigned, premeditated grief which squeezes out poison upon a wound, drop by drop. As for Comte d'Orbec, the Vicomte de Marmagne had wellnigh come to an open rupture with him; it was one of the rare instances of court enmities visible to the naked eye. D'Orbec despised Marmagne, because Marmagne had no fortune and could make no display. Marmagne despised D'Orbec, because D'Orbec was old and had consequently lost the power of making himself agreeable to women; in fine, they mutually detested each other, because, whenever they met upon the same path, one of them had taken something from the other. So it was that when they met on this occasion the two courtiers greeted each other with that cold, sardonic smile which is never seen save in palace antechambers, and which means, "Ah! if we weren't a pair of cowards, how long ago one of us would have ceased to live!"