“Then,” continued Monsieur Alain, and this time he sighed, “Mongenod went away. When I was alone, and no longer in presence of hard and cruel poverty, I began, in spite of myself, to reflect. I was sobered. ‘Mongenod,’ thought I, ‘is perhaps thoroughly depraved; he may have been playing a comedy at my expense.’ His gaiety, the moment I had handed over to him readily such a large sum of money, struck me then as being too like the joy of the valets on the stage when they catch a Geronte. I ended, where I ought to have begun, by resolving to make some investigations as to my friend Mongenod, who had given me his address,--written on the back of a playing card! I did not choose, as a matter of delicacy, to go and see him the next day; he might have thought there was distrust in such promptness, as, indeed, there would have been. The second day I had certain matters to attend to which took all my time, and it was only at the end of two weeks that, not seeing or hearing of Mongenod, I went one morning from the Croix-Rouge, where I was then living, to the rue des Moineaux, where he lived. I found he was living in furnished lodgings of the lowest class; but the landlady was a very worthy woman, the widow of a magistrate who had died on the scaffold; she was utterly ruined by the Revolution, and had only a few louis with which to begin the hazardous trade of taking lodgers.” Here Monsieur Alain interrupted himself to explain. “I knew her later,” he said; “she then had seven houses in Saint-Roch, and was making quite a little fortune.