“‘Behold me, Cartouche,’ said the prince; ‘I come to you armed with my sword alone, as you have wished. I run perhaps the greatest danger,’ he said in a clear, derisive voice, ‘but who would not risk everything to see at close range at midnight, in the heart of the forest, the form of Cartouche, when it costs nothing?’ Oh, Adolphe, my friend, that thou couldst have been there to hear me respond to the Regent of France! To be sure, I am only the son of a poor cooper of the Rue du Pontaux-Choux, but what Condé, what Montmorency could have bowed with more grace, sweeping the wet grass with the plume of his hat? The Duke de Richelieu himself could not kneel more elegantly than I did, nor present in a more gracious manner to my lord the purse that I had taken from his pocket. ‘I am,’ said I, ‘the most humble servant of my lord, and I beg him to take back from Cartouche this purse that I had the audacity to steal with so much coolness, only to prove to my lord that his highness finds himself face to face with Cartouche.’ The Regent begged me to preserve that purse for a remembrance of him. He was wrong to relate, in the course of time, this anecdote; for the report was spread that he was one of my band. I believe that he had started to go away, when he put his arm in mine and dragged me as far to the right as we are sitting to-day. “Then the regent did me the honor to put his arm in mine, and I saw that he had something of a secret nature to confide to me. He did not wait to acknowledge that he counted upon my ingenuity to avenge him for an offense that Monsieur the Controller-General had committed against him. He told me that he was quite in love with the courtesan, Emily; that she was his mistress, and had been for fifteen days, and that he had learned from La Fillon that M. Law had the promise of her favors the next night against the present that he would make her of a ten-thousand-louis necklace. He was sure of it, for La Fillon was never mistaken. Was it not from her that he had had a hint of the Cellamore conspiracy? All the rogues of Paris knew La Fillon.