"Not that I know of," replied the Count, with a smile at the very idea of such a thing as rebellion under Louis XIV.; "but I will call my fellow Riquet, who ought, I think, to have been called Scapin, for I am sure Molière must have had a presentiment of the approaching birth of such a scoundrel. He will tell us all about it; for if a thing takes place on the other side of the earth, Riquet knows it all within five minutes after it happens." Before he had well finished speaking, the person he alluded to entered. But Riquet deserves a pause for separate notice. CHAPTER II. THE VALET--THE TOWNSPEOPLE--THE PROCLAMATION. The personage who entered the room, which on that the first actual day after his arrival at his own dwelling the Count de Morseiul had used as a dining-room, was the representative of an extinct race, combining in his own person all the faults and absurdities with all the talents and even virtues which were sometimes mingled together in that strange composition, the old French valet. It is a creature that we find recorded in the pages of many an antique play, now either banished altogether from the stage, or very seldom acted; but, alas! the being itself is extinct; and even were we to find a fossil specimen in some unexplored bed of blue clay, we should gain but a very inadequate idea of all its various properties and movements. We have still the roguish valet in sad abundance--a sort of common house-rat; and we have, moreover, the sly and the silent, the loquacious and the lying, the pilfering and the impudent valet, with a thousand other varieties; but the old French valet, that mithridatic compound of many curious essences, is no longer upon the earth, having gone absolutely out of date and being at the same period with his famous contemporary "_le Marquis_."