"Oh! monsieur le comte, since you insist, since you command me, I will do it to obey you. But allow me first to offer you a chair." While Madame Cadichard bustled about the room, looking for her best easy-chair and the best place in the room to put it, Passedix approached the new-comer and addressed him, trying all the while to hide with his cloak that part of his doublet from which the buttons were missing. "I presume that I have the honor to salute one of my neighbors? I say _neighbors_, because we both live in the same hotel; only I am at the top and monsieur le comte is at the bottom. But men of honor are always on the same level." "Ah! does monsieur live in this hotel?" rejoined the stranger, bowing to the Gascon. "With your kind permission." "What, monsieur! why, I can only be flattered to have monsieur for my neighbor." "Castor Pyrrhus de Passedix, godson of the most honorable Chaudoreille, who left me only this sword, his trusty Roland, a finely tempered blade, which I dare to say that I use in an honorable way! My reputation in that regard is made!--And monsieur is the Comte de Carvajal, the noble Spaniard whom Dame Cadichard is so fortunate as to have as her tenant in the Hôtel du Sanglier?" "Madame Cadichard would do well, then, to be a little more discreet, and to respect the incognito which her guests desire to maintain." The stout landlady blushed when she heard that; she realized that she deserved the rebuke, and in her despair dropped the spoon which she was about to raise to her mouth, and which remained standing upright in the soup. But the stranger, as he lay back in the easy-chair she had offered him, continued, with something very like a smile: "However, I do not feel that I have the courage to bear any ill will to our excellent hostess, since I owe to her the acquaintance of so illustrious a knight as Monsieur de Passedix, who, I am convinced, will not betray the incognito which important considerations compel me to adopt at this moment, in Paris." The Gascon bowed again, taking care not to relax his hold of the corners of his cloak, and replied: "You may rely on my discretion, monsieur le comte; the secrets that are intrusted to me will go down with me into the darkness of the grave, unless I am released from my oath." Thereupon the chevalier seized a chair and placed it at the table, opposite Madame Cadichard, who had taken one of the eggs from the plate and was trying to devise some refined method of breaking the shell and dipping her pieces of toast into the egg, in her illustrious tenant's presence.