Pierre was called in to help, and among the three, all as solemn as himself, the marquis was more eminently bamboozled than he had ever been before in his life; which is saying a great deal. He protested every sample to be better than the last, whatever might have been mixed with it by Pierre in the fetching. He made half a hundred low bows when Steele claimed all that was tolerable; and declared his admiration of Charles’s magnanimity in pointing out the defects of his own commodity. The civility of M. Pierre also in vowing that the marquis should have no wine but the best, which was all, unhappily, sold already, was worthy of much acknowledgment. Being under promise, however, to purchase such and such quantities of wine, he must waive their polite scruples, and obviate all others by referring M. Charles Luyon to the most wealthy nobleman in the kingdom for payment. This avowal decided the matter. Charles shirked the marquis all the more speedily for his having owned that he came from the Duke of Orleans, and the carriage conveyed away the messenger without his errand. From day to day other customers came: but, as all might be traced as instruments of the duke, they were all dismissed in the same way as the marquis. Charles was convinced that some popular commotion was at hand. He perceived that the truly patriotic movers in the revolution were more and more hated by Orleans, as his purposes degenerated more and more from the purity of theirs; and he could not restrain his indignation at the efforts that were made to infatuate and brutalize the people, that they might disgrace or interrupt the measures of the enlightened of their leaders, and bring down a nation worthy of freedom to bow the knee to one who nourished the passions of a tyrant in the coward heart of a slave. “He shall not madden the people with my wine. Whatever they do shall be done in a state of sanity, as far as I can contribute thereto,” was still Charles’s resolution; and he declined prices on which the hand of many a brother in trade would have closed without a question. He had too humble an idea of his own consequence to adopt his wife’s opinion that it was designed to attach him to the Orleans party by making him the creditor of its chief. She was confirmed in her notion, however, by a very disagreeable circumstance,—the appearance of Orleans himself;—to purchase fruit, as he declared.