I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once related his Lordship's _exposé_ and revelation, very quietly relate it over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say, than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow? The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because, in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them. After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.