Flamin was overmastered by rapidity; but now again there was a want of something, which is still more indispensable than nobility to a game of fighting,--namely, of a good, legitimate offence. Matthieu, to be sure, was ready with pleasure to offer one to the man which should adequately justify a duel; but the man with the Chamberlain's master-key was one who, there was every reason to fear, would forgive it,--and there would be nobody to shoot.--Most fortunately the Evangelist remembered, that he himself had already received one from him, which he knew how profitably and honestly to bring to bear upon the case: "Le Baut had, indeed, _three_ years before, as good as promised him his daughter; and however indifferent this perjury was in itself, still, as a pretext for the chastisement of a greater fault, it retained its full value." ... Thus on a smutty tongue does truth take the form of a lie, provided the lie cannot dress itself in that of truth. And Flamin did not dream that his alleged groomsman was no other than the veritable Sabine robber of his bride. I am concerned lest it should be thought that Matthieu imputes to a Chamberlain, especially one with whom making and keeping a promise were the most distant cousins, less full-power of lying than to a Court-Page, and that he forgets how, in general, one gets over the stream of the court and of life as over any natural one, not in a direct line, but in a diagonal and oblique manner. But the rascal _despises_ the rascal still more than he _hates_ the good man. Besides, he acted thus not merely from passion, but from calculation: if Flamin were killed, then he must needs receive from Agnola, who now was becoming more and more the Princess of the Prince, and for whom naturally an after-bloom of January's and his Lordship's former sowings was a hedge of thorns, the honest man's fee and fairing, and a higher place on the merit-roll of the court;--furthermore, his Lordship in that case could no longer trundle through the gate and bring word, "Your Grace's son is to be had and is alive."--If the Chamberlain fell, then, too, the result was not to be despised; this former boarder and _protégé_[164] of the princely crown was, after all, gone to the Devil, and his Lordship would have at least to be ashamed to think that by his silence he had entangled the Regency-Councillor in a deadly relation with a man to whom he had, at all events, publicly to pay the veneration of a son. Matthieu could not lose,--besides, he could disguise or disclose his knowledge of Flamin's extraction, as the case might require.